Chinese history paradigms

Abstract

Chinese people have had a strong bond with a long continuous history that has shaped their identity as Chinese. The opening to the outside world during the last century has exposed them to different kinds of histories. Within China, the threats to their civilisation and the possibility of national history have led to many revisions of the Chinese past. Those who have lived outside China have faced alternative historical representations. How will the various experiences with history paradigms influence the very idea of being Chinese?

Keywords:

• historical bonds
• paradigms
• traditions
• becoming unbound

Notes

¹The word is still not in the English–Chinese dictionaries that I know and neither of the Chinese translations is widely understood. The idea of being Chinese or not is more easily conveyed with a direct question like, ‘Are you Chinese?’.

²This word, identity, often translated as rentong (recognizing sameness), is also new, but many dictionaries now accept that.

³A powerful recent example, not officially accepted, of using Chinese history to challenge current official stereotypes is “River Elegy” () a six-part TV series produced in the late 1980s; Su and Wang, He shang and Ho shang. Also interesting is the officially approved 12-part TV series, “Rise of Great Nations” (), now available in six DVDs; see also Tang Jin (editor), Daguo jueqi. Beijing: Renmin publishing, 2006. This uses Western historical sources to reconstruct the age of empires for the lessons it can teach the Chinese. The DVDs are easily available to Chinese overseas and has been well received.

⁴Words that referred to tribes or ancestral lineage have been used to convey the modern idea of race. In the last years of the 19^th century, people began to talk about the Chinese race, zhongzu , in the context of racial decline. After 1898, Liang Qichao and Zhang Binglin were influenced by Yan Fu's translation of Thomas Huxley and their popularization of Social Darwinism greatly encouraged the attacks on Manchu rule by nationalists like Sun Yat-sen. For several decades, most Chinese did not distinguish that idea of zhongzu from zhongguoren as nationals of China. This is discussed in Chow, ‘Imagining Boundaries of Blood’, 34–52); Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China; and Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation.

⁵Attitudes and responses among the huaqiao varied between the establishment of the Republic of China and that of the People's Republic 37 years later. Nationalist appeals received keen support during the time of the Japanese invasion, but the civil war caused not only ideological divisions but also between the sojourners and many of the local-born settlers. The clearest examples were found in Malaya and Indonesia; Charles Coppel, Indonesian Chinese in Crisis; C.F. Yong, The Kuomintang Movement in Malaya; Wang, ‘The Limits of Nanyang Chinese Nationalism’, 405–21.

⁶The clearest example of official concern was first studied by Wen, ‘The Nineteenth-century Imperial Chinese Consulate’. More details may be found in Ye Shujing , ‘Huang Zunxian and Singapore’.

⁷The best example of a modern presentation of Chinese history materials for the use of modern schools was one edited by Xia Zengyou . He saw Japanese versions modeled on Western school and college textbooks before preparing Latest Middle School Chinese History Textbook. It was to become a classic text and was revised and re-published several times as An Ancient History of China. The most recent reprint came out in 2006. Much of its content has been incorporated in modified form in later textbooks for all Chinese primary and secondary schools everywhere.

⁸I have seen a few collections of the history taught in primary and secondary schools, for example, the history volumes of the two sets published in Shenyang: Encyclopedia of Primary Schools Teaching Materials , volume 4, and Encyclopedia of Middle Schools Teaching Materials , volume 7, Shenyang Publishing Co., 1990–1993. They reflect the common syllabi that all schools follow. It is interesting to note that the Japanese have followed history teaching in China closely, and have translated in full the Middle Schools and Colleges History Textbooks edited by People's Education Publishers in Beijing, for example, Nyumon Chugoku no rekishi: Chugoku chugakko rekishi kyokasho; and Chugoku no rekishi: Chugoku koto gakko rekishi kyokasho. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, in 2001 and 2004 respectively.

⁹Colonial schools offered histories of each respective empire as well as the ancient history of the West followed by the emergence of national histories of newly emerging nation-states; Vickers and Jones, History Education and National Identity in East Asia. A well-known example from the British Empire was Williamson, The British Empire and Commonwealth. A recent study outlines other features; Watson, ‘Rulers and Ruled’, 147–74.

¹⁰Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies in Southeast Asia’, 51–93; and Reid, ‘Flows and Seepages’, 15–49). Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese.

¹¹For Chinese history, the obvious rewrites came from Taiwan and Hong Kong, with historiography being even more a political battlefield on the mainland as Marxist historical materialism was forcibly introduced with each revision of Chinese history; Feuerwerker, History in Communist China; Cohen, China Unbound. In comparison, both colonial and national histories reflected different ideological perspectives. The Chinese who settled in North America and Australasia were most open to essentially Eurocentric ‘world history’ approaches, exemplified by books by Langer, An Encyclopedia of World History and McNeill, A World History; and generations of history textbooks influenced by the two.

¹² The Culture of Chinese Merchants, Toronto: Toronto & York University Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, Working Paper Series No. 57, 1989. The result of favourable business conditions outside China is well illustrated by the essays in McVey, Southeast Asian Capitalists.

