Modern Chinese Historiography Research Articles

중국 국가건설 100년의 역정과 역사학(Ⅰ) - 천하 패러다임의 해체와 근대 역사학 -

Chinese Modern historiography began with the formation and establishment of the national state paradigm at the end of the 19th century. The New Historiography advocated by Liang Qi Chao and the Quintessence group(Liu Shi Pei; Zhang Bing Lin) was the beginning of modern Chinese historiography. Chinese traditional historiography aims to defend morality and ethics. However, the purpose of the New Historiography was to make historiography contribute to the national construction and create ideas for the establishment of national identity. Liang Qi Chao and the New Historiography of the National School emphasized China’s national identity, which would be the premise of national history. The New Historiography took creating national history as its mission, and it was natural to create and emphasize the essence of national identity. The national state model was established in the second stage of national construction. The decisive moment was the May 4th Movement. From then on, the value of the West was widely recognized, and the thinking and the practice were based on concepts and terms produced in the West. System, methodology and view of the modern science have become the model that needs to be pursued, and historical research is no exception. Gu Jie Gang or Fu Si Nian highly promoted history as a science. In this context, Liu Yi Zheng, considered as champion of cultural conservatism, emphasized scientific and empirical nature of the historical research.

The Problem of the Independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic in Modern Chinese Historiography

Mongolia nationhood status despite its present stability and full recognition by the world community has still ambiguous reaction among some Chinese authors. The goal of the article is to analyze the works on the problems of independence of Mongolia in XX century. The study aims at, first of all, identifying the works of Chinese researchers on the topic; secondly, random selection and analysis of the texts that contain the fundamental principles of the problems of independence of Mongolia. The analysis showed that some Chinese historians still use the archaic term “Outer Mongolia” in regard to the modern Mongolia; in the most Chinese works there is an idea that the independence of Mongolia in the first half of the XX century was the result of long-held plans of the Tsarist (Soviet) Russia towards effete China.

The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China by Xiaowei Zheng

Reviewed by: The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China by Xiaowei Zheng Peter J. Carroll Xiaowei Zheng. The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. 358 pp. $90.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). That the Railroad Rights Recovery movement helped trigger the 1911 Revolution and that the New Policies (1901–1911) are ripe for reconsideration as a period of formidable Qing state resurgence are verities of modern Chinese historiography. Nonetheless, scholarly analysis of these areas has often been macroscopic, not always connecting the high-flown rhetoric of constitutionalism, revolution, and statism with the nitty-gritty of local political and economic advantage. Xiaowei Zheng’s superb book advances significantly our understanding of both these subjects, effectively linking universal political aspirations to parochial interests and ambitions through a focused examination of factional maneuvering, discursive battles, and bloodshed over state and popular rights in late Qing Sichuan. In particular, she elucidates how the Railroad Rights Recovery movement—or, rather, concerns regarding the administration and ultimate ownership of railroads and the dispensation of their economic benefits—catalyzed the articulation of contending perspectives regarding popular and state rights and powers. She demonstrates the centrality of socioeconomic interest and rights to notions of national and provincial citizenship and of state vs. popular power and legitimacy. As such, Zheng’s study contributes to several important areas of historiography and is in conversation with keystones of scholarship such as Ralph Huenemann on the Railroad Rights Recovery movement, Li Hsiao-t’i on popular enlightenment societies, Chang Hao on intellectual transformation, and Min Tu-ki and Peter Zarrow on state administration and ideology.1 It also complements province-centered studies of the 1911 Revolution by Mary Rankin and Joseph Esherick by providing a granular look at the advent and immediate fate of the revolution in Sichuan.2 Yet Zheng’s ultimate subject is far grander: in sum, she provides a clear and compelling narrative of the advent of modern politics in China. The first chapter characterizes nineteenth-century Qing Sichuan provincial administration and notions of political legitimacy as the status quo ante, in contrast to the wholesale transformation effected by the rise of popular self-determination and sovereignty, political rights, and anti-Qing activism, which are detailed in the subsequent seven chapters. Throughout the study, Sichuan’s perceived isolation—the product of its distance from Beijing and the North China civilizational heartland, its economic and social backwardness in comparison with the littoral zone, and its southwestern, border location—is invoked by historical actors to underscore the remarkably radical and inclusive nature of the popular railway protection movement and the consequent contestation and rejection of Qing imperial power. Few would have imagined it, but the first dramatic and consequential provincewide revolution involving modern nationalism, rights, and citizenship broke out in marginal, tradition-bound Sichuan, not in Zhejiang, Guangdong, or Hubei. Zheng traces reformist currents that promoted the power and rule of the monarch vs. those of the people, along with the emergence of constitutionalism, in the 1890s and 1900s. She then focuses on the appropriation and development of these ideas in Sichuan, highlighting the actions of figures such as Pu Dianjun (蒲殿俊 1875–1934), the leading constitutionalist and chair of the Provincial Assembly whose influence on Sichuan was later compared to that of Lenin and Trotsky on Soviet Russia. Despite being dispatched by [End Page E-10] the state to study law in Japan, Pu, like many cultivated to direct state-led reform, became a champion of popular power, initially in conjunction with the Qing and finally against it. His transformation was partly driven by his support of the Sichuan Railway Protection Association. Escalating conflicts regarding foreign loans and the potential nationalization of commercially owned lines moved Pu first to accuse the state of violating both the commercial code and constitutional principles, then to adjure it and endorse revolution. Acting Governor-General Zhao Erfeng (趙爾豐 1845–1911) initially cooperated with railroad rights activists but earned their enmity by enacting the Qing Court’s increasingly stringent demands for control over railroads and by deploying troops against people protesting railroad policy (which had led to the detention of Pu, whose release...

