The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography)

The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China

Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography Editors

Axel Schneider Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik

VOLUME 2

The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China Edited by

Tze-ki Hon and Robert J. Culp

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN: 1574-4493 ISBN: 978 90 04 16023 1 Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

Preface ......................................................................................... Fan-sen Wang List of Contributors .................................................................... Introduction ................................................................................ Tze-ki Hon and Robert J. Culp

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PART ONE

THE NEW SCHOOL SYSTEM AND NEW EDUCATED ELITE The New Schools and National Identity: Chinese History Textbooks in the Late Qing ....................................................... Peter Zarrow

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Classifying Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Late Qing Native-place Textbooks and Gazetteers .......................................................... May-bo Ching

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Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks ....................................................................... Tze-ki Hon

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PART TWO

GENERAL HISTORY AND WORLD HISTORY Discontinuous Continuity: The Beginnings of a New Synthesis of “General History” in 20th-Century China ............. Mary G. Mazur Zhang Yinlin’s Early China .......................................................... Brian Moloughney

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Contending Memories of the Nation: History Education in Wartime China, 1937–1945 ....................................................... Wai-keung Chan “Weak and Small Peoples” in a “Europeanizing World”: World History Textbooks and Chinese Intellectuals’ Perspectives on Global Modernity ............................................. Robert J. Culp

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PART THREE

NATIONAL HISTORY AND ITS CHALLENGES Archives at the Margins: Luo Zhenyu’s Qing Documents and Nationalism in Republican China .............................................. Shana J. Brown

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How to Remember the Qing Dynasty: The Case of Meng Sen ............................................................................... Madeleine Yue Dong

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Liberalism and Nationalism at a Crossroads: The Guomindang’s Educational Policies, 1927–1930 ....................... Chiu-chun Lee

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Index ...........................................................................................

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PREFACE Fan-sen Wang

Current studies of Chinese historiography cover well-known historians, major historical writings, and key historical ideas. Indeed, this approach offers valuable insights into how the educated elite conceptualized and wrote history. But it pays little attention to the historical knowledge of the populace, who learned about the past, not from reading scholarly writings, but from going to theater, listening to stories, and gossiping in tea houses or at market places. Certainly, the high and the popular cultures were not completely separate, and scholarly writings did nd ways to reach the general public. Nevertheless, current studies of Chinese historiography do not explain how historical ideas of the educated elite were transmitted to the populace, and how the populace circulated and recreated the historical knowledge they received. In late Qing China, history textbooks became a major medium for disseminating historical knowledge. During the late imperial period, history textbooks took the forms of early-childhood readings (e.g., Sanzi jing 三字經, Youxue qionglin 幼學瓊林, and Yunshi 韻史) and popular historical writings (e.g., Gangjian yizhi lu 綱鑒易知錄 and Lishi gangjian bu 歷史綱鑒補). Diverse in content and exible as teaching tools, these popular writings were much more inuential than the assigned readings in the academy such as Guoyu 國語, Zhanguo ce 戰國策, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒, and Santong 三通. After 1900, there were signicant changes to the educational system. In order to build a nation-state, the late Qing government tried to expand its control over education. It established a national school system, created a standard curriculum, and scrutinized textbooks. The purpose of these measures was to promote a national identity among young Chinese, transforming them from distinct individuals into loyal and patriotic citizens. From the beginning of the educational reform, the late Qing government chose to supervise the production of textbooks through a system of “screening and authorization” (shending 審定). The system took years to develop. It was rst established in 1903, with the goal of creating a mechanism to publish government-approved textbooks. But the Qing government soon realized that it could not compete with private presses

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in publishing textbooks. Thus, in 1906, the Qing government issued an order requiring publishers to submit textbooks to the Ministry of Education for review. To make certain that private presses would follow government policies, the screening decisions were published in The Ofcial Announcements of the Ministry of Education (Xuebu guanbao 學部官報). In the remaining years of the Qing, the Ministry of Education did censor a number of textbooks. In 1908, it forbade the publication of He Qi’s 何琪 Chudeng nuzi xiaoxue guowen 初等女子小學國文, because the book included the term pingdeng 平等 (equality). In the same year, it stopped the publication of Mai Dinghua’s 麥鼎華 Zhongdeng lunlixue 中等倫理學, on the grounds of the “outrageous writings” in Cai Yuanpei’s 蔡元培 preface. In 1910, an order was issued by the governor of Zhili 直隸 to censor textbooks that criticized Confucian teaching, promoted equality, and advocated freedom of marriage.1 One result of this screening and authorization was that history textbooks became inextricably connected to state propaganda, political discourse, and commercial prot. A case in point is the drastic changes in textbooks after the 1911 Revolution. Before the revolution, most textbooks (particularly those published by the Commercial Press) supported the late Qing reforms and avoided discussing revolutionary ideas. But Lufei Kui 陸費逵, a staff member of the Commercial Press, together with others who supported revolutionary ideas, secretly prepared a new set of textbooks that supported republican ideals of equality. After the revolution, publishers such as Lufei Kui’s Zhonghua Book Company brought out these new textbooks, which discussed the rise and fall of imperial power, the concept of democracy, and the evolution of people’s rights. Adopted in schools throughout the country, these new textbooks sold like hotcakes, and the textbooks published by the Commercial Press lost their market immediately. But considering that Lufei Kui was the author of the Putong jiaoyu zhanxing banfa tongling 普通教育暫行辦法通令 (Temporary Orders for General Education), which dened the curriculum of the new school system, it seems clear that Lufei Kui used his inuence in the government to serve his private interest. Yet during the 1910s and 1920s, the Beiyang government did not have the manpower and the resources to control education. Not every government policy was fully implemented, with vagueness and “wiggle room” for negotiation always an option. Not until 1927, after the estab-

1

See Guan 2000: 376–85.

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lishment of the Nanjing government, did the state re-exert its power over education. The well-known example of the suppression of Gu Jiegang’s Benguo shi 本國史 in 1929 clearly demonstrates the Guomindang’s intention of using textbooks as a means of political propaganda. Needless to say, publishers and authors were quick to adjust to government policies. They recycled old materials to t the new guidelines, and hid materials that were deemed controversial. From 1905 to 1931, for instance, the Commercial Press produced 15 versions of the same textbook to please the censors. Each time the Commercial Press produced a new version, the company earned more prots, because the textbook was sold to millions of students throughout the country.2 In narrating—and rewriting—the past, history textbooks not only provide facts and dates, but also distinguish the subjects and objects of history. The subjects of history are the heroes who serve the community and protect the interest of “us.” By contrast, the objects of history are the villains who harm the community and advance the interest of “others.” This distinction between subject and object, us and them, is crucial in fostering a collective identity among readers. Regardless of the storyline—a heroic saga, a tragic tale, a redemptive venture—readers are encouraged to identify with the heroes and condemn the villains. In the textbooks of the early 1900s, for example, the subjects of history were “our imperial dynasty,” “the sagely government,” “our great Qing.” The objects of history were the “the rebels,” particularly the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion. After the 1911 Revolution, the subjects of history were changed to “the Republican government,” “our country,” and the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. The objects of history were the Manchus, who had committed numerous atrocities in China throughout their 300 years of rule. Ineluctably these changes in perspective required different narrations of the nation and different selections of historical facts. Having grown up in Taiwan, I have had direct experience with selective narration of the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, to counter communism and to prevent Taiwanese independence, the textbooks of the times conveyed the impression that Chiang Kai-shek was anti-Communist in the early 1920s. But those who were able to read “restricted materials” knew that Chiang was a “red general” whose speeches were full of quotations from Marxism-Leninism. The same is true of

2

Zhuang 1987.

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Sun Yat-sen. For much of the 1910s and early 1920s, Sun had limited inuence in national politics. Yet in textbooks, he was depicted as a dominant political player after the 1911 Revolution. For a long time, these selective and distorted accounts were taken as historical truth in Taiwan. Not until the 1980s were alternative views of history allowed to circulate. Similarly, in PRC history textbooks, little is said about the Guomindang’s contributions during the Sino-Japanese War. In their narratives, the CCP is described as the leading force in ghting the Japanese, although in reality, its power was limited to small areas in northwestern China. Ironically, what is taken for granted in Taiwan is totally missing in the PRC narratives. It is as if most people know nothing about the history that is not contained in their textbooks. Because large numbers of students are affected, history textbooks play a crucial role in shaping collective memory. In the 1990s, contentious debates erupted among educators in Taiwan when Taiwanese history was included in the history curriculum. The debate became so tense and emotional that in 1997, the Ministry of Education had to take unprecedented actions to stop an editorial board meeting on high school textbooks. The bone of contention at the time was merely how much 17th-century Taiwanese history should be included in the curriculum. After a decade of change, approximately one third of the materials in today’s Taiwanese history textbooks are devoted to the history of Taiwan. Because of the new curriculum, today’s Taiwanese who are 20 or younger know a lot more about Taiwanese history than do their elders. As a result, their collective memory is quite different from that of the older generations. Despite their importance, not much attention has been paid to the roles of history textbooks in disseminating historical knowledge and shaping collective memory. This collection of articles is intended to ll the lacuna. The germination of the idea of publishing a collection of articles about the textbooks took place at the panel “War and Politics of Memory: History Education in Early 20th-Century China” at the 2004 annual conference of the American Historical Association. After two years of hard labor, Professors Tze-ki Hon and Robert Culp have assembled 10 articles that examine the politics of remembering the past, competing visions in narrating the nation, and the social and moral functions of history education. Readers who are interested in the formation and transformation of historical knowledge and collective memory will nd this collection of articles enriching and enlightening.

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References Cited Guan Xiaohong 關曉紅 (2002), Wanqing xuebu yanjiu 晚清學部研究 (Studies of the Late Qing Ministry of Education). Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe. Zhuang Yu 莊俞 (1987), “Tantan woguan bianji jiaokeshu de bianqian 談談我舘編輯 教科書的變遷 (Reminiscence on the Changes in Editing Textbooks in Commercial Press),” in Shangwu yinshuguan jiushinian 商務印書館九十年 (Ninety Years at Commercial Press). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 62–72.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

SHANA J. BROWN is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her forthcoming book Pastimes: Chinese Historical Studies at the Intersection of Art, Commerce, and Politics, 1870–1928 analyzes the inuence of 19th-century antiquarianism and collecting practices on modern Chinese historical studies. WAI-KEUNG CHAN is a Lecturer in Liberal Studies, College of Professional and Continuing Education, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Concurrently, he is a part-time lecturer in World History at Hong Kong Shue Yan College. He was elected a Scouloudi Fellow in 2002 at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His research interests include modern Chinese intellectual and educational history. He has recently published an article on the intellectual interaction between H.G. Wells, Fu Sinan and Hu Shi in re-writing world history. MAY-BO CHING is Professor of History at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China). Her major research interest is the social and cultural history of modern China. Her book Regional Culture and National Identity: The shaping of “Guangdong Culture” since the late Qing (in Chinese) discusses changes in the articulation of regional identity against the rise of nationalism at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. Her current projects include a study of the introduction of natural history drawings and knowledge into China since the late 19th century and a social history of Cantonese opera from the 1860s to the 1950s. ROBERT J. CULP is Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Bard College. His rst book is Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming 2007). His current work focuses on publishing and cultural production in early 20th-century China. MADELEINE YUE DONG is Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Washington. Her most recent publications include Republican Beijing: The City and its Histories, and she

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is a co-editor (with Joshua Goldstein) of Everyday Modernity in China, and (with Tani Barlow, Uta Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn Thomas, and Alys Weinbaum) of The Modern Girl Around the World. She is currently working on a book on popular histories of the Qing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. TZE-KI HON is Associate Professor of History at State University of New York-Geneseo. His research interests cover both pre-modern and modern China. His book, Yijing and the Chinese Politics (SUNY Press, 2005) examines the Yijing commentaries of the Northern Song period. He is an editor of a volume on the May-Fourth New Culture paradigm. Currently, he is completing a book on the Guocui xuebao (1905–1912). CHIU-CHUN LEE is Associate Professor of History at National Taipei University, Taiwan. His research focuses on the intellectual history of modern China, especially the changes in the Chinese worldview in the past hundred years. He has done research on the formation of the discourse on liberalism in late Qing China, and China’s foreign policies at the United Nations during the Second World War. His most recent publications include “Debates on the Republican System in 1912: A Reection of the First Democratic Experiment in Modern China” (in Chinese) and “China’s Delegation to the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945” (in Japanese). MARY G. MAZUR is an independent scholar and afliate of the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. She received a B.A. from Carleton College, 1953, in Zoology; raised a family of three children with her husband Robert H. Mazur; and completed a Ph.D. in Chinese History from the University of Chicago in 1993. Awarded a Graduate Research Grant by the National Academy of Science, Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, 1985–86, with an extension in 1987, for a biography of the historian, Wu Han, her research base was at Beijing University. Among her publications is Shidai zhi zi: Wu Han (Son of His Times: Wu Han) (Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996). Mary received the China Quarterly 1999 Gordon White Prize for the most original CQ article of the year for her Research Note, “Public Space for Memory in Contemporary Civil Society: Freedom to Learn from the Mirror of the Past?”

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BRIAN MOLOUGHNEY is Professor and Head of the School of Asian and European Languages at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research focuses on biographical and autobiographical writing in China and on the nature of Chinese narrative. He also works on the Chinese diaspora. His most recent publications include Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts (with Tony Ballantyne) and Asia in the Making of New Zealand (with Henry Johnson). FAN-SEN WANG is Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. He also teaches at National Taiwan University and Tsinghua University. His publications include Fu Ssu-nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics (Cambridge University Press), The Rise of the Gushi Bian (Doubting of Antiquity) Movement (in Chinese), and The Thought of Zhang Taiyan (in Chinese), The Genealogy of Modern Chinese Thought (in Chinese). PETER ZARROW is Associate Research Fellow in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His has recently written China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949 (Routledge) and edited Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900–1940 (Peter Lang). His research interests focus on Chinese political philosophy in the late Qing and early Republic.

INTRODUCTION Tze-ki Hon and Robert J. Culp*

In 1906, a year after China established the modern school system, the young Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) entered primary school in his native city Suzhou, Jiangsu province. Like any child, Gu found his rst days in school bewildering. He felt insecure when he met with complete strangers—his classmates, his teachers, and the stern, authoritative headmaster. Accustomed to exible and negotiable routines at home, he struggled to cope with the strictures and schedule of school. But besides the usual novelty and anxiety, those early days of schooling left an indelible impression on the young Gu. In an autobiography written decades later, when he became a historian known for his iconoclasm, Gu described that experience as “stepping into a brand new world” (tajin le yige xinshijie 踏進了一個新世界).1 By “a brand new world,” Gu referred to the modern school system that was sharply different from private school (sishu 私塾), where he had spent his last eight years. In sishu, students received education at home or a relative’s home from private tutors. The curriculum was exible, as long as students learned enough of the Confucian canon to pass civil service examinations. Much of the learning was rote memorization of Confucian texts, particularly the Five Classics and the Four Books. In modern school, by contrast, children were taken from home to a public place. Its curriculum was diverse and well-dened, to prepare students to serve society in various capacities, not merely as government ofcials. Gu reported that his education included scientic experiments in laboratories, outings to the countryside to collect biological and geological specimens, and writing reports after excursions to historic and scenic sites.2 After spending years in sishu memorizing difcult Confucian texts, Gu had plenty of reasons to enjoy the modern

* We would like to thank Professor Axel Schneider for his support in publishing this book, Professor Fan-sen Wang for writing the preface, and Cythia Werthamer for her help in editing the nal version of the manuscript. 1 Gu 1926: 12. 2 Gu 1926: 12–3.

