POLITICS VERSUS SCHOLARSHIP: THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT AT BEIJING UNIVERSITY REVISITED, 1949–2009

Abstract

Some scholarship always regard that the Chinese intellectuals after 1949 have switched from serving their culture to serving their nation or even their Communist Party of China, their service to the nation has severely limited their intellectual and moral autonomy. Such phenomenon is particular true in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, especially in the discipline of history. In my point of view, although the interest of the Chinese Communist government in intellectuals after 1949 is a form of somewhat manipulation, however, the role of the intellectuals is not merely the passive collaborators with the Communist Party or simply malleable servants of the ruling regime. This article is going to take the development of the History Department at Beijing University (Beida) from 1949 to 2009 as a case study. It attempts to closely examine the evolution of the History Department in four different periods with the influence of Communist government of the People’s Republic of China, and with the increasing contacts with the foreign academic world since 1949. It intends to demonstrate this academic unit after 1949 was not merely conventionally stifling; however, many historians and researchers in the Department under Mao Zedong era were genuinely doing historical research by using the theory of Marxism, and were seeking possible limited academic autonomy. After Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, the History Department was becoming more professional and the factors of politics were being gradually withdrawn from the research milieu. Most of the professors in the Department were committed to historical research as a serious scholarly enterprise within the framework established by the regime. They did not view their role as mere propagandists, and they were not willing to subvert academic standards or distort history to serve immediate political ends. The article will first briefly go through the history of Beida under the People’s Republic of China. Afterwards, it will individually examine the historical stages of the History Department from 1949 to 2009 at different sections; it pays special attention to the relationships between the politics, the departmental professors, and the history curricula. To conclude, after sixty years from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949–2009), at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, the History Department at Beida seemed to end its long time isolation and suffocation in the pre-1978 decades, and returned to its heyday during the 1920s and 1930s. The Department looked more cosmopolitan, and the professionalization and academic autonomy quietly came back. The four decades of development has not only contributed considerably to the reform of the History Department especially in the aspects of curricula and pedagogy, but also effectively cultivated Beida’s long-cherished culture of historical research and studies.