民國時期 傅斯年 史學의 興衰 : 과학주의와 민족주의의 연쇄

This article aims to shed new light on the relationship that modern Chinese historiography has with nationalism, exploring its ideological aspects. For this purpose, Fu Sinian, the central figure of forming modern Chinese historiography, is reinterpreted from the social contexts of the times in which he lived, in particular, with a focus on how history as a science was mixed with nationalism.BR Fu Sinian, on the one hand, systemized ancient Chinese history on the basis of “scientific” arrangement of historical materials and primary sources. On the other hand, he led academic nationalism through establishing the Institute of History and Philology and advocating “scientific” East Asian Studies. His academic nationalism went to its zenith during the Second Sino-Japanese War in which he supported the Republic of China, with his advocacy of one homogeneous Chinese nation both in the History of Northeast China and his “scientific” exploration of ethnic minorities in Southwest China.BR His historiography, which had moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War, was limited to its methodology of “scientific” document examination, with the influence of the Cold War. However, the both sides of China is recalling it in the context of rearranging the memory of the Republic of China.

DROUGHT AND FAMINE IN NORTHWEST CHINA: A LATE VICTORIAN TRAGEDY?

AbstractThe North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.

New Historiography for the cultivation of the character of the “new citizen”: Liang Qichao’s ideas of history education and their practice

ABSTRACTAn advocate for modern Chinese historiography, Liang Qichao’s “new historiography” was ideologically quite closely tied to traditional Confucian historiography: his idea of “historiography” was both a form of scholarship for the provision of knowledge, as well as a type of learning for the cultivation of moral character. The fundamental objective of “new historiography” was to use the history of national development and evolution to educate the people, helping them to become nationally conscious “citizens.” However, according to Liang Qichao’s conception of history, the nationalist aspect of “new historiography” ultimately rested in the cultivation of individual character, not in imparting the concept of nationhood. During the movement to “systematize national heritage,” in his practicing of historiography, Liang primarily studied and compiled Chinese academic and intellectual histories, focusing particularly on Confucian history: he interpreted Confucianism and the cream of Chinese scholarship as a kind of “philosophy of life.” Liang’s historiographical practices eventually took shape as a form of moral education to cultivate the leading talents of society when the country was going through a transformation, while in the process signaling his profound repudiation of the empirical emphasis in historical research of the times.