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school. In his autobiography, he noted that he felt liberated when his school days were spent in various hands-on activities, training him to use both his mind and body.3 Yet not every child in turn-of-the-century China had the same experience as Gu. Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), a historian of Chinese thought, remembered his early schooling as training in patriotism. In his autobiography, he recalled that, when attending school in Wuchang 武昌 of Hubei, he had to wear a school uniform and sing the school song. The school uniform—a light-blue jacket and matching pants—deliberately mimicked a soldier’s uniform to emphasize the importance of serving the nation.4 The school song, allegedly written by Zhang Zhidong 張之洞, explained the purpose of the new school system: In a peaceful world lit by the sun and the moon, Listen to our singing to pay homage to our school. Our sagely emperor is determined to strengthen the nation; There is no other way but to improve education.5

As implied in the song, the goal of the school system was to promote a collective identity among students. Through a standard curriculum with clearly dened stages of learning, schools would gradually integrate educated youths to a bigger realm beyond family, lineage, hometown, and province, reaching to the far corners of the country, known as China. While Feng Youlan regarded his early years in school as a training ground for patriots, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) saw it as an opportunity to be part of the modern world. Growing up in Jiading 嘉定 of Sichuan, far from cultural and urban centers, Guo was delighted when, in 1905, his two older brothers were enrolled in the modern schools of the provincial capital, Chengdu.6 From his brothers, he learned about new subjects, such as geography and mathematics. More important, he met two Japanese instructors who taught at his oldest brother’s school. In his autobiography, Guo described the two Japanese teachers’ brief visit to Jiading as “a breath of fresh air” in his forlorn and sleepy village.7 He noted that immediately after their 3

Gu 1926: 13. Feng 1984: 7. 5 “天地泰, 日月光, 聽我唱歌贊學堂。聖天子, 圖自強, 除卻學堂別無方。” Feng 1984: 7. 6 Guo 1928: 40. 7 Guo 1928: 44–46. 4

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visit, signs of change occurred, including his stubborn father suddenly taking up the “modern habit” of eating uncooked eggs.8 If modern school for Guo was a window to the outside world, it was for Qian Mu 錢穆 (1895–1990) a reminder of the persistence of Chinese customs. An accomplished historian of Chinese thought and culture, Qian Mu fondly remembered his years in primary and secondary schools as a continuation of his sishu training.9 Despite the obvious differences in structure and curriculum, he saw similarities between the two educational systems in their teaching of ethics and moral codes.10 In both systems, he found afrmation that the Confucian tradition, particularly the Cheng-Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism, would continue to inuence China in the 20th century, making China a unique nation in the modern world.11 Diverse as they are, the four historians’ remembrances of their early years show how greatly educational changes had shaped early 20thcentury China. Politically speaking, as shown in Feng Youlan’s school song, educational changes were part of China’s transformation from an empire to a nation-state. From New Policy (xinzheng 新政) reforms of the late Qing (1902–1911) to the Nationalist government (1927–1949), the Chinese were building a national school system in order to form a modern nation. With a standardized curriculum, the new school system fostered a national identity that would link students to a social whole, despite their differences in ethnic backgrounds, languages, customs, and religious beliefs. It was intended to create what Benedict Anderson calls “an imagined community”12 that would give Chinese a sense of belonging to their nation. Because of the pivotal role that the school system played in cultivating a national identity, any Chinese government (be it the Qing, Beiyang, or Nationalist) had to spend a signicant amount of resources to build schools, hire teachers, screen students, and monitor curriculum changes.13 Controlling the school system became a key function of modern Chinese government. Socially speaking, the end of the examination system in 1905 marked a key point of transition, from an educational system geared toward 8

Guo 1928: 46. Qian 1998: 33–42. 10 Qian 1998: 41. 11 Qian 1998: 33–34, 41–42, 46–50. 12 Anderson 1991: 5–7. 13 For one approach to the interaction between broader political and sociocultural trends and educational reform, see Li 1997. 9

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bureaucratic recruitment and the instillation of basic moral education to the start of a Japanese- and Euro-American–based system, intended to educate a broad public to be productive, nationalistic, modern citizens.14 As the new “ladder of success” for the educated classes,15 the school system dispensed “academic capital” that would bestow upon students the qualications to become social and cultural elites. Because of its power to create what Pierre Bourdieu calls the new “aristocracy of culture,”16 many young students (including the four historians mentioned above) left sishu to enter the modern schools. As a result, the new kinds of social and cultural elites that the school system produced were drastically different from the literati of the past. Rather than single-mindedly aspiring to be government ofcials, as the literati did, students in modern schools learned to perform various roles in society. They could be bankers, diplomats, merchants, publishers, scientists, teachers, and so on. Consequently, the “brand new world” that Gu Jiegang lauded in his autobiography was a world full of diversity, exibility, and choices, ushering educated youths into diverse positions in society. As the school system continued to grow during the Republican period (resulting in the establishment of a national school system in 1927), millions of students entered school and became ready consumers of textbooks. According to one statistical study, by the 1920s roughly 6.8 million students were regularly attending modern primary and secondary schools.17 Consequently, this population provided a ready readership for both textbooks and the broader array of popular reading materials pioneered by the commercial publishing companies such as the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館), Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju 中華書局), and World Books (Shijie shuju 世界書局).18 In turn, as the number of students increased by leaps and bounds and the school system grew in size, educators and scholars quickly discovered that writing textbooks and popular works was a fast way to reach a huge audience. Whether for the lofty goal of

14

Hiroshi Abe traces the Japanese inuences on the rst modern Chinese educational system in Abe 1987. Barry Keenan provides the most comprehensive analysis of the impact of American progressive education on Chinese educators during the 1910s and 1920s. See Keenan 1977. 15 For analysis of the multistranded social, cultural, and political impact of the end of the examination system, see Elman 2000, chap. 11. 16 See Bourdieu 1984: 9–62. 17 Zhongguo jiaoyu tongji gailan 1923: 1–2. 18 Lee 1999; Reed 2004.

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educating the masses or for the pragmatic aim of earning extra money, many educators and academics became writers of textbooks and other accessible works. They found that, in addition to classroom teaching, the book market was an important avenue for expressing views and disseminating ideas. In combination, these political, socioeconomic, and cultural changes transformed both the authors and the audience of popular and educational histories. Educational reformers intended the modern school system to turn educated youths into a mass public of educated citizens, a group that provided a nascent readership both for textbooks and a growing list of periodicals and books produced by modern publishers.19 At the same time, with the decline of the literati tradition, transitional intellectuals quickly identied academia (xueshujie 學術界), “educational circles” ( jiaoyujie 教育界), and “publishing circles” (chubanjie 出版界) as sites for the creation of modern, professional roles and identities. Popular historical writing became a key genre through which the intellectual elite sought to transform itself and connect with the expanded (or at least expanding) public of educated readers. As a result, history—both in the formal curriculum and in terms of trade books—was a key subject for the publishing companies.20

Main Themes of the Anthology The goal of this anthology is to broaden the scope in studying modern Chinese historiography by examining popular and educational histories. Notwithstanding their valuable contributions to our understanding of modern Chinese historical thinking, current studies of modern Chinese historiography focus primarily on two issues: the rise of nationalism and the advent of scientic history. From Prasenjit Duara, we learn that in envisioning the Chinese nation, many modern Chinese historians adopted the European mode of national history, which is linear, progressive, and centered on the nation as a homogeneous community.21 From Xiaobing Tang and Rebecca Karl, we learn that many Chinese

19

Bailey 1990; Borthwick 1983; Culp forthcoming. For history’s place in the late Qing curriculum, see Peter Zarrow’s essay in this volume. For the secondary history curriculum during most of the Republican period, see Culp 2001. 21 Duara 1995. 20

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authors of national history, knowingly or unknowingly, advanced an image of the world that helped to locate China in the community of nations and places.22 From Q. Edward Wang and Fan-sen Wang, we learn that modern Chinese historical discourse was part of the “May Fourth New Culture Movement” that promoted a factual, empirical, and impartial view of the past.23 Certainly, by concentrating on Chinese historians’ ideas of history (e.g., the nation, world order, and science), we gain a better understanding of how they interpreted the past, narrated historical events, and conveyed historical lessons. At the same time, by focusing solely on historians’ ideas of history, we lose sight of the fact that they wrote history in a specic context and for particular audiences. As shown in the four historians’ remembrances of their early years, early 20th-century Chinese historians interpreted the past in the midst of momentous political, social, and cultural changes. Rather than promoting a methodology or historical school, they developed an interest in historical studies to facilitate changes in their country. The main audience for the majority of modern Chinese historians was students in modern schools and general readers in the book market. This trend began with Liu Yizheng 柳誼徵 and Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 in the early 1900s, when the school system had just started. It continued on unabated during the 1920s, when Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang began publishing their major works. It reached its peak in the 1930s, when foreign invasion pushed historians like Qian Mu, Wu Han 吳唅 and Zhang Yinlin 張蔭麟 to write directly for young students and young readers. Many important historical works produced during these three decades—such as Hu Shi’s Zhongguo zhexueshi dagang 中國哲學史大綱 (Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy), Liu Yizheng’s Zhongguo wenhuashi 中國 文化史 (History of Chinese Culture), Qian Mu’s Guoshi dagang 國史大綱 (Outline of National History), Feng Youlan’s Zhongguo zhexueshi 中國 哲學史 (History of Chinese Philosophy) and Zhang Yinlin’s Zhongguo shigang shanggu pian 中國史綱上古篇 (Outline of Chinese History: Section on Early Ancient Period)—were either written as textbooks or drawn from teaching notes. With 10 essays, this anthology seeks to link modern Chinese historical discourse to its political, social, and cultural contexts. The premise

22 23

Tang 1996; Karl 2002. Q. Edward Wang 2001; Fan-sen Wang 2000.

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of this anthology is that, in order to fully understand the uniqueness of modern Chinese historical discourse, we must examine the complex mechanism that allowed historical works to be written, produced, and circulated. To do so, we go beyond the writings of well-known historians, and focus our attention on the three major factors that made history an important subject of academic and social debates in early 20th-century China: the school system, print culture, and the book market. In this way, we examine various forms of historical production happening inside and outside the mainstream of academic history. They include new measures for publishing textbooks, new genres in writing history, the delineation and preservation of archival materials, the growth of popular history, and government attempts to establish orthodox historical accounts. Through specic cases, this anthology demonstrates that popular and educational histories have been important media for both historiographical and sociocultural changes in 20th-century China. Starting in the late Qing and continuing, with even greater emphasis, during the Republic, the emergent mass readership of educated young people was imagined as a nascent citizenry. However, open to question throughout this period was what kind of history was appropriate for these new citizens, and how that history would shape their collective identity. Linear, progressive history that tracked the development of the national people through time was certainly a central theme in at least some educational histories during this period.24 But a signal contribution of this anthology is to document the many alternative conceptions of history and community that circulated in textbooks and other popular historical writings, from the start of the 20th century through the Republican period. Perhaps most signicant and valuable in this regard are the textbooks of the late Qing period, which indicate some of the challenges involved in moving immediately to a historical discourse centered on progressive development of an ethno-culturally dened national community. The three essays in Part I of this anthology examine some of these challenges. Rather than seeing late Qing historians as breaking fully with the past by adopting linear, progressive, and unitary national histories, Peter Zarrow and May-bo Ching describe histories that followed the forms of two of late imperial China’s most prominent historical genres—the

24 Culp 2001. Note, though, the plural forms of narrative that were incorporated as national history in these textbooks.

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dynastic history and the local gazetteer. These prior forms haunted and shaped the resulting narratives. Zarrow shows that late Qing textbooks were often organized around accounts of dynastic consolidation and efforts to maintain dynastic security.25 Although the continuity of the dynastic form in a recognizably Chinese geopolitical space suggested a kind of national historical continuity, the textbooks still segmented time in non-national, dynastic units that would have complicated a clear message of national progression. Segmentation of time in Zarrow’s account becomes segmentation of space in Ching’s. Native place-teaching materials, though intended to “go from near to far” and root a national political identity in a local community identity, in fact gave rise to claims of ethnic priority and triggered interethnic controversies that exposed China’s undeniable ethno-cultural diversity. Such ethnic tensions complicated formulations of national-level ethno-cultural cohesion. Even Tze-ki Hon’s authors, at least two of whom aspired to craft national narratives, failed to produce them. Instead, we see histories that are fragmented, awed, incomplete, or present narratives of return to an authentic past. Nevertheless, as earlier attempts to present a history of the Chinese nation to educated youths, the three works that Hon analyzes show important signs of change after the abolition of the civil service examinations in 1905. Written respectively for the Qing government, the Commercial Press, and the revolutionary group Guoxue baocunhui 國學保存會 (Association for Preservation of National Learning), the three works reect the variety of social roles that educated elites could assume. With the establishment of the modern school system and the growth of the burgeoning book market, some members of the educated elite (especially those who had been struggling to pass the examinations) found opportunities to use their cultural capital to advance their social status. National history matured under the Republic. To assess the signicance of national history, the four essays in Part II examine the social and cultural impact of this new historical genre. In their essays on general history (tongshi 通史), Mary Mazur and Brian Moloughney compare the different ways that national histories were written to 25 Madeleine Dong’s paper, with its discussion of debates surrounding the Draft History of the Qing Dynasty (Qingshi gao) and the production of yeshi (unofcial history), also illustrates the continuing power of late imperial historical forms during the early Republic.

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inspire national identity. Tracing the process by which general history was developed into a popular genre of presenting the past, Mazur and Moloughney show how Chinese historians made the history of ancient China meaningful to a twentieth-century audience. Like Zarrow and Ching, Mazur and Moloughney see both continuity and discontinuity in historians’ attempts to refashion historical memory. Certainly, the form of general history was new: it broke with the tradition of dynastic history by presenting a story of the Chinese nation progressing over time. Yet, in substance, particularly with respect to marshalling historical facts to illustrate the continuous growth of the Chinese nation, historians drew on such traditional works as Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 (Records of History), Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑒 (Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government), and Zhang Xuecheng’s Wenshi tongyi 文史通義 (Comprehensive Explanation of Literature and History). Continuing the theme of national history, Wai-keung Chan’s essay illustrates that the motivation to use history to build national identity only intensied during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In this time of crisis and conict, the past served as a resource to construct a national collective and to inspire and direct patriotic action. However, the presence of competing regimes led to competing national narratives that had varying degrees of resonance with student readers. In his article, Chan compares the history textbooks in Guomindang and Japanese-controlled areas, based on the themes of ancient myths, race, and national heroes.26 In the comparison, Chan shows the different uses of the past in supporting competing political agendas. In some contrast with these pieces on the narratives in general histories and Chinese history textbooks, Culp’s essay on world history textbooks explores how the nation was conceived in the framework of global historical discourse during the Republican period. Most world histories of this period followed the Euro-American model of national narrative, portraying modern history as the realization or failure of various nation-making projects. But starting in the 1920s, world history textbooks’ celebration of a globalized form of anti-imperialism hinted at formation of an alternative political community of “weak and small peoples” (ruoxiao minzu 弱小民族) who were joined in their opposition 26 Because of a dearth of extent materials, Wai-keung Chan’s otherwise excellent essay could not include discussion of historical education in areas controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Wartime popular historiography under the CCP is an obvious next step in the study of Republican-period historical writing.

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to imperialism. Though ultimately subsumed in a Nationalist Party project of nation-building, this vision of a potential global community, which echoed a pattern that Rebecca Karl has identied in late Qing revolutionaries’ political writings,27 remained a persistent subtext in textbooks throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The three essays in Part III reveal ways in which educational histories and historians working inside and outside the academy eroded the hegemony of elite intellectuals’ national history at its foundations. Shana Brown strikingly portrays Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 during the early Republic as combining the activities of a dynastic loyalist and a modern collector to compile an archive of Qing historical materials outside the national trust. By dening a universe of primary historical materials separate from the national heritage, Luo disrupted the project of building a national history that could easily incorporate the Qing period. Likewise, Madeleine Dong suggests that the production of the Qingshi gao 清史稿 (Draft History of the Qing Dynasty) was shaped by Qing loyalists who were explicitly critical of the revolutionary project that ended that dynasty and ambivalent about the nation-state that replaced it. In both instances, late imperial modes of dynastic afliation disrupted the production of nationalist histories. Chiu-chun Lee’s essay focuses on the late-1920s debate between Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 and Dai Jitao 戴季陶 on standardizing the school curriculum. Lee demonstrates that during the early years of the Nanjing government, no consensus existed regarding precisely how to reshape the Chinese educational system, but a shared understanding evolved of the value of centralized state control over education, including historical instruction. Like Brown and Dong, Lee stresses that there were many forces shaping Chinese historical discourse. In particular, Guomindang leaders’ unpleasant experience with urban protests and student demonstrations in the mid 1920s greatly inuenced their views in designing a nationwide curriculum that would stress conformity and discipline. In all these ways, then, popular historical writing, textbook histories, nonacademic archive building, and curriculum debates complicated the dominant trend of nationalist historiography. The continued inuence of late imperial genres (dynastic histories and gazetteers), historiographic voices (loyalist apologists and local elites), and organizational patterns (the gentleman collector) underpinned these alternative histories. Such

27

Karl 1998.

