Reviewed by: World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century by Xin Fan Ke Ren Xin Fan. World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 251 pp. Hardcover ($99.99) or e-book. The study of the politics and intellectual stakes of historical production has long been an important subfield in modern China studies. Xin Fan’s World History and National Identity in China is a valuable and unique addition to this literature. On the one hand, it shares the approach of recent studies in focusing not only on the politics of historical writing but also on the structural changes in the education system, the formation of academic disciplines, and the rise of modern print culture.1 On the other hand, this book spans the entire twentieth century and places its emphasis not on the historiography of China but on the development of world history (世界史 shijie shi) as an academic field from the late Qing to contemporary China. Furthermore, in using sources such as autobiographies, correspondence, and, importantly, archived personnel files and declassified secret reports, it sheds empathetic light on the “agency of non-Western world historians in writing history based on the lived experiences of some of the most significant Chinese world historians” (10). In the opening chapter, Fan locates the origins of modern Chinese world-historical writing in the late Qing, connecting long-standing Neo-Confucian and statecraft interests in compiling geographical knowledge of foreign realms to recent changes in the New Policies period under a reformed education system. This shift is evidenced in the work of Zhou Weihan (周维翰 1870–1910), a Changzhou scholar and physician, whose An Outline of Western History (西史綱目 Xishi gangmu), published in 1901 through the translation-oriented Shanghai press Jingshi wenshe (經世文社), represented a new temporally focused approach to world history. Instead of idealizing past epochs such as the Three Dynasties period like many other late Qing intellectuals, Zhou applied universal categories to his comparative analysis of ancient European and Chinese societies, while he held onto Confucian notions such as human nature (性 xing) in an “attempt to embrace the belief in a common humanity in overcoming the differences between the East and West” (48). For Fan, Zhou’s seemingly cosmopolitan approach would serve as both a standard and a challenge for later generations of Chinese scholars whose study of world history proceeded under vastly different professional and political circumstances. Professionalization, print capitalism, and the shifting priorities of Republican and wartime China serve as the context of chapter 2. Here, Fan focuses on Western-educated “returned students” who became university professors and practicing world historians. Although Chen Hengzhe (陳衡哲 1893–1976), who was notably the only renowned woman [End Page E-28] historian in China during this period, used her writings on European history in the 1920s to argue for the need to embrace liberal internationalism as an antidote to imperialism, her US-trained peers would turn to cultural nationalism as they became engulfed in the cultural debates and wartime exigencies of the 1930s and 1940s. The exemplary figure here is Lei Haizong (雷海宗 1902–1962), who offered sustained critiques of Eurocentric “world history” and periodization as practiced by Western scholars and developed a “cultures/civilizations” schema to write the history of different world regions. Lei’s culturalist approach embodied the conservative stance taken by intellectuals associated with the wartime Zhanguo ce (戰國策) clique, who sought nationalist solutions to China’s revival through historical analogies between their own time and the Warring States period. If the demands of nationalism influenced many Chinese scholars in the 1940s, it was Marxism and the structural transformation of academic institutions that reshaped the practice of world history in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chapter 3 traces these developments through the establishment of “teaching and research units” (教研室 jiaoyanshi), the shift to Russian sources and textbooks, and the Soviet-style training of a new generation of world historians in an important Ancient World History Seminar in Changchun. While some world historians had trouble adapting to the political and institutional changes, others still tried to carve out spaces of autonomy even as they worked within imposed categories. Chapter 4 examines this dynamic...