Analysis of Japanese influence on the three major historiographical trends in early modern China

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the intrinsic relationships between Japanese historiography and the three great historiographical trends of New Historiography, Debates on Ancient History, and Marxist historiography, from the macroscopic perspective of the transformation, development, and early modern growth of modern and early modern Chinese historiography, exploring how Chinese historical researchers selected, deviated from, and assimilated Japanese historiography, while also particularly focusing on how the recipients utilized Japanese historiographical methods and concepts as well as the achievements of Japanese scholars in researching Chinese history to construct their own interpretation of Chinese historiography, in a study of the academic trend of indigenization.

A Precious Mirror for Governing the Peace: A Primer for Empress Dowager Cixi

The vilified Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) of late Qing China remains a symbol of national humiliation and weakness in modern Chinese historiography. Scholars attribute Cixi’s “rule behind the curtains” responsible for the ultimate decline of the Qing dynasty and its capitulatory peace with foreign powers. This article revisits the conditions that enabled Cixi’s rise to power during the Tongzhi reign (1861–75) and argues that Hanlin academicians regarded her as a potentially capable regent upon whom they could count to manage state affairs in the best interests of the Tongzhi emperor. This article also argues that Cixi acquired her political vocabulary from her Hanlin lecturers who compiled a unique primer for their patroness – the Zhiping baojian (A precious mirror for governing the peace) – on female regency in China’s imperial past.

Yan Fu’s (Mis)translation of “Feudal/Feudalism”

Yan Fu’s (Mis)translation of “Feudal/Feudalism” Gengsong Gao (bio) In the Preface to her celebrated book, Translingual Practice, Lydia Liu raises many profound and provocative questions concerning cross-cultural studies: Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly perceived equivalences? For instance, can we talk, or stop talking, about ‘modernity’ across the East-West divide without subjecting the experience of the one to representations, translations, or interpretations by the other?” (xv) Instead of discussing a philosophical question like whether languages are essentially commensurate or not, I am going to explore a number of concrete questions centered upon the translation of a key term in modern China: how the English word “feudal/feudalism” were translated into the Chinese word fengjian 封建 in the late Qing (1895-1911) and early Republican eras (1912-1927)? How were “hypothetical equivalences” between the two different words created? What historical occurrences shaped and maintained these equivalences, and what impact did they exert upon modern Chinese historiography and Chinese intellectuals’ pursuit of modernity? Lydia Liu herself has also noted the influential yet problematic translation of “feudal” into fengjian. She writes at the end of her book: “Since 封建 (‘feudal?’) happens to be one of those seminal translations in modern translingual history that have provoked much controversy surrounding Marxist interpretations of pre-capitalist Asian societies and consequently exerted a huge impact on these societies’ perceptions of their own past, the etymology of the term deserves more than casual attention” (261-2). However, as her focus is placed on literary texts, she does not address this historical term in any detail. Arif Dirlik has investigated the historical process of this semantic change, arguing that the confusion is largely derived from the importation of Marxist historiography in the 1930s which twisted Chinese history to fit a European historical model.1 Viren Murthy examines how fengjian was likened to Western local autonomy and reinterpreted by late-Qing intellectuals to implement a radical political reform.2 Praesenjit Duara looks into how the reinterpreted fengjian was denigrated and abandoned as a usable political tradition due to the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century of China.3 Their works undoubtedly shed light on the process of establishing the problematic “equivalence” between fengjian and feudalism and its relationship with modern Chinese historiography, but their research does not examine the role of translation and translator in this [End Page 23] historical process. Several Chinese scholars (Ri Zhi, Feng Tianyu, Zhou Zhenhe and Nie Changshun) to some extent make up for this inadequacy, but all of them tend to treat translators as transparent and unproblematic mediators. In this paper, I will focus on how Yan Fu (1854-1921), one of the most influential translators and intellectuals in the late Qing period, rejected and reaffirmed the equivalence between fengjian and feudal. Instead of taking Yan Fu as an unproblematic and transparent language transmitter, I will take a close look at his translations and translator’s notes and commentaries to demonstrate how he changed and appropriated the original texts and his own translations to make his intervention into the late Qing political and intellectual scene. This particular focus not only allows me to explore an understudied academic question but also to uncover the historical richness of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic encounters. I Fengjian 封建 is a classical Chinese word composed of two characters, i.e., feng 封 and jian 建. According to Feng Tianyu, feng originally means planting trees and raising mounds. Then its meaning was broadened to the granting of land by a king to his relatives and subordinates. The former meaning is closely related with the latter one, because planting trees and raising mound often functioned as marking the border of one’s land in pre-imperial China. Jian 建 means “establishment.” These two characters were more often than not used separately in the early Zhou Dynasty (around 12th century, B.C). When put together, fengjian initially referred to the division of land, as in this passage from the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo Zhuan), a...