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continuities indicate the challenges involved in the introduction of a new historical paradigm, even one as powerful and convincing as linear, progressive national history, into a cultural context with a wellestablished and sophisticated historiographic tradition. At the same time, national history was also disrupted by radical political histories calling for new forms of global revolution that were shaped by the post-Versailles global political climate. In sum, the 10 essays suggest that, once we look beyond the mainstream of ofcial, academic history, the late Qing and early Republican historiographic terrain was complex and varied. As a result, the early 20th-century readership of students and educated readers was exposed to variegated messages of collective identity.

Transitional Intellectuals and New Sites of Cultural Production If the narratives in early 20th-century popular and educational histories were varied, many of their authors shared a common goal, though one that was seldom explicitly voiced. That is, they sought to dene a new role for themselves as historians with the impending decline of the literati tradition that was signaled by the end of the examination system in 1905. The many authors discussed in this volume can all be considered “transitional intellectuals” because of the way they straddled the late imperial and modern institutional and academic worlds of early 20th-century China.28 Most, if not all, of them were trained at least to some degree in the classical tradition, but by virtue of their dates of birth, they did not have access to the examination ladder of success that had motivated and rewarded their predecessors. At the same time, many of them were conversant with, if not trained in, modern, Euro-American modes of scholarship and writing. Our authors wove together the intellectual strategies of these different intellectual traditions to craft a new, specialized role for themselves as historians or historical writers, as the role of “literatus” (wenren 文人) faded into historical memory and lost cultural power.

28 Capsule biographies of the authors discussed in the volume are incorporated into the relevant articles. We already have excellent English-language intellectual biographies of, respectively, Qian Mu and Gu Jiegang. See Dennerline 1988; Schneider 1971.

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Transitional intellectuals empowered themselves by assuming the role of historian. Discursively, it provided them with a position of authority from which to write, for by writing national or world history, these intellectuals assumed the roles, respectively, of authors of the nation or interpreters of the broader world. Our authors claimed further authority by seeking to write for a popular audience, thereby taking on the role of tutor to the people. We see the attractiveness of this role perhaps most clearly in the case of authors like Zhang Yinlin and Chen Hengzhe 陳衡哲, both eminently successful academic historians who could quite easily have focused solely on arcane areas of specialized research. Instead, they self-consciously chose to write for a popular audience, because of the increased impact they might have on their society. In addition, Hon and Culp both suggest that transitional intellectuals sought to legitimize and naturalize the central role of intellectuals in contemporary China by literally writing, respectively, either Confucian literati or modern intellectuals into prominent roles in their historical narratives. For a generation that had lost ready access to positions of political inuence and socio-cultural status, the role of historian presented itself as a viable alternative. Claiming status and authority as historians was a viable strategy, in part because transitional intellectuals could draw selectively from their classical training to write their modern histories. As we have seen, some during the late Qing, like Zarrow’s, Dong’s, and Ching’s authors, wrote in familiar genres of the dynastic history, the unofcial history ( yeshi ), and the local gazetteer, which were packaged by publishing companies in new ways, such as history textbooks, popular historical works, and native-place teaching materials. Others converted the cultural capital of their intellectual skills by more complex means. To varying degrees and in different ways, Liu Shipei 劉師培 (discussed in Hon’s essay), Meng Sen 孟森 (discussed in Dong’s essay), and Gu Jiegang (discussed in Mazur’s essay) built on philological scholarly traditions to write new histories. Luo Zhenyu (discussed in Brown’s essay) incorporated practices of literati connoisseurship in his collecting, cataloging, and sometimes reselling of archival materials in the early 20th century. Moreover, for all these authors, familiarity with, if not complete internalization of, the classical tradition shaped their understanding of the imperial past and, to varying degrees, informed their writing, whether in terms of style or perspective. If these transitional intellectuals, to some degree, chose to cast themselves anew in the discursive role of historian, the variation in insti-

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tutional contexts in which they operated as historians is quite striking. Surveying this group, we can see at least four institutional contexts in which they operated: formal academic institutions; educational circles (local, provincial, or national); publishing circles; and government service. Interestingly, the last of these seems to have been the least common and least attractive, perhaps because of its great discursive and practical restrictions, its inherent instability, and its limited potency, especially during the early Republic. This preference for operating in institutional contexts outside the government is telling. It suggests that, just years after the end of the examination system, which had always steered late imperial China’s best and brightest directly into government service, we see at least three other social domains—academia, publishing, and education—as presenting themselves as more attractive institutional contexts for intellectual work and cultural production.29 Our authors’ uid movement among these institutional sites and spheres indicates another way in which they were transitional, for as intellectuals they were moving between various social roles and contexts, as well as living through the transition from one era to another. Each of the gures discussed in this anthology operated in at least two of these domains; several worked actively within all three. Especially noteworthy is elite intellectuals’ and educators’ ready movement into publishing circles by working, on contract or as editors, for the commercial publishing companies. Just drawing on examples from this anthology, we see prominent young intellectuals like Gu Jiegang and Chen Hengzhe drawn into editing departments or writing on contract for publishers; and Meng Sen edited journals for the Commercial Press. Other historians, like Lü Simian 呂思勉, spent most of their careers moving back and forth between academic and publishing positions, and arguably established their reputation as historians as much through their writing for a popular audience as from their academic work.30 Even career 29 This assessment resonates with work documenting the growth of civil society, such as nongovernmental organizations, during the late Qing and early Republic, as well as the post-1911 intellectual focus on society rather than the state. For the former trend, see Rankin 1986; Schoppa 1982; Strand 1989. For the latter, see Chow 1960; Dirlik 1991; Schwarcz 1986. This shift of institutional preference for cultural production away from ofcial government positions was likely the culmination of a long-term trend that began in the early 19th century, when more and more intellectuals began to opt for more inuential and less fraught positions as ofcial secretaries, rather than commit themselves to the grueling discipline of ofcial life. Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann documented this trend some time ago. See Kuhn and Jones 1983. 30 Xu 1991: 331–332.

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academic Zhang Yinlin seems to have found his voice and purpose in writing a popular history for a commercial market. For educators like Jin Zhaozi 金兆梓, He Bingsong 何炳松, and many others of lesser fame, working as editors in publishing companies provided an alternate career route and position of intellectual inuence. Further research is necessary on this count. However, the uid movement of historians among the elds of academia, education, and publishing suggests that all of them provided viable institutional sites for transitional intellectuals to support themselves and claim some kind of public voice and cultural status in late Qing and Republican China. Worth emphasizing here might be the apparent parity in the attractiveness of work in academia and publishing circles during most of the Republican period. The movement into commercial publishers’ editing departments of prominent intellectuals like Princeton-trained He Bingsong (Commercial Press, 1924–1932) and University of Chicago-educated Chen Hengzhe (Commercial Press, 1922–1924) suggests that the freedom, income, and perhaps enhanced public visibility and inuence of the publishing world proved more attractive to some than arcane academic work. At the very least, the experiences of the historians in this anthology indicate that the vibrant economy and active educational reform movements of the early 20th century created multiple sites where transitional intellectuals could chart new career paths and produce new forms of culture that had social impact. Yet, into the Sino-Japanese War period, no single institution monopolized the power, status, and revenue potential that had characterized government service and statesponsored scholarship during the late imperial period. The uid, transitional nature of the early 20th century, with its low degree of state inuence, is perhaps captured best in Shana Brown’s portrayal of Luo Zhenyu’s peripatetic career. Luo inhabited none of the three institutional contexts described above, yet he successfully positioned himself on the margins of the community of historians through his control over historical materials. For most of his career from the 1910s into the 1930s, Luo looks like nothing so much as an archivist with documents but no archive. However, by the early 1930s, the interstices in which Luo had happily maneuvered began to narrow and nally close. As state formations consolidated in both Manchukuo and under the Nationalist Party in China proper, formal archives were established that sought to monopolize control over material collections.31 In the 31

Prasenjit Duara provides a nuanced analysis of the parallel and competing state-

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end, even intellectual maverick Luo Zhenyu drifted into state orbit by contributing to projects sponsored by the Manchukuo government. This growth in state inuence over historical production, through establishment of state archives and state efforts to centrally control education, comes only at the end of the period covered by this book, when Chinese states again had the means and intention to shape popular and educational history. For much of the late Qing and Republican periods, intellectuals had great leeway, and also responsibility, for crafting a usable past for post-imperial China. During the late Qing, the Ministry of Education (Xuebu 學部) set curriculum standards and reviewed the resulting textbooks (see Ching’s and Zarrow’s essays); the variety of narratives and arguments in the resulting texts suggests state controls over content were, in practice, limited. During the Republican period, state inuence on educational and popular historical writing was even less evident, until the start of the Nanjing decade in 1927.32 From that point onward, as Lee Chiu-chun’s and Wai-keung Chan’s articles suggest, the Nationalist government sought to reestablish centralized state control over the educational process, including textbook histories. When read together, the essays on education, cultural production, and the state in Part III portray relatively limited state control over historical discourse during the late Qing and early Republic that the Nationalist Party sought to reverse after 1927. In sum, the educational and popular histories studied here were sites of experimentation with new modes of narrative, structures of argument, and registers of speech. These were shaped by intellectual inuences ranging from late imperial philology to modern Western scientic historiography, by shifts in political and cultural climate, and by the demands and opportunities of institutional contexts, such as academia, educational circles, and publishing circles. But they generally were not dictated by direct state intervention. As a result, these educational and popular histories open a window onto a rare period of limited state control in China’s historical tradition. This illustration of the limited nature of state control over historical production from the late Qing to the beginning of the Nanjing decade suggests how this anthology, while focused primarily on popular historical

building projects in Nationalist China and Manchukuo during the 1930s. See Duara 2003. In both areas, states aspired to greater control over cultural representations, especially in regard to ethno-history. 32 For a preliminary assessment of the limited nature of government control over textbook production during the early Republic, see Culp forthcoming, chapter 1.

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discourse during the early 20th century, makes contributions to, and has implications for, many other historiographical debates. Specically, the 10 essays document a major cultural shift in the early 20th century, when commercial publishing and writing for the book market became a prime locus for cultural production and intellectual elites’ activities. Socially, this anthology explains the ways in which early 20th-century intellectuals made the transition from inhabiting the role of the late imperial literatus to playing new modern professional roles, such as historian, and operating within the modern institutions of the school, academy, and publishing house. Through attention to these processes, this anthology works to contextualize historiographic change and consider across a broader eld the social, political, and cultural implications of the historical craft.

References Cited Abe, Hiroshi (1987), “Borrowing from Japan: China’s First Modern Educational System,” in Ruth Hayhoe and Marianne Bastid (eds.) (1987), China’s Education and the Industrialized World. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 57–80. Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso. Bailey, Paul J. (1990), Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth Century China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Borthwick, Sally (1983), Education and Social Change in China: The Beginnings of the Modern Era. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chow Tse-tsung (1960), The May 4th Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Culp, Robert J. (2001), “ ‘China—The Land and its People’: Fashioning Identity in Secondary School History Textbooks, 1911–1937,” in Twentieth-Century China 26 (April 2001) 2, 17–62. —— (forthcoming), Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Social Change in Southeastern China, 1912–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Dennerline, Jerry (1998), Qian Mu and the World of Seven Mansions. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dirlik, Arif (1991), Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duara, Prasenjit (1995), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —— (2003), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham, Boulder: Rowman & Littleeld Publishers Inc. Elman, Benjamin A. (2000), A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1984), San song tang ziyu 三松堂自序 (Preface to the Collected Writings of the Three Pines Pavilion). Beijing: Sanlian shudian.

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Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1926), “Zi xu” 自序, in Gu shi bian 古史辨 vol. 1. Beiping [Beijing]: Pushe, 1–103. Guo Moruo (1928), “Wo de tongnian” 我的童年 (My Childhood), in Moruo zi zhuan 沫若自傳 (The Autobiography of Guo Moruo) (1956). Shanghai: Xinwenyi chubanshe, 40–46. Karl, Rebecca E. (1998), “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (October 1998): 1096–118. —— (2002), Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Keenan, Barry (1977), The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Philip, and Jones, Susan Mann (1983), “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 10. New York: Cambridge University Press, 107–162. Lee, Leo Ou-fan (1999), Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Li Huaxing 李華興 et al. (1997), Minguo jiaoyushi 民國教育史 (The History of Educattion during the Republican Period). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. Qian Mu (1998), “Shiyou zayi” 師友雜憶 (Memories of Teachers and Friends), in Bashi yi shuangqing shiyou zayi hekan 八十憶雙親師友雜憶合刊 (Combined Publication of Remembering My Parents at the Age of Eighty and Memories of Teachers and Friends). Taibei: Lianjing chubanshe, 33–388. Rankin, Mary B. (1986), Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reed, Christopher A. (2004), Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876 –1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Schneider, Laurence A. (1971), Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schoppa, R. Keith (1982), Chinese Elites and Political Change: Zhejiang Province in the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schwarcz, Vera (1986), The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May 4th Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strand, David (1989), Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tang, Xiaobing (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wang, Fan-sen (2000), Fu Su-nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang, Q. Edward (2001), Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press. Xu Youchun 徐友春 et al., (eds.) (1991), Minguo renwu da cidian 民國人物大辭典 (Biographical dictionary of Republican China). Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe. Zhongguo jiaoyu tongji gailan, Zhonghua jiaoyu gaijin she congshu, Di si zhong (An Overview of Chinese Statistics on Education, No. 4 in the Chinese Educational Improvement Society Series) (1923). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan.

PART ONE

THE NEW SCHOOL SYSTEM AND NEW EDUCATED ELITE

THE NEW SCHOOLS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: CHINESE HISTORY TEXTBOOKS IN THE LATE QING Peter Zarrow*

“Western-style education” in China, referring to schools that included Western subjects, had its roots in the missionaries and reformers of the 19th century. But it was only in the rst years of the 20th century that a nation-wide mass education system began to take shape. The New Policy (xinzheng 新政) reforms of the Qing dynasty made education a central concern from their beginnings in 1902, and a number of ofcially-sanctioned schools emerged with the educational regulations of 1904.1 The goal of compulsory and universal education was to be met gradually; the regulations stipulated that each prefecture needed a middle school and each county a primary school. The actual numbers were much larger, even while local schools might only follow the ofcial curriculum to a degree. A functioning state school system could certainly be found in China’s cities by the time of the 1911 Revolution. In the countryside, as is well known, building local schools by conscating temple lands and raising taxes provoked protests; however, there were also quiet successes that historians have perhaps underestimated.2 Regardless of the exact number of schools and students, the publication of recognizably modern textbooks (that is, short books devoted to particular subjects and aimed at specic age groups) grew from relatively small numbers through the 1890s to a veritable explosion circa

* I would like to express my appreciation for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, particularly to the editors of this volume; and also to participants in several forums at the National University of Singapore ( July 2005); the International Conference of Asian Studies (Shanghai, August, 2005); the Instituto Ricci de Macau (December 2005); Yangzhou University (August 2006); and the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, where Huang Chin-hsing’s 黃進興 discussant’s comments proved especially useful ( June 2006). 1 For the early development of China’s modern education system in English, see Borthwick 1983: 87–127; Bastid 1987; Abe 1987; and Curran 2005. The classic study in Chinese is Shu 1932; see also inter alia Xiong 1998; Li and Wang 2000; Mao and Shen 1988. 2 VanderVen 2005.

