Revisiting China’s Modernity

As a corpus of my writings in the past 15 years, this book includes some chapters that were published before in academic journals. I hereby express my gratitude to Routledge, Oriens Extremus, Frontiers of History in China, and Chinese History and Society for their reprint permission. I am also indebted to Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, my former employer, and Prof. So-an Chang at Academia Sinica, who invited me to join her research project. My particular thanks go to Prof. Liu Jianhui. Without his support, I could not finish this book as a visiting scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, where I spent an unforgettable year doing research and hosting the seminar for a comparative study of the formation of academic concepts across East Asia.

Credits

One’s hometown may be far away, but the world we share is right before our eyes. At the start of each new academic year, I always ask my students to tell me about the history of their hometowns. But the answers I receive invariably disappoint me, because not a single one of them can provide even a sketchy outline of the history of their hometowns. In his essay “A New History” published in 1902, Liang Qichao scathingly noted that traditional historiographers “only care about the imperial court, but know nothing of the nation … and only refer to individuals, but ignore the collective.” Now, over a century after Liang’s observation, if we replaced “imperial court” with “hometown,” this statement would still ring true, for all the new historical understandings over the past 20th and early 21st centuries were acquired at the cost of sacrificing some significant underpinnings of the historiographical tradition that Liang so urgently criticized.

At the end of the 18th century, the modern conception of “history” emerged. In the middle of the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke dismissed the idea of universal history in terms of civilization and progress. Employing a scientific dialectical methodology and applying it to the study of human collectives across time and space, he constructed a historiography that possessed the character of a modern academic discipline. This modern historiography proposed by Ranke is commonly referred to as the historiography of peoples and nations, which serves as a proper object of research and imposes profound influence on future generations. In 1887, two years after Ranke’s death, his student Ludwig Riess arrived in Japan to teach at Tokyo Imperial University. With his awkward English, Riess established the paradigm of historical writing that inspired the first generation of modern Japanese historians. His impact lingers on even to the present day. At the same time, China, with its long-existing tradition of historical writing, also fell under the influence of Western learnings introduced both directly from the West and indirectly via Japan (and in a Japanized form). The notion of universal historiography in terms of civilization and progress and that of modern historiography in Ranke’s sense entered into China in succession, leading to the birth of modern Chinese historiography.

The hierarchy of the West and the East established by modern historiography is based on the superiority of the advanced over the backward, with a clear implication of Eurocentrism. The Japanese version of Asian History tried to neutralize this Euro-centric overtone, but merely by substituting Japan as the center of an alternative form of Orientalism. The abandonment of Eurocentrism was accomplished only after World War II. Postcolonialism and internationalism that arise out of the increasingly globalized world transform the power relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, thereby invalidating the Eurocentrism of the past. Moreover, postmodernism seeks to undermine the essentialist and teleological basis of modern historiography. In contrast to the nation-bound narrative of modern historiography, global history is concerned with the flux of humans and objects across space and the social relations that facilitate this unprecedented flow, resulting in the deconstruction of Euro-centric perspectives. At this juncture, when globalization and regionalization, decentralization and recentralization, are intertwined and interacting with one another, is the global historical narrative a utopia that lies somewhere beyond the horizon, or a reality now within our reach? Its realization awaits the future efforts of the writers of historical texts.

This work investigates the contours of Chinese modernity from the perspectives of social and intellectual history, and it is the debate on national narratives during the 1990s that impels me to ponder over some related questions in this book. Needless to say, central to this debate was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. This book exposes the ambiguity of the concept of nation and contributes to a marked turn of national narratives. By contrast, the definition of nation as an essential being is greatly challenged with nation being reduced to a sheer derivative. In truth, the understandings of nation as either an imagined community or something original are both partially reasonable. One stresses the subjective, political character of nation states in the Western European tradition, whereas the other highlights the substantive cultural origins of the Central European nation states. These two types of nation states both emerged in the process of modernization within Europe. Back into Chinese context, when it comes to the debate over Chinese identity, Western scholars tend to adopt Anderson’s narrative mode, while Chinese scholars find Smith’s views more favorable. If we can claim that the former conjures up an image of ever-drifting snowflakes, the latter depicts something more like a snowball that grows increasingly big as it rolls over. This contradiction can be seen as an indication of the limits of the concept of nation when applied to China. The word nation derives from nation in Latin, which, among other things, refers to one’s place of birth, place of production, or tribe. In the second half of the 18th century, with the rise of republicanism and citizenship in Western Europe and North America, nation was endowed with the implications of a republic or a whole body of citizens. Before this concept was introduced into China, China had its own distinctive socio-cultural system, and the binary mode of nation or ethnicity was inadequate to interpret the complexity of Chinese society.