The master narratives of modern China: their origins, evolution, and reconstruction – a review of Li Huaiyin’s Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

There have been plenty of critical scholarly retrospectives and reflections on the paradigmatic shifts in modern Chinese historiography since the turn of the twentieth century.1 1 Major works on th...

THREATENING HISTORIES

This article contributes to recent scholarship on modern Vietnamese historiography by examining the ways in which twentieth-century historians have manipulated their representations of collective actions during the French colonial period. Following studies by Patricia Pelley, Christoph Giebel, Peter Zinoman, and others, the author offers a critical reading of narrative accounts of the period between the late nineteenth century and the late 1930s. The article is inspired by Prasenjit Duara's work on modern Chinese historiography, in which he showed how early twentieth-century Chinese historians viewed their history through the simplifying lens of the nation-state. Here the author argues that most post–1954 communist historians in Viet Nam were influenced by similar impulses, leading them to construct a highly teleological account of this period, obscuring its true complexity. The author uses case studies of the representations of secret societies, ethnic minority groups, and new religious movements to demonstrate how this obscuring has worked, while suggesting alternate readings of the collective actions by these groups that place them outside of a convenient teleology leading directly to the triumph of the Communist Party. The author argues that the complex histories of these groups were a challenge to the Marxist dialectic and were thus regarded as a threat to the narrative. As such, modern historians had to reimagine or even erase these complexities for political purposes. The author concludes by suggesting that historians must continue to probe these types of collectivities as complex actors in a complicated historical landscape, rather than accepting them as part of a linear narrative.

Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography by Shana J. Brown (review)

Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography by Shana J. Brown (review)

Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography by Shana J. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography by Shana J. Brown Peter Zarrow (bio) Shana J. Brown. Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. 232 pp. Hardcover $48.00. isbn 978-0-8248-3498-2. The study of ancient bronze vessels and of steles (jinshi 金石) had its first great flowering in the Northern Song dynasty, as scholars sought to recapture a ritually pure, pre-Buddhist past. Bronzes in particular promised a kind of access to ancient ritual (and ultimately to the Way) through their materiality as much as through their inscriptions. They were also valuable art pieces. A second great flowering occurred in the late Qing, which, Brown argues, remains relevant today: “Its influence includes persistent attitudes towards the uses of history, the meaning of pictorial images and the value of material artifacts, and the complex relationship between public institutions and private scholars” (p. 9). After all, “In China as well as in many parts of the world nothing was so modern as antiquity” (p. 9). With the rise of modern archaeology and the other scholarly disciplines of the human sciences — particularly anthropology and historical linguistics, as well as history — jinshi studies are perhaps more ancestor than living presence today. But certainly jinshi studies fed into the great construction of national identity that took place in the late Qing and early Republic, not merely providing artifacts for study but also, through its own scholarly traditions, shaping China’s relationship with the past. Brown’s work enriches our knowledge of Republican culture, which is still too often equated with thoroughgoing radicalism, throwing into sharper relief the sheer variety and volatility of the political and cultural currents of the early twentieth century. Brown’s decision to translate jinshi as “antiquarianism” has obvious disadvantages but captures, I think, something essential. The English connotations [End Page 464] are of amateur and somewhat fuddy-duddy connoisseurship, of manic collectors, and of worldviews that might be labeled traditionalist, conservative, and reactionary — or even decadent. This misses the long use in China of jinshi in the practice of orthodox scholarship and pursuit of the Way that Brown outlines in her first chapters. Nonetheless, the term captures “a complex emotional valance … the proud mastery of syntactically difficult documents, as well as a bittersweet longing for the vanished past they represent” (p. 4). On the one hand, certain scholars appreciated ancient objects for themselves and enjoyed seeking them out, looking at them, fondling them, smelling them, and hiding them away where only selected friends would be allowed access. On the other hand, these objects were also signposts helping to find roads to understanding the past in a more or less scientific way. During the rise of modern scholarship in the West, antiquarianism helped foster archaeology and ancient history, art history, numismatics, philology and literary studies, and numerous other fields and subfields. In China as well, starting in the late Qing, knowledge of material artifacts and their ancient inscriptions informed the emerging discipline of archaeology, revolutionized understanding of ancient history, rebuilt philology, and ultimately gave Chinese nationalists a new sense of the roots of their civilization. All this Brown shows convincingly, and she highlights the relationship between the particular stresses of the late Qing and the revival and development of jinshi studies. As well, Brown incisively but sympathetically delineates the personalities of collector-scholars such as Wu Dacheng 吳大澂, Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉, and Wang Guowei 王國維. However, a related argument about the relationship between antiquarianism and political reform is less convincing (discussed below). Brown traces the more or less continuous history of jinshi studies to the Northern Song dynasty. Scholars like Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 displayed a new interest in the materiality of the past, such as the clothes worn in antiquity and especially ritual vessels. Song scholars produced new research into the types and uses of bronzes from much earlier periods. Not least important were their publications with illustrations of the bronzes in their collections. As Brown emphasizes, these line-drawn illustrations were deliberately simplified, representing a kind of political-ritual ideal rather than the actual tarnished and cracked objects. Song scholars also turned to stele inscriptions as at least a...