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1906.3 Large-scale textbook publication created a “textual community” of students and teachers reading the same kinds of materials.4 By 1906 if not earlier, schools could choose among dozens of competing textbooks in particular subjects (upper primary school Chinese history, for example, or middle school physics). The variety of textbooks simultaneously represented diversication and standardization. Competing editions by different publishers (or the same publishers in the case of larger companies) reveal different approaches to the subject matter—as we will explore further below in the case of Chinese history—but they also show general similarities that reected both ofcial regulations and elite consensus. The Commercial Press (商務印書館), soon to be dominant in textbook publishing, began in 1897 as a small printing operation; then, it moved into translation projects and in 1903 recognized the potential of textbooks.5 Its editors now included men who were leading intellectuals in their own right, interested in raising the cultural level of the people and looking to education to help solve China’s problems. The famous “up-to-date textbook” series (zuixin jiaokeshu 最新教科書) was started in 1904 and proved immensely protable. The entire series was designed, subject by subject, to begin with short simple “lessons” that expanded to longer and more complex ones over the course of the semester, one lesson per class as stipulated by the Qing regulations. For example, history classes were to be held one hour a week in lower primary and two hours a week in upper primary and middle schools.

3 This date is meant loosely, and is based on my entirely unscientic sense of library catalogs. 4 The phrase is from Wertsch 2002: 27–29, 62–65. Historians have given textbooks relatively little attention, although education is a fundamental institution in all modern societies and history textbooks in particular can be highly politicized and controversial—for America, see FitzGerald 1980, and for a more recent comparative study, see Hein and Selden 2000. Textbooks in modern China are the subject of a number of ongoing investigations; recently published research includes Wang 1996 on the institutional background; Zou 2001, who uses geography textbooks in the late Qing to trace the spread of Western knowledge; and on citizenship and national identity see: Zinda 2004; Judge 2000, 2001; and on the early Republican period Culp (2001). Chinese history textbooks have received little scholarly attention; one recent article, focusing on their relationship to early 20th century Chinese nationalism, is Tanaka 2005; though see also Tze-ki Hon in this volume and Zheng 1991: 181–245, especially on university and upper level texts. 5 Zhang 1997.

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Textbooks represent “ofcial knowledge” in the sense that they are approved by political and intellectual elites to form the basis of mass education of the young. Of course, elites’ goals are usually met only partially. In the 19th-century West no less than in early 20th-century China, formal schooling—universal, compulsory, and regimented—was a state ideal, not a reality. Textbooks themselves tell us what lessons elites hoped to impart to children but not what children actually learned or what they thought about their texts. For late Qing Chinese elites, national history was a critical subject. It was both a traditionally honored branch of scholarship and, in the new world of imperialist rivalries, a means to socialize children into their community: or, rather, communities: local, Chinese-national, Qing-imperial, and even humanity as a whole. Chinese history textbooks in the late Qing conveyed a sense of national identity deeply rooted in the past—indeed, rooted in a vision of ancient “China” stretching back four to ve thousand years. Textbooks narrativized the achievements that marked and ultimately dened the Chinese. But what were these “achievements” and, above all, how precisely was “Chinese-ness” (zhongguo 中國, zhonghua 中華, huaxia 華夏) to be dened? Here, it should be noted that history textbooks were not excessively didactic. The job of directly telling children who they were and how they should behave was left to morality textbooks and readers. History textbook authors, while enthusiastically accepting the duty of instilling patriotism as one of their goals, tended to let their historical narrative speak for itself.6 Yet if historical knowledge was not reducible to the production of national feeling, neither was identity a mere byproduct of the installation of history into children’s minds. Rather, in the context of the late Qing, Chinese history and national identity were so intertwined as to be inseparable. This was not a result of explicit authorial intention so much as the demand that elites generally made of national history at a time of crisis. This chapter argues that history textbooks reected many of the tensions and debates of the late Qing. History textbooks attempted to construct a narrative framework based on the progress of the nation. That is, they attempted, though with only partial success, to t the historical data into this particular framework, a framework which represented a

6

Liu Longxin 2002: 88–98.

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new understanding of the meaning of history. As we will see, textbooks were themselves thus lled with tensions and ambiguities. Who were the Chinese? Was Chinese culture reducible to the Han (漢) people’s culture? How did the races and ethnic groups that occupied Chinese territories come together? If history is a story of progress, how and when did China actually see progress? Did it not stagnate at times? What did, what would, represent historical progress? Nonetheless, in spite of differing approaches to such questions, the Chinese history textbooks of the late Qing tended to emphasize the theme of political unity. Political unity was the greatest accomplishment of the ancient period, and never entirely lost—at least never lost as the normative expression of the national ideal even if temporarily mislaid from time to time. Naturally enough, textbooks narratives were structured around the dynastic cycle. Textbooks thus frankly discussed periods of disunity as well as unity. Yet transcending the cyclical sense of time was the continuity (if not progress) of the dynastic system itself. And to emphasize the dynastic system was to emphasize the centralized state. Regardless of whether the specic dynasty in question was the Han, the Song, the Ming, or for that matter the Qing, it was marked by imperial-bureaucratic control within (rough) boundaries which also marked certain cultural traits and customs. In the context of the late Qing, this was to create a national identity that derived from the state. In other words, the textbook narrative of the Chinese nation was a story that revolved around a putative Chinese state. Textbooks did not neglect stories based on local, ethnic, and cutural identities, but—in spite of some attempts—they simply could not turn the story of China into an ethnohistory of the self-becoming of the people (Han or otherwise), and nor into the rise of a particular culture (given China’s cultural diversity). The Qing court’s non-Han ethnicity naturally precluded ofcial textbooks from explicit anti-Manchuism, and the conation of “China” with the borders of the Qing turned China into a multi-ethnic nation by denition.7 Discussions of the different “peoples” of China often 7 Zhao 2006 argues that Qing imperial ideology deliberately equated the empire (Qing, including Inner Asia) with “China” (Zhongguo). This is convincing up to a point; however, it remains unproven that eighteenth century use of Zhongguo in ofcial documents, much less in nonofcial usages, always corresponded with the “entity” that is immediately antecedent to China today, and the possibility remains that Qing imperial ideology did more to create various proto-nationalities within the empire who could be subsumed under the label Zhongguo only with great difculty. Still, if we cannot

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served as introductionary material in history textbooks and invariably did so in geography textbooks. Textbook writers were inuenced by the ethnohistorical approach to national history that dominated history-writing in the West and Japan and were happy to talk about distinct races and “peoples.” But they could not escape the dynastic (now Chinese) state. There was a large “traditional” component to this view of Chinese history, even it if was now harnessed to a crisis-induced patriotism that sought—in some quarters and to varying degrees—to dene the state as the “property” of the people, not the emperor. State-based patriotism simply made sense to most Han elites, but it was a double-edged sword for the Qing itself, threatening to cut off the head of the dynasty if it failed its duties to the state—which was to say, the nation.

The Purpose of History Thus the overriding didactic purpose of history textbooks was to promote patriotism, even if the exact contents of this ethic remained elastic and historical narrative worked through indirect means. The Qing’s new Ministry of Education (學部) wanted textbooks to emphasize the history of the nation: its origins, its development over long periods, recent events, the worries of the emperor, and the problems stemming from foreign pressures and domestic issues. In this way, the Ministry promised, students would never forget loyalty to the emperor—and, in remembering the great deeds of former heroes and the blessings of the cosmos, would be inoculated against revolutionary heresies. Exactly how this approach differed from traditional historiography could be debated. Neither an interest in learning lessons from the past nor a sense that history might convey moral lessons were novel, but history designed systematically for the inculcation of children was new. At the same time, widespread calls for a “new historiography” in the late Qing certainly inuenced ofcials and textbook-writers. In a word, the new history was to take the Chinese nation as its subject, showing its development through time. Not alone, but perhaps most famously, in 1902 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 sharply criticized traditional histories as speak of a truly “Chinese” national identity before the late 19th century, it is clear that a lengthy ideological development prepared the way for what would be called “greater Chinese nationalism” as opposed to the exclusionist Han nationalism of the 1911 revolutionaries.

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merely dynastic “genealogies” or personal histories of emperors rather than collective histories of the nation; he demanded that history focus on the evolution of the nation, paying attention to current affairs and speaking to the future.8 This chapter cannot explore in detail the “new history” movement.9 However, it is important to note that the movement had a strong and direct—if incomplete and tension-lled—impact on the search for the “progress” of the “nation” in late Qing history textbooks. Furthermore, there is no doubt of the importance of the Japanese model on the Chinese history textbooks that began to be written in the late Qing.10 Meiji historians, who were often well trained in Chinese studies, by the 1880s had begun to write national histories of China as well as Japan. The Japanese offered a model of the narration of a nation from its origins, through its development, to the present-day. If not completely unknown in traditional Chinese historiography, the “national history” ( guojia tongshi 國家通史) was a striking innovation both as the dominant form of historical writing and in the context of international nation-state system, each member claiming its own bounded history. If traditional historiography was in part a tool of state-building, it now became a tool of nation-building. In this sense, regardless of Japanese models—and often in fact in opposition to Japanese views—Chinese writers were necessarily going to provide their own views of their own history. They also continued to rely on their own knowledge of the classics, particularly for narratives of the ancient period, and their familiarity with the dynastic histories. The fundamental problem facing Chinese historians and textbook writers was how to fulll the ideals of the “new history” in practice: how to avoid reverting to a history of great men (or indeed “dynasties”) that obscured the nation; and how, in a word, to dene the “nation”

8

Liang 1996. Overviews of the transformation of historiographical thinking in the late Qing and early Republic include: Xu Guansan 1989; Luo Zhitian 2001; Wang Fansen 1987, 2003; Zhang Kaizhi 1996; Hu Fengxiang and Zhang Wenjian 1991; and Wang 2001. Duara 1995 is indispensable for thinking about the relationship between nationalism and history. For Liang’s views in particular, see inter alia Huang Jinxing 1997; Tang 1996; Zarrow 2003. 10 Li Xiaoqian 2003. As Tze-ki Hon shows in this volume, late Qing historian-authors like Liu Yizheng 柳誼徵 based their own textbooks directly on Japanese models; other Chinese authors were inuenced indirectly. A complete analysis of the rise of “national history” narratives in East Asia around the turn of the century would also take into account the Sino-Japanese interest in “national learning” (國學) in more general terms, a topic beyond the scope of this chapter. 9

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that the history was supposed to illuminate. In practice, late Qing history textbooks utilized a “schematic narrative template,” as James Wertsch has proposed for the Russian case.11 Wertsch postulates that generalized narrative forms underlie specic narratives or stories (forms that manifest underlying patterns but that are not universal archetypes, because they are culturally or nationally determined in specic textual heritages). In the Chinese case, the dynastic cycle in effect provided textbook authors with such a template. Unnamed and never explicitly analyzed, the “dynastic cycle” nevertheless described good emperors and ofcials who built great empires and civilization but who were, however, eventually succeeded by evil or incompetent emperors whose rule gave rise to domestic rebellion and foreign invasion. This repeated rise-and-fall story provided a “narrative template” for nearly all of Chinese history: the history that followed the very rst sage-kings who founded (Chinese) civilization itself up to the Qing. As for the Qing, textbook authors could hardly state explicitly that by the end of the 19th century it t the model of dynastic decline, but they certainly presented evidence to suggest decline. In itself, this schematic possessed no moral force. The historical subject of “China” was here implied as that arena within which the dynastic cycle operated, maintaining cultural continuity across the dynasties. But, again, the narrative template never specied the exact nature of Chinese or Han identity. These were issues marginalized by the schematic of the dynastic cycle. However, it seems to me that there is also another way to reduce the immense range of historical detail—which general is rebelling against which monarch, which minister is loyally serving unto death, which monarch is staging brilliant campaigns against barbarian threats, and so forth—to conscious or unconscious themes that in narrative terms act as repeating motifs. Most important of these are rst, the unity of empire, or the dominance of central rule and unied customs; and second, the protection of the borders, or resistance to barbarian pressure. This “resistance” could be quite active in the case of pushing back barbarians to expand the empire, but textbooks also treat stability

11 Wertsch 2002: 60–62. Wertsch found that Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks use a narrative template of “triumph over alien (hostile) forces” (2002: 93) consisting of a repeated story with four plot elements: 1) Russia at peace; 2) invaded by aggressors; 3) crisis and suffering; and 4) victory secured by the Russian people. Garagozov 2002 has found this template at work in pre-Soviet history-writing as well.

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as a satisfactory condition. These motifs were compatible with a frank, realpolitik approach to history-writing that generally eschewed moralizing. However, these motifs were also compatible with the specic worries of late Qing intellectuals: that the empire’s borders were under threat and that the empire needed unity and stability in order to meet this threat.

Ofcial Goals The new Ministry of Education set out general goals for the new schools in 1906. This document plunged into the debates of the day, promoting reform on the one hand but criticizing reformist extremism on the other. It was the latter problem that seems to have struck the Ministry as especially worrisome; it did not claim that the West set a bad example but that some Chinese did not properly understand the West. Universal education was ultimately a means to inculcate loyalty and inoculate the population against revolutionary “heresies”; it was also a means to strengthen the state by mobilizing the people.12 Textbooks were subject to the Ministry’s censorship. Nonetheless, although this subject needs greater research, in general it seems that textbooks were not required to spread a specic political message.13 The Ministry of Education was alert to threats to morality in ethics textbooks (xiushen jiaokeshu 修身教科書) and elementary readers (duben 讀本), but perhaps respected history and geography as more objective disciplines. Furthermore, a number of textbooks were published privately outside the ofcial school system, which remained limited. Therefore, the textbooks of major publishing companies certainly complied with the vetting process of the Ministry of Education, but in practice this appears not to have been difcult, at least in the case of history textbooks. Generally speaking, history textbook authors eschewed moralizing and even political theorizing, concentrating on a dry recitation of “facts.” This is not to claim either that history textbooks lacked political implications or that authors were oblivious of these implications. Indeed, precisely because historical questions were politically sensitive and history textbooks were devoted to the creation

12 13

Qu and Tang 1991: I, 534–539. Guan 2000: 375–385; Wang Jianjun 1996: 158–190.

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of the modern Chinese citizen, they implicitly reveal the tensions of that time, as we will see below. Nonetheless, the narrative structure of history textbooks tended to obscure these tensions and emphasize the general elite consensus on the need to create a self-aware citizenry. The Ministry of Education proclaimed that proper policies needed to be established on the basis of China’s circumstances and popular customs. Above all, the traditional notion of the state (zhengjiao 政教) rested on loyalty to the emperor (zhongjun 忠君) and reverence for Confucius (zun Kong 尊孔). What was now needed, in order to maintain these foundational principles, was esteem for public mindedness (shanggong 尙公), the military arts (shangwu 尙武), and the practical arts (shangshi 尙實).14 According to the Ministry, although the political forms of Eastern and Western countries differed, all based their politics on reverence for the king ( guozhu 國主). For example, the recent rise of Germany could be traced to the emphasis its schools placed on preserving the unity of the empire, while Japan’s rise had much to do with its schools’ emphasis on the unbroken imperial line. The Qing, in its great benecence and care of the people, could, according to the Ministry, shape its educational system similarly. Public-mindedness, the military, and the practical arts were thus, for the Ministry, essentially means to promote Confucianism and loyalism. Nonetheless, in terms of curriculum and class time, they offered a more immediate set of purposes to school-builders. Public-mindedness referred to creating a unied populace that was determined and unconquerable.15 The role of schooling here was essential, the Ministry declared, in creating trust and friendship through lessons in self-cultivation, ethical relations, history, and geography: all such courses encouraged the feelings of students to promote cooperative sentiment. Patriotic unity, the Ministry explicitly noted, should be rooted in childhood, just as Confucius taught that universal benevolence was the extension of more particularistic liality. Central to this process would be a revival of a “national learning” ( guoxue 國學) that was in decline. Students were to start formal schooling at age 7, and lower primary schools covered grades one through ve; upper primary schools grades six through nine; and middle schools (along with parallel vocational and normal schools) grades ten through thirteen. Then, higher schools

14 15

Qu and Tang 1991: I, 535. Qu and Tang 1991: I, 536.

