Biographies and Revisionist Histories in Modern China

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Abstract Born and raised in the British Caribbean island colony of Trinidad, Eugene Chen was one of China’s foremost foreign ministers during the early twentieth century, defending his nation’s interests despite its military weakness and political disunity. Relying primarily on newspapers and what he calls the “Eugene Chen Papers,” sourced from Eugene Chen’s grandson in Hong Kong, Walton Look Lai reveals Eugene Chen’s multiple identities, first as “Sun Yat-sen’s personal representative and spokesman in Shanghai,” then as “the global face and voice of the Wuhan regime,” and ultimately as “China’s ‘dynamite’ diplomat [who] challenged the British lion over the Hankow concession and won.” For many, Eugene Chen, for all his political accomplishments and connections to the most illustrious personalities in Republican Chinese history, cut a relatively obscure figure. Eugene Chen’s obscurity points to an old problem in Chinese historiography, or any historiography, for that matter. The privileging or canonization of certain historical figures at the expense of attention to others stems partly from the binary of reform and revolution held by historians when investigating the transformations of twentieth-century China or its transition from empire to nation. Walton Look Lai’s book on Eugene Chen is thus a contribution to our broader historiographical attempt to dismantle the obsolete paradigms that caricature complex historical personalities as one-dimensional persons of their times.