Dang'an: Contemporary Chinese Archives

Abstract

Western scholars who have worked with records of imperial and Nationalist China are perhaps not so familiar with post-1949 archives.' This article introduces archives management in the People's Republic of China (PRC).2 For more than 2,000 years, Chinese written language has linked people who have locally different oral languages. This lends archives a political significance often taken for granted in China. There is profound respect for the antiquity of records (on bone, stone, bronze, bamboo, wood and silk as well as on paper), a respect that dignifies contemporary archives and archivists. Long archival traditions affect modern archives management and use of archives by scholars. Ordering history by imperial reigns and year within reigns persists in preference for chronological order rather than division into functional series. Court compilation of official histories survives as today's archivists compile and publish selected documents of historical events. During the 19th century, Western methods and forms of record-keeping were introduced and amalgamated with imperial methods of preservation and categorization, and may still be found in Chinese archives today. Soviet, German and American methods were absorbed partially during the 20th century. Archives work after 1949 was preoccupied with trying to pull together, restore and make useful the surviving remnants of a beleaguered past, and to build a systematic record of the present for useful social reference. The effort was aborted for a decade during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Since 1978, however, archive maintenance and management has received renewed attention and priority from central, provincial and local governments. Conditions and access are changing, although perhaps more slowly and inconsistently than seems tolerable to Western users. Only just rehabilitated and rejuvenated in the 1980s, the archival profession now faces reform of governmental and economic structures and the