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were to provide more specialized university-preparation courses in grades fourteen through seventeen, followed nally by a university or Confucian academy.16 The curriculum of upper and lower primary and middle schools emphasized self-cultivation and the classics (as well as learning to read and write characters). Other classes included geography, arithmetic, sciences, physical exercise, perhaps drawing and crafts—and certainly history. Upper primary and middle schools were to provide more specialized scientic or vocational classes (e.g., agriculture and commerce); middle and higher schools were to offer courses in law, nance, and foreign languages in addition to the basic curriculum. What was the role of history classes in this system? If the Ministry originally envisioned a curriculum revolving around Four Books and Five Classics and ethics, while subjects like history, politics, and the sciences were secondary, the fact remains that the new subjects were given a major place in the curriculum—a place that only grew over time.17 Yet was history a discrete eld of knowledge in its own right, or was it a branch of ethics? History classes were certainly to promote moral lessons, above all patriotism. The aim of history was to convey the “great and virtuous deeds of the sage rulers” (shengzhu xianjun 聖主 賢君) so students learned the origins of Chinese culture and the sacred governance (shengde zheng 聖德政) of the “present dynasty” in order to nurture the well-springs of national loyalty ( guomin zhongai 國民忠愛).18 Whilst the Ministry may have sought to nesse any potential conict between loyalty to the dynasty and loyalty to the “nation” (patriotism), the ambiguous term guomin (國民, “national” or “citizen”) was itself a break with the past. “The knowledge of love of the same kind [of people] (ai tonglei 愛同類) at this time [in youth] is the basis for the patriotism (ai guojia 愛國家) of adults.”19 History classes for the rst two years of lower primary school were to focus on local history and the stories of the virtuous men of the locality for students to emulate.20 And at the same time, a chart of

16

This essay focuses on textbooks used at the primary level. For details of the higherlevel school system, never fully implemented, see Shangwu yinshuguan 1909. 17 Hayhoe 1992: 51, 71 n. 11. 18 Qu and Tang 1991: I, 295. 19 Qu and Tang 1991: I, 294. 20 This chapter focuses on history textbooks and the late Qing project of national identity; in addition to tensions in this project noted below, potential conicts between local and national identities should be noted. For both the tensions and means to reconcile them, see May-Bo Ching’s article in this volume; also see her two Chinese articles, Cheng 2003, 2006.

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the imperial dynasties and reigns hung on the wall would provide a convenient chronology that students would naturally memorize. Consciously or not, the regulations thus linked local and national (or imperial), simultaneously seeking to root children in their immediate, known place and their larger, abstract political community. In years three and four students moved on to learn of the specic dynasties and reigns, and in year ve they learned of the founding of the Qing and the good government of its various sage-rulers (renzheng liesheng 仁政列聖). Similarly, geography classes began with the local, years one and two emphasizing local roads, villages, mountains, rivers, and temples to worthies, while in year three students went on to their county and prefecture and something of China. In year four students concentrated on Chinese territory, famous mountains, and rivers, and in year ve looked at both China and its neighboring countries.21 Students were thus to understand China’s place in the world, which was pictured as primarily constituted of borders. It is as if the Ministry assumed modern patriotism rested on the extension of a concrete sense of locality to the more abstract sense of a territory dened historically and represented by lines on a map. History in the upper primary schools was to emphasize stories of dynastic rise and fall since Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) 黃帝 and Yao 堯 and Shun 舜. History classes were also to be explicitly didactic, designed to produce loyal subjects of the Qing, from whose good government they beneted; they were also to promote self-strengthening. Middle school history was to use the “great events of dynasties and reigns” to narrate, rst, the Qing’s own “royal sacred government and inexhaustible virtue” and the basic progress of the previous century: its great events; the stories of loyal and good scholars; the ourishing of scholarship and technical skills; the renewal of old military equipment; changes in government; the progress of agriculture, industry, and commerce; and changes in customs.22 Then students were to learn the history of Asian nations and nally Europe and the United States. In general, the history curriculum at this level was supposed to show students the relations among facts and the distinct origins of different cultures. In this way, students would come to an understanding of the reasons why some countries were strong while others weak. Again, the ultimate purpose was frankly didactic if less narrowly

21 22

Shangwu yinshuguan 1909: 7:2:5a–6a. Shangwu yinshuguan 1909: 7:1:73.

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focused: to raise the resolve and character of the people ( guomin zhi zhiqi 國民之志氣).23 It is also worth noting that at the middle school level, classics classes seemed more oriented toward history than self-cultivation. The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋), the Zuo Commentary (Zuozhuan 左傳), and the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli 周禮) were all considered useful sources of statecraft ( jingshi 經世) knowledge. They displayed valiant heroes and the spirit of ancient Zhou ofcials; they demonstrated how the former kings’ system to nourish and educate the people could inspire presentday government.24 So, too, primary school geography classes were to reinforce pupils’ patriotic spirit; and while the geographic concepts grew more complex at higher grade levels, this goal did not change.25 The goals of the Qing government for its new schools were thus fairly clear. But did the schools and the texts actually taught to children deliver what the Qing wanted? While this chapter can scarcely answer that question completely, I conclude that history textbooks followed the Qing’s guidelines but nonetheless subtly subverted any specic Qing loyalism. Rather, the narrative template of history textbooks linked patriotism to a sense of the Chinese state that transcended any particular dynasty, as well as the narrow ethnonationalism rightly feared by the Qing. Focusing on the implications of historical narrative for identity, the following three sections examine the play of the motifs of empirebuilding, breakdown, and state functions in descriptions of, rst, the ancient origins of China; second, the imperial period to the end of the Ming; and third, the Qing itself.

A Question of Identity: Origins By focusing on the origins of a people/culture/civilization, late Qing history textbooks implied the existence of a “nation” that was somehow distinguishable from the dynasty or indeed any particular state formation, and which progressed through time. To an extent, traditional stories of the “sage-kings” (聖王) as culture-founders were reforged into stories of nation-founders. Textbooks were thus quick to reect two intellec-

23 24 25

Shangwu yinshuguan 1909: 7:1:74. Shangwu yinshuguan 1909: 7:1:72b–73a. Shangwu yinshuguan 1909: 7:1:81b; 7:1:74a.

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tual trends of the late Qing. First, the interest in “new historiography” that sought to center the nation in an evolutionary framework.26 And second, the “Western origins” theory of the Han race that postulated that the Chinese or “Han” people did not originate in the land they now occupied (China) but thousands of years previously had emerged out of Central Asia. Publicized by the prominent intellectuals Zhang Binglin 章炳麟 and Liu Shipei 劉師培, this theory held that the “Baks,” originally from Mesopotamia but then wandering around Central Asia for some time, had entered China under their leader Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) in the third millennium BC. Huangdi defeated the native aborigines, some of whom moved south, becoming the Miao 苗, while some remained as a labor caste under the Baks, whose name evolved into “Han.” Huangdi was literally the progenitor of the Chinese people (or the Han, a term derived from “Bak”).27 Inevitably, history textbooks began in one form or another with founding stories of the Chinese nation. These started not with the origins of the world or the human species but with a bio-cultural descent group that from ancient times occupied the Yellow River and the Yangzi River regions: what is today generally called China proper. One approach was to begin with a discussion of physical and human geography. The “Primary Reader in History” attempted to dene the Chinese in racial terms.28 They were members of the Yellow Race like Japanese, Koreans, Tartars, and other groups. Their specic subgroup was that of the Hua (huaren 華人), who were in turn dened circularly as those who developed China. “China” in this sense was a spatial concept: this people originally moved out of the northern plains, but what marked them as historically Chinese was their settling around the Yellow River Valley and then moving into central and southern China.29 Culturally, according to the “Primary Reader,” this people was marked by scholarship, the educated classes following Confucianism while the

26

See notes 7 and 8 above. Though well known to historians of the late Qing, the popularity of this theory, propagated especially by anti-Manchu revolutionaries but more widely held, has yet to be fully explained. For Liu Shipei’s version, see 1997a [1904]. For well-considered analysis, see Shen 1997; and Luo 2002. 28 XDS: 4a–5a. 29 Obviously, this story does not accord exactly with the “Western origins” theory that specied Central Asia, but it does maintain the notion of the migration of the (future) Chinese into “China” from the outside. 27

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ignorant followed Buddhism and Daoism. In this sense, identity was dened through race, geography, and culture. Yao Zuyi’s 姚祖義 “Upper Primary Chinese History Textbook” of 1904 began with a brief cosmogony, referring to a Great Mist that was succeeded by Pangu 盤古 and the Three August Ones and the Five Emperors (sanhuang wudi 三皇五帝).30 Yao thus generally followed the account in Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–90 BC) in referring to the August Ones of Heaven, Earth and Humanity (tianhuang 天皇, dihuang 地皇, renhuang 人皇) and attributed the most basic attributes of civilization—re and housing—to this extremely ancient and little-known period. However, it is worth noting that Yao Zuyi did not begin his text with these civilizational legends but rather with the observation that the ancient world consisted merely of tribes or villages, and that it evolved into a unied state. In all, “China” had remained unied through fourteen dynasties.31 These dynasties stretched back to Tang 唐, Yu 虞, and Xia 夏, coming forward to the Qing through periods of division. The point is not how Yao Zuyi determined which later dynasties were legitimate (zhengtong 正統) but that he was giving students a sense of national identity that depended on the unied imperial state. In this way, Yao took the legitimacy of the Qing (like the Yuan 元 under the Mongols) for granted. More importantly, while obviously not denying Chinese identity to those unfortunate enough to lives in times of disunity or chaos, he bound that identity to the ideal of the unied imperial state. Other textbooks, however, simply plunged into China’s history, beginning with the genesis of a recognizable nation with the Yellow Emperor. As noted above, several textbooks reported a movement of primitive tribes out of the West or Northwest into what would become China. For example, Qian Zonghan’s 錢宗翰 “Illustrated Vernacular History of China” spoke of tribes moving into the Yellow River region.32 Eventually, these tribes amalgamated, and from their various chiefs came a supreme leader: the Yellow Emperor. Establishing a kingdom that stretched from north of the Yellow River to south of the Yangzi, he

30 GXZL: 1: 2a. The textbook was evidently highly successful, in its (alleged) fourteenth edition. 31 GXZL: 1: 1a. Again, this is not to deny the fact of periods of political disunity but to stress the normative condition intrinsic to unity and by implication maintained at the cultural level regardless of political disruptions. 32 HZBS: 1a.

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marked the start of the rulership. He was the “rst ancestor of us, the Chinese people” (women de Zhongguoren de touyige zuzong 我們的中國人的 頭一個祖宗). He also created written characters and invented carts and ships. Qian Zhonghan thus concentrated all these markers of civilization in one historical gure. Before the Yellow Emperor there were primitive tribes perhaps with some skills like hunting, re, even agriculture (in other accounts this is made clearer) but not a unied people. After the Yellow Emperor there was, in effect, the Chinese nation. Qian was not alone in attributing both rulership and ancestry to the Yellow Emperor. Ding Baoshu’s 丁寶書 “Elementary Chinese History Textbook” was slightly different in specifying a pre-existing “Han tribe” (hanzu 漢族) that moved into the Yellow River region out of the northwest.33 As its population grew, various separate tribes emerged under local chiefs. This was an age of shing, hunting, planting, medicine, and weaving. There were no supreme rulers ( junzhu 君主). Then, in Ding’s narrative, the Yellow Emperor arose as a conqueror, uniting the tribes under his rule and extending his kingdom to the Yangzi region.34 In this account, too, the Yellow Emperor created Chinese characters, invented carts and boats, and “established the basis for a unied Chinese polity.” In other words, even if “Han” identity of some sort preceded the Yellow Emperor, the Han were but one tribe indistinguishable from many others. Ding’s emphasis on the beginning of rulership was essential for a distinct Han identity. So, too, in Zhao Zhengduo’s 趙鉦鐸 “Upper Primary History Textbook.” Zhao began with the successful spread of the Hua race (huazhong 華種) from out of the West into the upper Yellow River valley and beyond: so that China (Zhongguo 中國) has been called Zhonghua (中華) ever since.35 And for Yao Zuyi, the Yellow Emperor, once his conquest was in place, represented nothing less than the institutionalization of the bureaucratic system and “improving the lives of the people through civil rule.”36 At the same time, the basic story of the evolution of civilization and the organized state could also be told without emphasizing the role of the Yellow Emperor. The “Primary Reader in History” pointed out the unreliability of records pertaining to the “Three August Ones and the Five Emperors” while also noting a series of inventions associated 33 34 35 36

MZLJ: 1a. MZLJ: 1b. GXLK: 1a–b. GXZL: 1:2b–3a.

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with various versions of their names.37 Essentially, this textbook repeated familiar legends. Taihao 太皞 [i.e., Fuxi 伏羲] invented the eight trigrams, hunting nets, ritual sacrices, and marriage; Yandi 炎帝 [Shennong 神農] invented the plow, and taught the people farming, medicine, and markets—while the Yellow Emperor then made tools, currency, boats and carts, clothes, cities, and ordered the creation of written characters and the stem-branch calendrical system, and his empress taught the people to raise silkworms. These inventions, along with houses, re, clothing, and the like distinguished the civilized Huaxia (華夏) from barbarian groups, according to this textbook. The Huaxia’s leaders were termed Sages (sheng 聖). Yet the “Primary Reader” also pointed out that the inventions of civilization did not all come from one man or one sage: they were the product of hundreds of people’s efforts and adapted over generations.38 This latter view came close to turning the anonymous collective Chinese people into the agent of historical progress—or at least prehistorical progress. Civilization took generations to build. The “Primary Reader” also traced the rise of an organized polity to the arrival of the Huaren in what was to become China. Originally from the north, they followed the river eastward and gradually opened up more lands to the south. When faced with native inhabitants (barbarians), they simply expelled them. Gradually, they established cities and eventually a “huge empire” divided into the nine districts ( jiuzhou 九州). Unlike most other textbooks, the “Primary Reader” suggested that not until the reliable records of Yao and Shun could one speak of individuals, but it conveyed a similar sort of state-based political identity. It was also possible to combine the traditional Five Emperors narrative with a new emphasis on the Yellow Emperor. Fu Guangnian’s 富光年 “Simplied History Textbook” posited an evolutionary process from primitive tribes to more complex, higher-level social organization.39 He thus traced an age completely without rulers ( junzhu 君主) to purely local chiefs, and nally to assemblages of tribes—which marked the origins of the emperorship (diwang 帝王). Fu Xi invented writing and

37

XDS: 10a–b. XDS: 10b–11a. The quasi-metaphorical interpretation of the sage-king mythology as a representation of the collective advances in civilization was to become more common in the Republican period, especially after the “doubting antiquity” movement of the 1920s; for textbook treatments, see Culp 2001: 24–26. 39 JLK: 1a. 38

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Shennong medicine, but it was still the Yellow Emperor who militarily defeated his enemies, created a polity—including the well-eld ( jingtian 井田) system—and fathered the entire yellow race. An even stronger position was staked out by Zhao Zhengduo, who dismissed Fuxi and Shennong as mere tribal chiefs, although with the usual inventions to their names.40 But (for Zhao) it was the Yellow Emperor who became a great military leader, expelling the Miao people and creating a real polity through expansion. The Yellow Emperor thus became honored by the people as the rst “Son of Heaven” (tianzi 天子), and he thus became the founder of the imperial system ( junzhu zhengzhi 君主政治).41 Nonetheless, the Yellow Emperor was not the sole focus of “origins” in the version of a collective past expounded in late Qing history textbooks. The Yellow Emperor’s great successors, Yao and Shun, if not the founders of the imperial state, came to dene its ideal essence. The late Qing history textbooks treated Yao and Shun as exemplars of imperial virtue. Qian Zonghan, for example, simply describes Yao as devoted to the people, laboring every day, and establishing the calendar.42 The main themes here were their good deeds, their abdications of the throne, and the ood stories, which explain the rise of a third exemplar of imperial virtue, Yu. Here, then, is a mix of foundation myths concerning the institutions of civilization on the one hand and personal moral attributes on the other. Yao, aging, and learning of Shun’s great reputation for lial piety, rst turned over responsibilities to Shun and then, once Shun had proved himself, formally abdicated the throne. In Qian’s view, Shun’s rule was marked by good administration: not only did he work hard personally but he promoted good ofcials and demoted bad ones. Again, nding his own son inadequate to replace him, he abdicated to the virtuous Yu. Yu—who had quelled the oods after immense and lengthy labor—returns us to the realm of the foundation myths, but, in Qian’s hands, in a rather naturalistic fashion.43 Other textbooks added more detail, but while cautiously warning that the records were sparse, nonetheless mixed the ood themes of origins mythology with more prosaic administrative accomplishments.44 For 40