Gu Jiegang and the Creation of Chinese Historical Geography

Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) is one of the most important figures in twentiethcentury Chinese historiography. Throughout his life, he had engaged with various topics centered on ancient Chinese history and historiography. In 2004 the Historical Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the highest-level government sponsored historical research institution in China, together with the History Department of Sun Yat-sen University, celebrated Gu Jiegang's 110th danchen by dedicating a conference to him. The CASS outlined Gu's three major contributions to modern Chinese historiography. First, Gu and his Gushi bian (Debates on Ancient History) School exerted invaluable influence on modern Chinese historiography. Second, Gu was the first to explore folklore as a historical source and established folklore studies as a new discipline of historical study in China. Third, Gu is the founding father of modern Chinese historical geography.

The Making of the Official Qing History and the Crisis of Traditional Chinese Historiography

The making of the official Qingshi (Qing History) during the turbulent years of early Republican China epitomizes the flux and complexities of modern Chinese historiography in an age of transition. It had long been routine practice in China for a newly-established regime, in assuming the mantle of legitimate rule, to authorize an official of the previous, overthrown dynasty. With twenty-four as preceding models and a more or less standardized layout, composing the twenty-fifth one should have been a feasible task. However, the making of the of the last dynasty was besieged with unprecedented changes and challenges: universal kingship and the mandate of Heaven had collapsed, the continuity of cultural tradition was put into doubt, and, most important of all, the past was no longer fixable in a static picture for the present to capture. In short, along with the fall of the last dynasty, the genre of history itself became history. The making of the Qingshi not only provided the final chapter of Chinese dynastic – orthodox – but arguably the last chapter of traditional official historiography as well.This paper delves into the making of the Qing History by the Bureau of Qing Historiography established in 1914, its rushed publication in 1928 under the title Qingshi gao (Draft Qing History), and its banning by the Nationalist government in 1930. Special attention is paid to how the leading compilers, many of whom deemed themselves Qing royalists, attempted to preserve or recapitulate a collective memory of Qing China and thus how their narrative was intertwined with their concern for political and cultural identity. As the Qing court had long established the Bureau of State Historiography and precompiled its own dynastic history, the compilers of the Qingshi gao were overwhelmed by the weighty legacies left by their Qing counterparts and were able neither to digest all the archives thoroughly nor to reexamine their preprogrammed memories from different perspectives. The Republican memory of the Qing, as exemplified by the final version of the Qingshi gao, was conditioned by the imperial memories already established by the Qing.The making of the last dynastic remains an unfinished enterprise. One issue is certain: the Qingshi gao published in 1928 will never be officially authorized as one of the histories, if only because there is no longer any agency capable of this act. On the other hand, it is also irreplaceable, for its narratives, its arrangement of themes, and its choice of personalities represent to a certain extent a collective effort by a specific group of intellectuals in the dynasty-republic transition period. The Qingshi gao serves as an lens through which we can examine the perspective of these compilers. Not only will the Qingshi gao live forever, but also Qing as such will forever remain in draft. Perhaps efforts to compile an ideal complete Qing History will never cease, but they are unlikely to be enshrined as the conclusive interpretation of Qing History. Indeed, the earlier Twenty-four Histories also have become incomplete drafts open to further revision.Form the perspective of modern historiography, all of the previous Twenty-five orthodox histories should be redefined as the Twenty-five Drafts, tentative accounts aiding but not defining our understanding of the past. The Twenty-five Histories can thus be treated as partial collections of historical resources, rather than cherished as (re-)presentation of historical facts. They are deemed either as raw or cooked materials, which need further digestion. Accordingly, the Qingshi gao belongs in their company and is a fitting orthodox after all, with or without any arbitrary official authorization. Any is but a draft to approach the past.

