The Chinese Critical Tradition

Abstract

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.