¹³The full story of the education of the children of the Chinese overseas during the twentieth century has yet to be told. The studies of huaqiao education published in Chinese do not convey the variety of educational institutions that Chinese students attended. The stress on only those schools where the medium of education was Chinese nevertheless brings out the fact that popular education available to all was the ideal everyone subscribed to from the early years of the 1912 Republic; Chen, (Footprints of the Trailblazers: 300 Years of Chinese Education Overseas). There is a growing literature on the commitment to popular education in the twentieth century; Peterson, Hayhoe, and Lu (eds.), Education, Culture, and Identity in twentieth-century China.

¹⁴Aspiring Chinese community leaders have, directly or indirectly, been engaged in the political process in native kingdoms, colonial states and new nations, most openly in Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, but increasingly also in migrant nations like United States and Australia. The following capture their early political activities: Suryadinata, Peranakan Chinese Politics in Java; Tejapira, Commodifying Marxism; Ratnam, Communalism and the Political Process. Examples of recent developments in the United States may be found in Chang, Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects. New immigrants are also participating although somewhat differently, Lien Pei-Te, ‘Transnational Homeland Concern and Participation in US Politics’, 56–78.

¹⁵Two outstanding historians in Southeast Asia who wrote on subjects that affected Chinese lives without identifying with Chineseness are Ong Hok Ham in Indonesia and Khoo Kay Kim in Malaysia. An example from each author: Ong Hok Ham, The Thugs, the Curtain Thief, and the Sugar Lord; Khoo, ‘The Beginnings of Political Extremism in Malaya, 1915–1935’.

¹⁶Lloyd E. Eastman. The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist rule, 1927–1937; Oldstone-Moore, ‘The New Life movement of Nationalist China’.

¹⁷This is more fully discussed in Wang, ‘ : ’ [History and Knowledge: different library classifications in China and the West].

¹⁸Wang, ‘Juxtaposing Past and Present in China Today’, The China Quarterly, March (1975), 1–24. For the background to the change in history paradigms, Wang, Inventing China Through History. An excellent example of early efforts to write world history for Chinese students is Chen Hengzhe , [Western History]. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998 (based on the first edition published in 1927). He Bingsong's translation of James Harvey Robinson's A New History (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1924) was particularly influential in introducing Anglo-American historiography to college students before the introduction of Marxist and later Soviet historical writings.

¹⁹In 2001–2003, a group of Shanghai scholars led by the historian Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University produced a new set of high school history textbooks that was tried out for three years. After being reported on by Joseph Kahn in The New York Times, the controversy drew official attention to its unorthodox approach and it was eventually withdrawn; Joseph Kahn, New York Times, September 1 2006; [Southern Weekly], September 13 2007. The official view that historical materialism remains paramount during the past three decades of revisiting Chinese historiography may be found in the first five essays in [Historical Research], no. 316, June 2008, 1–33. A more muted essay about research on modern Chinese history is by Yu Heping in [Modern Chinese History Studies], no. 168, June 2008, 82–99. Nevertheless, in both these journals as well as those published by major universities, historians display knowledge of, and willingness to use, a wide range of theories and methods derived from reading books and journals published outside China. Incorporating the results of new research into history textbooks will have to wait.

²⁰Liu and Shek, Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China; Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion; Ma, . [Chinese Religions and Beliefs, a Series of Contemporary Studies in China]; Bolton and Hutton, Triad Societies; Ownby and Heidhues, ‘Secret Societies’ Reconsidered.

²¹The work of Maurice Freedman on this subject has inspired modern research on this subject where the Chinese oversea are concerned. His essays collected by G. William Skinner are in The Study of Chinese Society. Another pioneering study is Ho Ping-ti's historical survey of Landsmannschaften in China, . . (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1966). More recent are essays in Faure and Siu (eds.), Down to Earth. For the Confucian background, Slote and De Vos, Confucianism and the Family.

²²Liu, ‘Old Linkages, New Networks’, 582–609.

²³There are now thousands of Chinese students, most of them descendants of overseas Chinese, studying in Anglophone schools and colleges. If they did any arts and social science courses, they are likely to use textbooks that deal with China that are written by Western scholars. Good examples, among several others, would be Wm. Theodore de Bary's Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, many editions since 1960) and Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, East Asia: the Great Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, several editions since 1960). Mainstream histories of the West would include the very accessible books by J.M. Roberts and William McNeill.

²⁴Kuah, Rebuilding the Ancestral Village, provides a good example of what is being attempted today. For an earlier period, a fine account is Yuan-yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. For examples of problematical adjustments, Yow, ‘The Changing Landscape of Qiaoxiang’.

²⁵Some perspectives of recent developments in China are found in Yao and Badham, Religious Experience in Contemporary China; Yang, Chinese Religiosities; MacInnis, Ting, Zheng and Luo, Religion under Socialism in China. Comparable manifestations may be found among the Chinese overseas facing Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. The complex responses among peranakan Chinese who have lived four or more generations in the region can be seen in Clammer, ‘Syncretism, Religion and Ethnic Identity’, in his collection of essays, Diaspora and Identity.