Fifty Years of Chinese Historiography

Abstract

This is a comprehensive and analytical survey of the course of development in historical study in China, centering on the People's Republic period. The author observes that after Liang Qichao advocated the "Historiographical Revolution" in 1902, there emerged two main schools of history. One was called the Textual Criticism School, advanced by Hu Shi (1891-1962) and his main disciples, Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) and Fu Sinian (1896-1950), who each also had their dedicated followers in the latter half of the twentieth century. The other was the Historical Materialism School, or the Marxist School, led by Guo Moruo (1892-1978), Fan Wenlan (1893-1969), and Jian Bozan (1898-1968). As an opponent to the Textual Criticism School, which favored empirical source criticism, the Marxist School emphasized the link between historical study and social reality. From the late 1920s on, the Marxist School gained more currency and eventually became the dominant historiographical trend from the 1950s on, after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. But the author also argues that, although its influence waned and its main exponents had either left the mainland or been persistently chastised by their colleagues, the Textual Criticism School remained a notable undercurrent throughout the twentieth century. During the 1990s, it indeed waged an impressive comeback, characterized by the then popular slogan—"returning to Qing Evidential Learning" in some historical circles. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Historical Materialism School and the Textual Criticism School coalesced into a new school—the Synthesis School, which constitutes a new interesting development in modern Chinese historiography.