GXLK: 1b–2a. GXLK: 2b. 42 HZBS: 1b. 43 HZBS: 1b–2a. 44 However, records pertaining to Yao and Shun were seen as more reliable than accounts of earlier leaders; indeed, several textbooks convey a sense that proper records began with Yao. See JLK: 1a. 41

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Ding Baoshu, Yao possessed the “kingly virtue of the great sage.”45 For Zhao Zhengduo, Yao was “humane and virtuous” (rende 仁德), honoring frugality and simplicity.46 Yao and Shun continued the military conquest that made China.47 They also invented the calendar and astronomy.48 These were of course traditional markers of dynastic-founders as well as the building-blocks of civilization. Shun’s virtue was dened more precisely than Yao’s. In effect, Shun needed to prove himself worthy: not only did he take care of his parents but he managed to keep his entire criminally-minded family out of trouble. The cycle of ood myths was of course associated with Yu rather than Shun, but in these historicized accounts, it was Shun who appointed Yu as Minister of Public Works, giving him bureaucratic responsibility for controlling the oods. Yu’s diligence and eventual success then caused Shun to abdicate to Yu. Meanwhile, Shun was also no mean administrator, using ritual to command. He put the lords on a schedule of court visits (preguring the enfeoffment system of fengjian 封建), and he developed a system of rewards and punishments for aristocrats and commoners alike.49 Origin stories seem to hold a peculiar grip on the imaginaries of most, if not all, human societies. Myth or history, they answer the critical question, “where did ‘we’ come from?” The question is critical because its answer at least partly denes identity—who we are—in a logic parallel to the seed somehow containing the tree. The origin stories recounted in late Qing history textbooks in no way differed from versions in the classics and Han period textual redactions. Yet a new political and institutional context gave them new signicance. They now spoke not merely to exible ways of distinguishing “us” from “them” through ethnicity and culture but also to the early growth of a specic “Chinese” nation that—by implication—grew like the tree from the seed into today’s Chinese nation. The late Qing’s unprecedented need for national identity, so to speak, led to the recasting of ancient myths and histories into coherent narratives in which contemporary Chinese could nd themselves, or at least their ancestors. However, Chinese history was obviously more than its origins, and indeed textbook authors had

45 46 47 48 49

MZLJ: 2a. GXLK: 2b. JLK: 1a. XDS: 11b; MZLJ: 2a. XDS: 12a–b.

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to deal with the less-than-ideal dynastic states that in fact formed the heart of the historical record. After origins, textbook authors had to discuss development, albeit possibly the development of stasis.

The Dynastic State: Hereditary Kingship50 King Yu who quelled the oods was of course one of the iconic sageking founders of civilization in Chinese popular memory. Textbook treatments of him reected such mythical elements as his construction of nine rivers to the sea, but differed on the ultimate signicance of his turn to the hereditary kingship. Of Yu’s contributions to the kingship, there was no doubt. Yao Zuyi, for example, emphasized Yu’s casting of the nine bronze tripods (a key mark of rulership), as well as his establishment of a tribute or tax system and his administrative organization of the empire.51 It was the people themselves who wanted Yu’s son to succeed him—in Zhao Zhengduo’s account—thus establishing the hereditary kingship ( junzhu shixi zhi zhi 君主世襲之制) of the dynastic state.52 Other accounts leave the decision to Yu; in any case, the rst family dynasty was established under Yu. Fu Guangnian noted that Yu had already expanded imperial power and reported that people said Yu’s virtue had decreased.53 This was why he was called “king” (wang 王) instead of “emperor” (di 帝). Fu’s was certainly a minority view; according to the “Primary Reader,” for example, Yu’s title as “king” was a mark of special respect continued through the entire “three dynasties” period through the Zhou. Nonetheless, textbook writers hardly presented the principle of hereditary kingship as either natural or moral. If Yu’s son was virtuous, his grandson was immoral and lost the empire.54 True,

50 This section of the chapter reects, I believe, the general view of late Qing textbook authors that King Yu’s establishment of the Xia dynasty was a watershed in Chinese history (roughly comparable to the stress that today’s historians place on the Qin). Nonetheless, it should be noted that late Qing textbook authors generally paid little attention to grand periodization schemes. There were some attempts to use the categories of ancient, medieval, and modern (see Tze-ki Hon in this volume). But elementary and secondary textbooks, at least, effectively based periodization on rulers and dynasties. 51 GXJL: 3b–4a. See also XDS: 13a–b. 52 GXLK: 3b. 53 JLK: 1a–b. 54 XDS: 13b; see also JLK: 1b.

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another heir of Yu was able to restore the Xia, and, in all, the dynasty lasted some 400 years under 17 generations of Xia kings. Yet nally, with seeming inevitability, the utterly evil Jie 桀 came to power, to be overthrown by King Tang 湯, who then established the Shang 商 dynasty. Textbooks thus described the rst dynastic cycle, which was to structure the rest of their historical narratives. As Zhao Zhengduo pointed out, as Yu had been the rst emperor to transmit the throne to his son, so Tang had been the rst to seize the throne by violence.55 However, this did not imply moral culpability on Tang’s part. Jie was immoral and lost all popular support.56 Tang was wise and kind—indeed some textbooks treated him not as a military conqueror at all but as almost passively winning the support of all the lords, who pronounced him Son of Heaven.57 So, too, with the Zhou, and after its prolonged decline, the Qin, quickly passed through, the longer Han (or two Hans), and so forth down to the “present dynasty.” The historical events that textbooks described in some detail must be ignored here for want of space. The larger question is, what was the signicance of the cyclical rise-andfall narrative structure of late Qing textbooks? What did it say about the nation? Nowhere do any of the textbooks I examined offer explicit statements about the nature of the Chinese people (beyond their early development of culture or civilization), the legitimacy of the imperial state, or metahistorical speculation. They offer straight-forward political narratives, focusing on court politics, foreign relations, military events, rebellions, and the like, sprinkled with occasional summaries of developments in scholarship, religion, and the arts. Beyond this kind of historical ‘data’ certain themes do emerge: motifs as it were repeated if not in every dynasty, certainly repeated often enough. Several authors stressed the dangers of court inghting—particularly the threats posed by eunuchs and women.58 The Zhou kings were sometimes discussed in terms of their personal virtue (or lack thereof ), and the Zhou offered the single best image of a Golden Age.59 However, later emperors were 55

GXLK: 3b. GXZL: 2b. 57 HZBS: 2b–3a; XDS: 14a–b. 58 GXLK: 14b–15a; JLK: 5b–6a, 7b. 59 Golden Age thinking is an important variation of the stress placed on origins. Late Qing textbooks all treated the Eastern Zhou as a golden age. A special case is Liu Shipei’s Chinese History Textbook (中國歷史教科書) of 1906 (1997b), which stressed 56

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subject to more purely political analysis. Zhao Zhengduo, for example, did not pass moral judgment on Qin Shihuang 秦始皇 but only political judgment: the burdens he placed on the people contributed to the uprisings that occurred after his death.60 Politically, then, what dened the successful dynastic state? The great models of the Han and the Tang, and to some extent the Yuan and the Ming, featured military strength. Unity at home and, above all, the ability to maintain peace along the frontiers emerged, at least implicitly, in late Qing history textbooks as core political values. The Yuan was not a “Han” Chinese dynasty, of course, but it was a success in military terms, at least for a century.61 That the Yuan unied China after a period of disunity (even if that disunity was caused to a degree by the Mongols themselves) marked its legitimacy. Of course, political considerations would have prevented outright condemnation of the Yuan even in the waning days of the Qing, since the Qing court was long sensitive to criticism of the Yuan. However, if the real glories of the dynastic state were found in the successes of the Han and Tang, putting aside ethnic issues, the Yuan t that mold. In fact, textbooks did note that the Yuan bureaucratic system discriminated against Hanren and that it was unpopular. It survived, after all, only a hundred years, though its own internal rifts explained much of its weaknesses. Yet meanwhile textbook writers gave the Yuan credit not only for its military success but for the results of that success: expansion of the state’s territory and, above all, opening the entire Eurasian continent to ows of communication and trade.62 Indeed, textbooks treated even the collapse of the Yuan not as a matter of Han restoration but in terms of the usual pattern of the dynastic cycle. Emperors were incompetent (this was a special problem for the Yuan since the Yuan lacked an orderly rule of succession); there was corruption and cruelty; and taxes were too high, and so the people became restless.

the quasi-democratic nature of the Western Zhou. I will not further comment on Liu’s textbook here, because, rst, an excellent study of this work is offered by Tze-ki Hon in this volume (see also Yuan Yingguang and Zhong Weiming 1998). And second, although Liu’s textbook and an entire series of related and overlapping writings were published in the inuential Guocui xuebao (國粹學報) and there is no doubt of the power of Liu’s philological-historical analysis well into the Republican period, it is not clear that Liu’s textbook was widely adopted in schools. 60 GXLK: 11b–12a; see also JLK: 4a. 61 JLK: 11a–b. 62 MZLJ: 47a–b; JLK: 11a–b.

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Putting the Yuan aside as a special case, we can see that textbook writers valued the dynastic state when it protected the borders. This was of course a historical theme with contemporary implications. Ding Baoshu was unusual in his willingness to make relatively explicit historical judgments. Ding found faults with Qin Shihuang but noted the emperor unied and expanded the empire, thus protecting the “race” (zhongzu 種族).63 If the early Zhou, for Ding, represented the perfection of government, it was apparently an unrecoverable perfection. However harsh, the centralization put into place by the Qin and continued, if modied, by later dynasties, at least served to keep the barbarians at bay. Indeed, several textbook writers emphasized orthodox Confucian approbation of the “hegmons” (ba 霸) of the late Zhou on the grounds they protected the borders. Similarly, for Ding, Han Wudi’s 武帝 military expansionism created problems for his successors yet he “protected the race and advanced state power” ( yi bao zhongzu yi yang guowei 以保 種族以揚國威) by defeating the dreaded Xiongnu 匈奴.64 Ding also credited Tang Gaozong 高宗 with the “protection of the race and the extension of state power” (wei zhongzu zhang guowei 衛種族張國威) in his discussion of the great but scarcely perfect Tang dynasty.65 In sum, late Qing history textbooks did not explicitly attempt to trace the story of a Chinese “nation” that in some sense transcended the dynastic state. According to much current theory of nationalism, the dynastic state’s centripetal hierarchies represented an entirely different worldview than that required by the modern national imaginary.66 In China’s case, furthermore, the dynastic state was an inherently unstable formation that seems unable to support the essentialism and the continuity assumed in modern nationalism. Yet late Qing textbook writers sought—in accordance with their own desires and ofcial curriculum guidelines—to instill a sense of patriotism. The dynastic state erased neither the quasi-racial nor the cultural-civilization bases of identity established (in the late Qing view) in ancient times. An equation of the land and the people—the land of China being the land rst conquered

63

MZLJ: 10a–b; see also HZBS: 9b. MZLJ: 16a; see also JLK: 4b. 65 MZLJ: 30b. 66 Benedict Anderson (1991) for example, specically cites the dynastic state as a prenationalist form that nationalists must overthrow to create the horizontal ties of nation (19–22). Although Anderson may well be right, this was not the understanding of late Qing reformers, who sought to reconcile the imperial state with nationalist sentiment, indeed creating the latter in some sense on the foundation of the former. 64

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and then expanded by its people—was then further ‘marked’ by the dynastic states that rose and fell on this land. Dynastic identity (“man of Han,” “man of Ming”) was a form of contemporary being-ness that was layered on top of other identities. In the late Qing, the quest to construct national identity found this both a problem—as intellectuals attempted to sort out competing identities—yet also a source of national identity. For the dynastic state willy-nilly shaped the historical consciousness that was central to national identity.

The Manchu-Qing as Contemporary Reality Late Qing intellectuals building Chinese nationalism had to deal with the “foreignness” of the Qing, as is well known.67 Anti-Manchuism had the virtue of simplicity and was vigorously argued by revolutionary republicans. However, it did not represent mainstream view, which was more complicated. Of course, as we have seen above, late Qing history textbooks could hardly preach anti-Manchuism. Authors conated the borders of the empire and the distinct peoples it had come to come up with a multiethnic view of China. This was a state-based view of nationalism that stemmed partly from long-standing Qing ideology, but it was also based on the historical logic of the dynastic cycle. While anti-Manchu revolutionaries mustered historical, racial, and cultural arguments to deny the Qing had ever been legitimate, once its legitimacy was granted, as had long been the case, then modern Chinese nationalism had to incorporate the Qing one way or another. Textbooks thus made no attempts to hide or deny the “foreignness” of the Manchus, but rather, understanding the Qing in terms of the dynastic cycle, assigned it the duty of maintaining China’s territorial integrity. In the case of the equally foreign Yuan, we have seen that textbooks followed orthodox historiography by treating it as a legitimate dynasty. It was even regarded favorably in some respects though certainly criticized (like all dynasties) on various grounds. According to the “Primary Reader in History,” the Mongols were primitive pastoralists, racially related to the Turks, both groups being descended from the Xiongnu.68 Ding Baoshu called the Mongols a race of nomadic

67 68

The literature on this topic is vast; the best recent study is Rhoads 2000. XDS: 5b–6a.

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herders.69 Yet textbook writers do not seem to have seen the Mongol conquest of China, perhaps precisely because it was a military conquest, as fundamentally different from the route to power taken by other dynasties. The Ming was not a “restoration,” in this view, but rather another conquest: in the end a military rising led by the brilliant Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 as the Yuan followed the usual pattern and self-destructed. From this perspective, the historical importance of the Ming lay not in the features of economic growth and cultural ourishing that historians today often emphasize but rather in the pressures it constantly faced and its own weakening that prepared the way for the Qing. (If later Republican historiography treated the Yuan as an alien conquest, the Ming as a restoration, and the Qing as another alien conquest, such was the logic of racial/national identity. But in the Republican period the self-conscious multi-ethnic construction of the “Republic of the Five Races” (wuzu gonghe 五族共和)—and ongoing imperialist threats—continued to limit the uses of ethnonationalism and encourage nationalists to identify with the state.) In late Qing history textbooks, the Qing conquered China militarily like other dynasties. However, the textbooks also made it clear that the Ming had rst self-destructed and the Qing’s military was mostly devoted to mopping up operations against bandits and rumps of the Ming court. For the Ming had long been under military pressures from the northern tribes and eastern pirates.70 (Perhaps textbooks tended to downplay the role of the Manchus in inicting these pressures in the rst place, but they were not ignored.) The Ming, in this view, collapsed in court factionalism and eunuch maneuvering and nally due to the rise of vast bandit armies. Meanwhile, the Great Qing had already taken shape in the Northeast as the Aixinjueluo 愛新覺羅 clan began to conquer and unify neighboring tribes.71 Having moved into Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula, a process that involved struggles with Ming troops, the Great Qing was in effect poised to takeover China by the 1640s. Textbook accounts, however, make it plain that the late Ming emperor hanged himself when “bandits” led by Li Zicheng 李自成 took over Beijing. This was, aside from being technically accurate, part of the pattern of the dynastic cycle. In other words, textbook authors

69 70 71

MZLJ: 44a. MZLJ: 54a–55a; JLK: 13b. GXLK: 13a–b. MZLJ: 54a–55b; JLK: 13a–14a.

