Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Li Huaiyin, and: Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China by Qin Yanchun

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Li Huaiyin, and: Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China by Qin Yanchun Guo Chao (bio) Li Huaiyin. Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xii, 338 pp. Hardcover $52.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3608-5. Qin Yanchun 秦燕春. Imaginations of Late Ming Dynasty in Late Imperial China (清末民初的晚明想象). Beijing: Peking University Press 北京­大学出版社, 2008. ix, 408 pp. Paperback RMB42.00, isbn 978-7-301-14863-1. Li Huaiyin’s book, by showing the shift of two paradigms—modernization and revolution—in Chinese historiography since the 1930s, emphasizes the significance [End Page 58] of motivations of teleology, specifically ideology, in all history writing. In Li’s point of view, history writing is the historian’s subjective construction, which is not “found” or “discovered,” but “invented” (pp. 4, 18). Via the “reinventing” in the title of his book, Li definitively differentiates history writing from history, therefore indicating that the ultimate aim of Chinese historians in the twentieth century was not (primarily) to seek the truth (history) but to legitimate the solutions for the given sociopolitical situations (reality). Specifically, Li discusses the two paradigms of historiography with emphases on four sequentially historical Chinese contexts. I will not retell the details of the book at length; Paul A. Cohen1 and Qian Zhu Pullen2 have both excellently summarized these in their book reviews. As an early attempt in English, which “systematically studies Chinese historiography over the period 1930s–2000s” (Qian, p. 229), Li outlines the confrontation between and transformation within the two paradigms, as well as indicates an alternative explanatory framework to the historiography of twentieth-century China. But he still leaves some questions unanswered (or even concealed), which will be examined hereinafter. First, Li’s book is indeed, as he himself writes, “a study of Chinese historiography” (p. vii); however, we must acknowledge it as an examination of Chinese history as well, which is welded together with ideological biases. If checked within a long-lasting and far-ranging perspective of the history of China, his way of framing his narrative model seems questionable in two points: origin defining and material choosing. One of the contentious points is Li’s beginning his narrative in the 1930s. By distinguishing “modernization” in the 1930s from “Westernization” in the May Fourth Movement, which focused on “intellectual enlightenment” and “liberal values” (p. 38), Li switches his “before 1949” in the title with “after 1930” in the body, beginning with Jiang Tingfu (蒋廷黻), an intellectual as well as KMT (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party of China) official in the 1930s, as an exemplar. Thus, when viewing Li’s relocation of the 1980s “New Enlightenment” as a return of liberal tradition, we may notice the absence of the origin of the “liberal tradition” (p. 198) it came back to. Li therefore reveals an ambiguous attitude to the May Fourth Movement, since his efforts at downplaying it might precisely reflect his anxiety of unconsciously admitting it as orthodoxy. Li’s studiously downplaying May Fourth’s influence might be an outcome of CPC’s (Communist Party of China) ratifying this movement as the origin of its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the nationalism of the 1930s cannot outweigh the liberalism of May Fourth—for the 1930s “nationalism” exemplified by Jiang is dubious itself. In a battle with the “Left-Wing League” of CPC, KMT initiated the “Nationalist Literature Movement” in the 1930s. History writing, especially the narrative of KMT official Jiang himself, was unlikely to avoid such influences—despite Li’s justifications (p. 70) for Jiang’s identity as an individual intellectual. After all, when a “liberal intellectual” [End Page 59] becomes complicit with “a dictatorial state,” it seems contradictory to consider him a “liberal intellectual” as before, with absolute individuality. As for his choice of material, “The foremost characteristic of the modernization discourse in the 1930s,” according to Li, is a shifting from liberalism to nationalism (p. 37). Li neglects the heterogeneity of such categories as “liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism,” as well as “Maoism” (p. 2) by integrating them into his two main narratives. Generally, nationalism is a claim calling for a...