Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xii, 338 pp. US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-82448-3608-5.
One of the refreshing things about UT-Austin Professor Huaiyin Li’s latest book on historical writing in China, Reinventing Modern China, is that roughly three-fourths of the more than four hundred references cited are from Chinese publications, many of them written by members of Li’s own cohort (Chinese social scientists and historians who didn’t enter academic circles until China’s economic reform era in the 1980s). The rest of Li’s Chinese sources cover a wide range of scholarship from the early twentieth century to the present. Not that he ignores Western scholarship on the subject; far from it. He delves deeply into Western accounts of modern China and theoretical works on history-writing to elucidate cross-cultural influences and contrasting interpretations of historical events.
Welcome too is the tight, logical organization of his arguments that Li offers. What could look like an unfathomable tangle of views and interpretations is made crystal clear, so that the specialist and generalist alike can grasp the arguments with ease. This clarity is achieved in part through what some might call too much repetition, but I took it rather as an opportunity to “review as I went along.”
Professor Li’s overarching argument revolves around the construction of “grand narratives” about modern Chinese history over the course of the twentieth century, and the need to fashion a more balanced and nuanced narrative for the future, if we are to better understand the continuing development of modern China in the age of globalization. Simply put, the book may be read as a history of historiography in (and of) modern China, and a call to continue the project by adopting a more objective approach that is not driven by one ideological construct or another, as has been the case in the past.
Li follows chronological order in describing the origins, proponents and ideological/political motivations behind each of the narratives presented. After a comprehensive introduction that lays out the elements of the arguments to come, two chapters explain in exhaustive detail the origins of the pre-1949 Modernization Narrative (Nationalists) and Revolutionary Narrative (Marxists). Beginning with Liang Qichao’s call at the start of the twentieth century for a “new history,” Li introduces the backgrounds and views of those “mainstream historians” who succeeded Liang in the 1920s and 1930s, and who constructed the modernization narrative in support of the Nationalists and advocated cooperation with the Japanese, both as pragmatic moves more than anything else, according to Li. He points out this modernization narrative’s Western origins, the fact that at the time it was adopted by most intellectuals, in large measure for the sake of the survival of the Chinese people in the competition among nations, and that it was all about Western “Enlightenment values,” ruling elites and governments, ignoring ordinary people altogether.
Equally clear and detailed is Li’s account of contrasting views among Chinese historians that gave rise to the revolutionary narrative before 1949, and became orthodoxy in the PRC. Two intriguing points elucidated here are, one, how Fan Wenlan, a “poor” Marxist because of his lack of interest in class struggle and emphasis instead on Han-Manchu conflicts within Qing society, became the most influential historian during the Mao era instead of the “better” Marxists Li Dingsheng and Zhang Wentian; and two, Mao’s ongoing “struggle against the monopoly on orthodox Marxism by the Comintern” during the first half of the century (109).
The early 1950s, when the PRC was newly established, saw the disciplinization of historiography and several different schemes for the periodization of modern Chinese history. Li decodes the perspectives of the important historians of the period: Hu Sheng, Sun Shouren, and Jin Congji, among others, and the striking contrasts among them. He also points out how much (relative) freedom of debate existed in China during the early 1950s, before the clamp-downs of the late 1950s and early 1960s leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
Here Li’s story begins to read like a chilling and poignant thriller. Chilling in that the “historiographical revolution,” which began during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, involved intrigue and power struggles between older and younger generations of intellectuals, various factions within the CCP leadership, professionalizers and politicizers, those with higher and lower positions in educational and government institutions, those with liberal values and the more radicalized rebels, and privileged seniors vs. those out to “destroy existing hierarchies and establish their domination in the field of historical study and beyond” (134). Poignant because of the lengths to which intellectuals had to go just to survive, to say nothing of maintaining their dignity and integrity. When even the use of original source materials was called into question, or attempts were made to delete the names of dynasties from history books, or the idea that “theory [rather than empirical evidence] guides history” was in fashion, one sees emerging an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Li vividly describes many aspects of this world, and how it led to the even more chaotic world of the Cultural Revolution.
In the late 1970s and 1980s era of economic reforms, an ideological shift known as the “New Enlightenment” took place. As Li describes it, this period was characterized by dramatic reversals in interpretations of historical events, depending on the dizzying shifts in social conditions and political aims. Once again, the reader is fortunate to have Li’s able guidance through the myriad players and issues in this complex game, the result of which was the defeat of the revolutionary construct built by dogmatist Marxists, and the dominance of the “capitalist construct,” which paved the way for capitalist economic development in the 1980s. An interesting note that Li elaborates is how Western liberal ideas survived the Mao era and were “revived” by New Enlightenment scholars in historiography and the social sciences.
Bringing his argument full circle, Li introduces key figures of the “new generation” of historians, who he says are just as ideologically driven as those of the revolutionary narrative, and who further developed the modernization narrative over the past 20 years by occupying themselves solely with empirical studies of what Li calls “trivial details,” or by adopting Western theories wholesale without offering concepts or theories of their own. Li laments that two Western historians whose work he admires, Paul Cohen and Prasenjit Duara, offer nothing to take the place of the narratives they debunk either. Thus Li’s urgent call for construction of a new narrative of Chinese modernization in the era of globalization, if we are to understand how far China has come in the process and speculate about how it will continue.
On the final page of the volume, Li reiterates the challenge to create a new narrative of modern China that is “non-teleological,” “within-time” (seen from the perspective of actors on a particular stage at a given time, without viewing the results as pre-determined), “open-ended” (without putting closure on the historical record), and most importantly (in this reader’s opinion, at least), “transcends any presumed ideologies and conjectures” (277).
A worthy project, indeed. And Professor Li’s book is an excellent place to begin the journey.
Nancy J. Hodes
Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, USA
pp. 324-326