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were not here engaged in Qing propaganda, nor did they present the conquest that was soon to come as in any way friendly to the Ming, as had some Qing propaganda of the seventeenth century. Rather, it was precisely a conquest and a restoration of imperial order. The Qing entered the pass with the cooperation of Wu Sangui 吳三桂, destroyed Li Zicheng and moved on to the south. There, they faced Ming remnant opposition, then the rebellions of the Three Feudatories, and Zheng Chenggong’s (鄭成功) resistance in Taiwan. Textbooks treated Kangxi 康熙, Yongzheng 雍正, and Qianlong 乾隆 in the heroic mode. Zhao Zhengduo proclaimed that these emperors not only defeated all opposition, they established superior government, rectifying the Ming’s mistakes.72 By the eighteenth century the treasury was full and the people prosperous. Ding Baoshu emphasized that the Qing conquered new territories, so that power was spread to its maximum and the arts of government ourished.73 The “Primary Reader” accepted racial terms of analysis, but argued that the Manchus had become assimilated. The “Manchu race” (滿洲種) was itself a subgroup of the Donghu (東胡) race, but since entering the territory of the Chinese, their ceremonies and customs had been sinied. Indeed, according to the “Primary Reader,” present-day China beneted from the good points of both Manchus and Han. The groups’ powers might differ, but both stood on the basis of the Classics.74 The text thus admitted the limitations of assimilation, referring to the political supremacy of the Manchus, while still arguing that culture trumped race. And when the text turned to historical discussion proper, it derived the Qing’s legitimacy from the fact of dynastic change—or more specically the “unity” (tongyi Zhongguo 統一中國) imposed by the imperial state.75 This was a unity that had existed cyclically (not unbroken) for thousands of years. Textbooks naturally told the story of the rise of the Qing as a triumphant narrative. Incidents of tragedy and violence—rape and slaughter and exile—found no place in the textbook narratives. Yet what were authors to do with the defeats the Qing had suffered since the 19th century? Should they be played down to shore up the prestige of the

72 73 74 75

GXLK: 13b–14a; see also JLK: 14b–16b. MZLJ: 58b. XDS: 5b. XDS: 7a.

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dynasty? Should they be played up to foster patriotic anger? How could they be explained? Who was at fault? In the case of Ding Baoshu, this material is handled very dryly and succinctly. If there is a ‘rst cause,’ it is Qing domestic disorder: the White Lotus uprising.76 As several authors noted, Qianlong was not at his best in his old age. At the time, British opium imports were increasing, and the court seemed to have little option but to try to prohibit it. In Ding’s account, the Opium War contributed to the Taiping Rebellion; the Qing was also forced to give up Hong Kong and open ports to trade. During the British-French expedition against Beijing during the Taiping Rebellion, the emperor was forced to ee while new peace terms were worked out. This brought Russia onto the scene even as the Qing managed to defeat the Taipings. Ding seems to emphasize the lost suzerainty over the nations of Southeast Asia, Korea, and the Liuqiu Islands as much as direct attacks on China itself, a point of view somewhat distinct from modern nationalist feeling. Ding’s textbook ends abruptly with the loss of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the postwar proliferation of Western leaseholds. Not only was Taiwan ceded to Japan permanently, but soon Russia, France, Germany, and Britain were all carving out pieces of China proper. Ding ends his textbook on this utterly bleak note without further comment. Other authors, while maintaining a sober, objective tone, added more telling detail. Zhao Zhengduo jumped from the glory days of Qianlong to the Opium War, and in addition to China’s territorial losses, recounted each indemnity “extorted” from the Qing: 21 million taels of silver after the First Opium War, 16 million after the Second Opium War, 200 million after the Sino-Japanese War (increased by another 30 million after the Triple Intervention), and no less than 450 million in the wake of the Boxer Uprising.77 In Zhao’s account, there is little hint of domestic trouble before Britain started the rst Opium War and the foreigners began opening China’s ports, taking control of China’s traditional dependencies (Vietnam, Korea), and seizing Chinese territory. There is no doubt of the foreigners’ aggression, though Zhao, like Ding, refrains from moral or even strategic discussions. Why the foreigners behaved the way they did is not Zhao’s concern, though

76 77

MZLJ: 60b–69a. GXLK: 14b–16b.

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he does note that the Japanese had long desired Korea, and students are left in little doubt of the foreigners’ commercial interests—at least their desire to prot from the selling of opium. Moving beyond Ding’s chronology, Zhao discusses the Russo-Japanese War, highlighting China’s neutrality, and concluding that while Manchuria remained ofcially Chinese real power had passed into Japan’s hands.78 Nonetheless, Zhao ends his textbook on an optimistic note. The disaster of the Boxers had inspired Chinese reformers (though he avoids the controversy of the 1898 reforms), and Japan’s defeat of Russia seemed to conrm the effectiveness of constitutional government. China was now preparing for a constitution, which, Zhao promised, boded well for the future.79 Fu Guangnian, too, effectively began the story of Qing decline—not that the term was used—with British opium. He only then turned back to White Lotus Rebellion, which, after all, had been suppressed.80 But by the mid-19th century, both foreign pressures and domestic turmoil were taking their toll. Fu described the setbacks to the Qing in much the same terms as the other authors, though he added a chapter on the 1898 reform movement. Again, without passing judgment, he noted that in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War the emperor had been attracted by Kang Youwei’s 康有為 notions of self-strengthening (自強) and institutional reform (變法). The empress dowager, however, accused the reformers of plotting rebellion and countermanded the reforms. Soon, the Boxer disaster broke out, but in its wake the court turned to the New Policy reforms: a second round of institutional reform.81 Again, this allowed Fu to end his textbook on a note of optimism: with the triumphal abolition of the traditional examination system and the promise of a constitution in the future. On the other hand, Yao Zuyi, whose textbook generally stressed loyalism and the Qing point of view, painted a bleak picture of the 19th century, and ended with the briefest of notes on the promise of the New Policy’s school system to strengthen China.82 In effect, Yao was suggesting that the next generation would be the ones to save China.

78 79 80 81 82

GXLK: 17b. GXLK: 18a. JLK: 17b–18a. JLK: 21b –22a. GXZL: 4:63a.

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peter zarrow Conclusion

How did textbook discussions of the Qing contribute to Chinese identity? Surely frank discussions of the defeats inicted on the country over the last half century conveyed the sense of “national humiliation” that was common parlance at the time.83 The pictures of emperors eeing to Rehe and Xi’an were hardly edifying. The key, if largely hidden, issue was not the Qing’s foreignness but its competence. The nature of the dynastic state gave the Qing all the legitimacy it needed, as logically followed from the narrative structure of post-Yu/Xia and post-Qin historiography. Nor were the Qing’s accomplishments forgotten—the creation of unprecedented territorial claims, population size, and general prosperity. More importantly, for anti-revolutionary reformers, at least, the threat to China—which after all provoked all the ofcial discussion of patriotism—came from the “White race.” No longer did Chinese rulers have to worry about Xiongnu, or Donghu, or Tartars. Today’s struggle set the Yellow Race against the White, as Ding Baoshu, echoing much rhetoric of the period, frankly stated in his preface. Similarly, not only did the “Primary Reader” argue that the Manchus had become assimilated, as we have seen. In addition, several history textbooks pointed out that of the various dynasties with foreign elements (including even the great Tang), all these foreigners had belonged to the Yellow Race. The implicit argument, in terms of debates known to the textbooks writers if not all their young students, was that the various peoples of China needed to unite—through serious governmental reform—to meet the new threat from the West (that is, the White race). Nonetheless, historical narratives that in effect taught a state-based nationalism were a double-edged sword for the Qing. Without the move from dynastic legitimacy to state nationalism, the Qing could not claim the right to rule in a world much concerned with “race” and the supposed naturalness of the “nation-state.” Yet such history also taught that the dynasty’s rst duty was to defend the borders. The Qing had survived much by the rst decade of the 20th century, but in asking its people for “patriotism” it was also promising a new relationship between

83 See also XDS: 3b. For intellectuals’ concerns over the issue, see Cohen 2002. “National humiliation” was ritualized during the Republican period and has been periodically revived since: see Callahan 2006.

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the state and the people. History could not speak to the unprecedented demands of the 20th century; its promise was that although dynasties came and went, the Chinese state endured. The Chinese state might endure, but the state, at least as embodied in any particular government, did not represent the ultimate locus of loyalty. Something even larger was at stake. Ding Baoshu’s preface is unusual among late Qing textbooks for its openly programmatic statement of political goals. Frankly acknowledging that Chinese textbooks writers had borrowed heavily from Japanese sources, he argued that the Chinese people needed to develop their own “historical point of view” (lishi zhi guannian 歷史之觀念). Their failure to do so had resulted in their forgetting the origins of the “ancestral nation” (zuguo 祖國).84 Ding compared the narration of the affairs of the nation to a grandson narrating the meritorious deeds of his father and grandfather to encourage clan solidarity. This theme of ancestral remembrance, then, was meant to mark a history that was based on two kinds of time. On the one hand, Ding emphasized the cyclical movement between unity and disunity: this allowed him to bring out the current threat facing China from invading Europeans. At the same time, history narrates the evolutionary phenomena of the past and foreshadows future evolution, according to Ding. His ultimate goal, then, was to further advance culture and improve society. He proposed to trace the changes in dynastic rule and territorial conquests in these terms, while noting the inuences on China from other parts of the world and providing students with moral exemplars. Although, as we have seen, Ding drew parallels from the past struggles between Han and non-Han to the contemporary struggle between the Yellow and White races, and although the purpose of his history was frankly to protect the race and promote national power, Ding’s vision of the world was not of zero-sum competition but was actually quite benign. He strongly favored opening China up to outside inuences. His reading of history further suggested to him that when national civilizations were roughly equal in strength, they could not oppress one another. As they maintain contacts and some degree of competition with one another, furthermore, they both progress. Facing European imperialism from a position of weakness, then, China must now absorb European civilization precisely in order to resist its imperialist side.

84

MZLJ: 1a.

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Chinese children must learn to keep the country open and struggle economically. Youth needed to be taught practical business skills to make the country strong and wealthy.85 Ding’s views were typical of the reform generation, and, I think, more or less representative of other history textbook writers in the late Qing.86 History texts narrativized the nation through its roots and development up to the present-day. Textbook authors deliberately recruited history to the nation-building cause, even if not as consistently as they would during the Republican period.87 Yet if the new educational system heeded the calls of Liang Qichao and others for a greater emphasis on contemporary issues, history classes still emphasized the deeds of individuals: emperors, their ministers, generals, and a few thinkers, beginning with Confucius. What did it mean to claim that “China” was a historical subject? Where was the collectivity? Who were the muchvaunted Chinese people? Whether “Zhongguoren” or “guomin,” the people generally appeared only in crowd scenes, passive recipients of history, not its makers. And where was “progress” in these textbook accounts of various dynasties? Arguably, separate sections on thought and culture that were featured to a greater or lesser extent in most textbooks revealed a story of cumulative gain of some kind, though this was not made explicit.88 But in any case the narrative template of dynastic rise and fall left little room for the evolution of the nation. Interestingly, Ding’s stated goals differed from the Qing government’s emphasis on loyalty, though, at least ostensibly, they shared a concern with fostering “patriotism.” Even Ding, however, not only failed to challenge the Qing’s legitimacy but sought to shore it up. Yet, at the same time, history textbooks, even Yao Zuyi’s, strongly implied the Qing had to earn the loyalty of the people by better protecting the nation. Nonetheless, most textbook writers tried to be hopeful. Indeed, to write a history textbook was to proclaim one’s faith in history’s worth and in the project of educating the citizens of China’s future. The Ministry of Education sought to conate the Qing with China, loyalism with patriotism, and patriotism with history. History textbooks taught

85

MZLJ: 2a–b. Ding (1866–1935) was an educator and in 1902 co-founded the Wenming Publishing Co. (文明書局). I have been able to nd nothing more about his life. 87 Tanaka 2005. And as Robert Culp demonstrates in this volume, Western and Japanese history were, in part, utilized to provide models for Chinese nation-building efforts. 88 Some textbooks also discussed popular customs and beliefs: see XDS: 54a–61a. 86

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a slightly though signicantly different lesson: national identity was inseparable from the state, but the Chinese state could not be reduced to the Qing.

References Cited I

Textbooks

GXLK. Zhao Zhengduo 趙鉦鐸, Gaodeng xiaoxue lishi keben 高等小學歷史課本 (Upper Primary History Textbook, 3 vols.). N.p.: Zhongguo tushu gongsi, 1907–10. GXZL. Yao Zuyi 姚祖義, Zuixin gaodeng xiaoxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新高等小學 中國歷史教科書 (Upper Primary Chinese History Textbook). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1904. HZBS. Qian Zhonghan 錢宗翰, Huitu Zhongguo baihua shi 繪圖中國白話史 (Illustrated Vernacular History of China). N.p., 1906. JLK. Fu Guangnian 富光年, Jianyi lishi keben 簡易歷史課本 (Simplied History Textbook). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1906. MZLJ. Ding Baoshu 丁寶書, Mengxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 蒙學中國歷史教科書 (Elementary Chinese History Textbook). Shanghai: Wenming shuju, n.d. XDS. (Anon.), Xiaoxue duben shi 小學讀本史 (Primary Reader in History). N.p., n.d., in possession of the Shanghai Library (古籍文獻庫). II

Other Works Cited

Abe, Hiroshi (1987), “Borrowing from Japan: China’s First Modern Educational System,” in Ruth Hayhoe and Marianne Bastid, eds., China’s Education and the Industrialized World. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 57–80. Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bastid, Marianne (1987), “Servitude or Liberation: The Introduction of Foreign Educational Practices and Systems to China from 1840 to the Present,” in Ruth Hayhoe and Marianne Bastid, (eds.) (1987), China’s Education and the Industrialized World. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 3–20. Borthwick, Sally (1983), Education and Social Change in China: The Beginnings of the Modern Era. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Callahan, William A. (2006), “History, Identity, and Security: Producing and Consuming Nationalism in China,” in Critical Asian Studies, 38 (2006) 2, 179–208. Cheng Meibao [May-bo Ching] 程美寶 (2003), “You aixiang er aiguo: Qingmo Guangdong xiangtu jiaocai de guojia huayu” 由愛鄉而愛國：清末廣東省鄉土教 材的國家話語 (To love my native-place, to love my country: The national discourse in Guangdong native-place textbooks during the late Qing), in Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 2003 no. 4, 68–84. Cheng Meibao 程美寶 (2006), Diyu wenhua yu guojia rentong: Wan-Qing yilai Guangdong wenhuaguan de xingcheng 地域文化與國家認同：晚清以來廣東文化觀的形成 (Local culture and national identity: the formation of Cantonese cultural views since the late Qing). Beijing: Sanlian. Cohen, Paul A. (2002), “Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China,” in Twentieth-Century China 27 (April, 2002) 2, 1–39. Culp, Robert (2001), “ ‘China—The Land and Its People’: Fashioning Identity in Secondary School History Textbooks, 1911–37,” in Twentieth-Century China, 26 (April, 2001) 2, 17–62.