Discovery or Invention: Modern Interpretations of Zhang Xuecheng

Zhang Xuecheng was an ordinary scholar in eighteenth-century China. But in modern times he was recognized as an extraordinary historian. His remark that Six Classics are all was especially praised as a remarkable breakthrough or distinct paradigm. This study, however, argues that the rediscovery of Zhang was in effect a modern invention. Six Classics are all is actually quite an old concept. At least from the sixteenth-century on, Wang Yangming had already set a precedent for Zhang, whose version of the dictum was quite similar to his predecessors as well as contemporaries. Zhang filled in little, if any, new wine in the old bottle. He found no new meaning in history, as he believed the so-called Dao, or Way, contained in the Six Classics was as eternal as the sun and the moon and applied to hundreds of generations to come. He had no intention of turning history against the Classics, or of replacing the Classics with history, as modern scholars have claimed. His view of history was well within the bounds of Confucian historiography. Zhang attached a great deal of importance to history, but he was not unique in this regard. His historiography rested almost totally on the laurels of orthodox Confucianism. He criticized Dai Zhen, but his criticism was generally based on moral grounds and it seems to have little epistemological significance. Zhang Xuecheng emphasized the importance of history to serve statecraft (jingshi), but this view, too, was scarcely original. In this regard, he was more a successor than an innovator. He remained a rather old-fashioned scholar in the eighteenth century. The rediscovery of Zhang in modern times actually reflects modern scholars' concerns. They read their own ideas into Zhang Xuecheng's writings. Zhang never considered the Classics or history as mere historical materials as modern historians do. Nor did Zheng try to secularize the Classics and history, which might have constituted a major breakthrough in the conception of historiography. A secularized Zhang was thus the invention of modern scholars. In addition, only modern scholars, like Collingwood and Qian Zhongshu, who consider the past dead, feel duty-bound to breathe new life into this moribund history. There are no striking similarities, as a modern scholar claims, between eighteenth-century Zhang and twentieth-century Collingwood. This study is as much interested in exposing misrepresentations as in revealing the modern concerns that helped invent Zhang. These concerns, in fact, reflect the dramatic changes of modern Chinese historiography.

Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman” and a Chinese Modernism

A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.

Gu Jiegang: His Last Thirty Years

When in 1931 the late Arthur W. Hummel published his annotated translation of Gu Jiegang's Preface to the Gushi-bian, only the first two volumes of this opus magnum in modern Chinese historiography had appeared. Yet, Hummel recognized the nascent work as “an admirable introduction to the technique and temper of Chinese scholarship” of the post-May-Fourth “Chinese Renaissance” era, and its then youthful editor as an historian who, although he had never studied abroad or with a western teacher, was able to conduct such a large-scale disputation on ancient Chinese history “in the most rigorous scientific manner” owing to his “firm grasp of the best traditions of native scholarship, together with what he had learned of western methods.” Most of the leaders of the “New Culture Movement” (yet another name for the intellectual tide around May Fourth) subsequently contributed to the Gushi-bian, the spiritus rector of which Gu remained, although he had to ask colleagues for help with the editing.