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Curran, Thomas D. (2005), Educational Reform in Republican China: The Failure of Educators to Create a Modern Nation. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Duara, Prasenjit (1995), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. FitzGerald, Frances (1980), America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books. Garagozov, R.R. (2002), “Collective Memory and the Russian ‘Schematic Narrative Template’,” in Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 40 (September-October 2002) 5, 55–89. Guan Xiaohong 關曉紅 (2000), Wan-Qing xuebu yanjiu 晚清學部研究 (Research on the late Qing Ministry of Education). Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe. Hayhoe, Ruth (1992), “Cultural Tradition and Educational Modernization: Lessons from the Republican Era,” in Ruth Hayhoe, (ed.) (1992), Education and Modernization: The Chinese Experience. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Hein, Laura, and Mark Selden (eds.) (2000), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Hu Fengxiang 胡逢祥 and Zhang Wenjian 張文建 (1991), Zhongguo jindai shixue sixiang yu liupai 中國近代史學思想與流派 (The ideas and schools of modern Chinese historiography). Shanghai: Huadong Shifan daxue chubanshe. Huang Jinxing 黃進興 (1997), “Zhongguo jindai shixue de shuangchong weiji: shilun ‘xinshixue’ de dansheng ji qisuo mianlin de kunjing” 中國近代史學的雙重危機: 試論「新史學」的誕生及其所面臨的困境 (The dual crises of Chinese modern historiography: A preliminary discussion on the birth of ‘new history’ and its predicament), in Journal of Chinese Studies (Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6, 263–285. Judge, Joan (2000), “Meng Mu Meets the Modern: Female Exemplars in Early Twentieth-Century Textbooks for Girls and Women,” in Jindai Zhongguo funüshi yanjiu 近代中國婦女史研究 8, 129–177. —— (2001), trans. Sun Huimin 孫慧敏, “Gaizao guojia—wan Qing de jiaokeshu yu guomin duben” 改造國家—晚清的教科書與國民讀本 (Transforming the nation: late Qing textbooks and citizen readers), Xin Shixue 新史學 12 ( June, 2001), 1–40. Li Guojun 李國鈞 and Wang Bingzhao 王炳照 (eds.) (2000), vols. 6–7, Zhongguo jiaoyu zhidu tongshi 中國教育制度通史 (General history of the Chinese education system). Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe. Li Xiaoqian 李孝遷 (2003), “Qingji Zhinashi, dongyangshi jiaokeshu jieyi chutan” (A preliminary discussion of textbooks on Chinese and Asian history during the Qing), Shixue yuekan 9, 101–110. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1996 [1902]), “Xin shixue” 新史學 (New history), Yinbingshi heji 飲冰室合集 (Collected essays from the Ice-drinker’s studio). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, wenji 文集 9, 1–32. Liu Longxin 劉龍心 (2002), Xueshu yu zhidu: xueke tizhi yu xiandai Zhongguo shixue de jianli 學術與制度：學科體制與現代中國史學的建立 (Scholarship and institutions: academic disciplines and the establishment of modern Chinese history). Taibei: Yuanliu. Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1997a [1904]), “Rangshu” 攘書 (Book of Expulsion), in Liu Shipei quanji 劉師培全集 (The complete works of Liu Shipei). Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, vol. 2, 1–17. —— 劉師培 (1997b [1906]) Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 中國歷史教科書 (Chinese History Textbook), in Liu Shipei quanji 劉師培全集 (The complete works of Liu Shipei). Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, vol. 4, 275–370. Luo Zhitian 羅志田 (2002), “Baorong ruxue, zhuzi yu Huangdi de guoxue: Qingji shiren xunqiu minzu rentong xiangzheng de nuli” 包容儒學、諸子與黃帝的國學: 清季士人尋求民族認同象徵的努力 (The national learning of Confucianism, the various schools, and the Yellow Emperor: Chinese intellectuals’ search for a symbol of national identity in the Qing), Taida lishi xuebao 29 ( June), 87–105.

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—— 羅志田 (ed.) (2001), 20 shiji de Zhongguo: xueshu yu shehui—shixuejuan 20 世紀的中國: 學術與社會─史學卷 (20th century China: scholarship and society—history volume). Jinan: Shantong renmin chubanshe. Mao Lirei 毛禮銳 and Shen Guanqun 沈灌群 (eds.) (1988), Zhongguo jiaoyu tongshi 中 國教育通史 (General history of Chinese education), vol. 4. Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe. Qu Xingui 璩鑫圭 and Tang Liangyan 唐良炎 (eds.) (1991), Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi ziliao huibian: xuezhi yanbian 中國近代教育史資料彙編：學制演變 (Collected historical documents on modern Chinese education: the development of the school system). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. Rhoads, Edward J.M. (2000), Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館 (1909), “Seventh category” 第七類目錄, in Da Qing xin faling 大清新法令 (New ofcial regulations). Beijing: Shangwu. Shen Songqiao 沈松僑 (1997), “Wo yi woxie jian Xuanyuan: Huangdi shenhua yu wan Qing de guozu jiangou” 我以我血建軒轅—黃帝神話與晚清的國族建構 (I sacrice to Huangdi with my blood: Huangdi myth and the construction of nationhood in the late Qing), in Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 28 (December), 1–77. Shu Xincheng 舒新城 (ed.) (1932), Jindai Zhongguo jiaoyu sixiangshi 近代中國教育思 想史 (The history of modern Chinese educational thought). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian). Tanaka Hiroshi 田中比呂志 (2005), “Tsukurareru dentÔ: Shinmatsu minsho no kokumin keisei to rekishi kyÔkasho” 創られる伝統：清末民初の国民行形成と歷史教科書 (Invented tradition: The formation of the nation and history textbooks in the late Qing and early Republic), Rekishi hyÔron no. 659 (March), 42–56. Tang, Xiaobing (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press. VanderVen, Elizabeth (2005), “Village-State Cooperation: Modern Community Schools and Their Funding, Haicheng County, Fengtian, 1905–1931,” in Modern China 31 (April, 2005) 2, 204–235. Wang, Q. Edward (2001), Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wang Fansen 王汎森 (1987), Gushibian yundong de xingqi: yige sixiangshi de fenxi 古史辨 運動的興起：一個思想史的分析 (The origins of the antiquity debate movement: an intellectual history analaysis). Taibei: Yunchen wenhua gongsi. —— 王汎森 (2003), “Wan-Qing de zhengzhi gainian yu ‘xin shixue’ ” 晚清的政治概念與 ª新史學 ¼ (Late Qing political concepts and the “new history”), in Zhongguo jindai sixiang yu xueshu de xipu 中國近代思想與學術的系譜 (Modern Chinese thought and genealogies of scholarship in modern China). Taibei: Lianjing, 195–220. Wang Jianjun 王建軍 (1996), Zhongguo jindai jiaokeshu fazhan yanjiu 中國近代教科書發 展研究 (Studies on the development of modern Chinese textbooks). Guangdong: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe. Wertsch, James V. (2002), Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Xiong Xianjun 熊賢君 (1998), Qianqiu jiye: Zhongguo jindai yiwu jiaoyu yanjiu 千秋基業; 中國近代義務教育研究 (A foundation for centuries: studies of modern compulsory education in China). Wuchang: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe. Xu Guansan 許冠三 (1989), Xinshixue jiushinian: 1900 —新史學九十年：一九００— (Ninety years of the new history: 1900 –). Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe. Yuan Yingguang 袁英光 and Zhong Weimin 仲偉民 (1998), “Liu Xhipei yu Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu yanjiu” 劉師培與《中國歷史教科書》研究 (Notes on Liu Shipei and the Chinese History Textbook), in Huadong shifan daxue xueban (zhexue shehui kexueban) no. 4, 67–75. Zarrow, Peter (2003), “Old Myth into New History: The Building Blocks of Liang Qichao’s ‘New History’,” in Historiography East & West, 1.2 (2003), 204–241.

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Zhang Kaizhi 張豈之, ed., (1996), Zhongguo jindaishixue xueshushi 中國近代史學學術史 (The history of modern Chinese historiography). Beijing: Zhongguo Shehuikexue chubanshe. Zhang Renfeng 張人鳳 (1997), “Shangwu ‘zuixin jiaokeshu’ de bianzuan jingguo he tedian” 商務《最新教科書》的編纂經過和特點 (How the “new textbooks” series of the Commercial Press were compiled), Bianji xuekan 編輯學刊 no. 3 (www.cp.com. cn/ht/newsdetail.cfm?iCntNo=601, accessed 4 September 2005). Zhao, Gang (2006), “Reinventing China: Imperial Qing Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the Early Twentieth Century,” Modern China vol. 32, no. 1 ( January), 3–30. Zheng Zhishu 鄭之書 (1991), “Qingmo minchu de lishi jiaoyu” 清末民初的歷史教育 (History teaching in the late Qing and early Republic), Masters’ Thesis, Taiwan Normal University (國立台灣師範大學歷史研究碩士論文). Zinda, Yvonne Schulz (2004), “Propagating New ‘Virtues’—‘Patriotism’ in Late Qing Textbooks for the Moral Education of Primary Students,” in Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China. Leiden: Brill, 685–710. Zou Zhenhuan 鄒振環 (2001), “Shilun wan Qing jindai dilixue jiaokeshu de bianzuan” 試論晚清近代地理學教科書的編纂 (A preliminary analysis of the compilation of modern geography textbooks in the late Qing), in Shanghai tushuguan lishi wenxian yanjiusuo 上海圖書館歷史文獻研究所, ed,. Lishi yu wenxian 歷史與文獻 (History and documents), vol. 5. Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 273–308.

CLASSIFYING PEOPLES: ETHNIC POLITICS IN LATE QING NATIVE-PLACE TEXTBOOKS AND GAZETTEERS May-bo Ching

In the rst decade of the 20th century, the Qing government announced a series of school regulations as part of its reform program. Supplementary to this nationalistic education reform agenda was the promotion of native-place (xiangtu 鄉土) education at the primary school level. The Qing government believed that through learning “from near to distant,” students would be able to see the connections between their own native-place and the nation, and their patriotic sentiments would be cultivated as a result. Consequently, a considerable number of native-place textbooks (xiangtu jiaokeshu 鄉土教科書) and native-place gazetteers (xiangtuzhi 鄉土志) were published in a number of provinces from 1904 to 1911. However, because native-place textbooks and gazetteers were in most cases compiled by local literati, their consideration of their own local interest was often articulated side by side with their expression of patriotism. In some cases, traces of conicts of interest articulated by different dialect groups within the same province can be detected. In late Qing Guangdong, Cantonese-Hakka conicts became intensied as a result of the rise of ethnic consciousness among the Hakka literati. Focusing on the Cantonese-Hakka conicts manifested in the native-place textbooks and other relevant literature published in late Qing, this paper examines how ethnic politics was expressed and manipulated in textbooks compiled and applied in a local context.

Native-place Education in the Late Qing Elsewhere I have discussed the implementation of native-place education in the late Qing by analyzing a number of native-place textbooks and gazetteers compiled in Guangdong Province.1 In this paper I will only give a brief account of the subject before looking into the focal issue,

1

See Cheng 2003.

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namely, ethnic politics expressed in textbooks. The idea of native-place education was ofcially introduced for the rst time in the “Approved Junior Primary School Regulations” pronounced by the Qing government in 1904. According to the regulations, elements of native-place education should be attached to the history, geography, and science curriculum. The signicance of native-place education, however, has to be appreciated against the wider background of national education. It is clearly stated in the regulations that the ve-year junior primary education was intended “to enlighten the students to learn what they should learn; to establish the foundation for their understanding of proper human relationships, and for promoting their love for the nation.”2 Native-place education was therefore a means to an end. According to the 1904 regulations, the essence of history education was to let students know “the important issues and virtuous conducts of various sage emperors” in order to nurture their spirit of nationalism and loyalty. Teachers should start with “native-place history” by telling students the history of local celebrities so as “to strengthen their will.” Likewise, the teaching of geography should also be started with geographical knowledge of the vicinity. Maps of the county, province, nation (the Qing empire), Eastern and Western hemispheres, and the ve continents should be posted on the wall so that students could understand the world “from near to distant” ( you jin er yuan 由近而遠). The same principle should also be applied to the teaching of science. Before studying the animals, plants, and minerals in the wild, students should be instructed to become familiar with the appliances used in their classrooms and schools and the animals, plants, and minerals seen in their backyards.3 In every respect, learning “from near to distant” parallels the attempt to link the notion of loving one’s native place with that of loving one’s nation. Students were expected to see the connections between their own native place, counties, provinces, and the nation as a whole. In view of the new ofcial policies, local literati acted quickly to respond to the possible demand. Extant collections show that considerable numbers of native-place textbooks and native-place gazetteers (as

2 Quoted from Qu and Tang 1991: 291. According to the 1904 school regulations, children were expected to attend junior primary school at the age of seven and study there for ve years. Afterwards, they could attend senior primary schools, education that lasted for four years. 3 Qu and Tang 1991: 295–296.

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supplementary and preparatory materials to textbooks) were compiled from 1904 to 1911. The background of the compilers varied from established degree holders active at the county or provincial levels, members of Guoxue baocun hui 國學保存會 (Society for Preserving National Learning) who were stationed at Shanghai to advance their latent anti-Manchu agenda, to radical local literary men who later joined the revolutionary Tongmenghui 同盟會 (Society of the United Alliance). Their political orientation might be different, but with the exception of the members of Guoxue baocun hui, all other compilers were local leaders who were deeply involved in provincial and county politics and education matters. They were signicant gatekeepers in disseminating and interpreting the political and social ideas promoted by the government and individual intellectuals at the national level. In spite of the requirements made in the regulations, no clear instructions concerning the compilation of native-place textbooks were given. The only available ofcial document concerning the compilation of native-place textbooks is a guideline on the compilation of native-place gazetteers issued by the minister of education in 1905. According to this guideline, local literati were encouraged to compile native-place gazetteers before native-place education was put into practice.4 It is unclear whether the guideline was also applied to the compilation of native-place textbooks. What is certain is that native-place gazetteers were regarded as part of the native-place education teaching materials and, to some extent, the preparatory materials for compiling nativeplace textbooks. According to the guideline, the table of contents of a native-place gazetteer should include the followings: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

History (lishi 歷史) Government’s accomplishment (zhengji 政績) Military affairs (bingshi 兵事) Biographies of the Elderly (qijiu 耆舊) Humans / Race (renlei 人類) Households (hukou 戶口) Surnames and lineages (shizu 氏族)

4 “Xuewu dachen zou ju bianshuju jiandu biancheng xiangtuzhi limu ni tongchi bianji pian,” 217–218. According to Wang Xingliang 王興亮 and Zhao Zongqiang 趙宗強 the guideline was drawn by Huang Shaoji 黃紹箕 the superintendent of the Imperial Compilation Bureau. See Wang Xingliang and Zhao Zongqiang 2005. Regarding Qing’s government policy of examining and approving the use of textbooks, see Wang Jianjun 1996.

58 8. 9. 10. 11.

may-bo ching Religions (zongjiao 宗教) Occupations (shiye 實業) Geography (dili 地理) Local produce (wuchan 物產)

At rst glance, the overall structure of a native-place gazetteer would not have been signicantly different from a traditional gazetteer, albeit such new categories as “renlei” (humans / race), “zongjiao” (religion), and “shiye” (occupations) were proposed.5 Yet local literati who felt involved in the late Qing reform movement did perceive native-place gazetteers as a novelty, and it was exactly in the chapters dealing with these new categories that local literati made an effort to rephrase their description of their native place in order to t it into the national agenda.

From Near to Distant: Local Pride and National Interest The primary task of the native-place gazetteer and textbook compilers was to create a chain that connected their localities with the nation. Above all, one had to ask what constituted a “xiangtu.” The answer given by the guideline is that a “xiangtu consists of four categories, namely, the self-governing region of the prefecture ( fu zizhi zhi di 府自治之地), the self-governing region of the subprefecture (zhili zhou zizhi zhi di 直隸州 自治之地), the department (zhou 州), and the county (xian 縣).” Translating the Chinese term “zizhi zhi di” as “self-governing region” does not reect what was being practiced in reality. But the rhetoric echoed the local activism motivated by the government. At any rate, the denition of “xiangtu” as it appeared in the guideline is not clearly differentiated from the administrative hierarchy outlined in traditional Chinese gazetteers: all localities were dened and perceived from the sovereign’s point of view in administrative terms, and were signicant only because they were part of the Chinese territory. Within such a framework, it seems that compilers still found it feasible to relate “xiangtu” to the unclear and yet novel idea of “guojia” 國家, and thus “yimin” 邑民 (native residents) to “guomin” 國民 (national). The Shouban Chaozhou xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 首版潮州鄉土地理教科書 (Chaozhou Native-Place Geography Textbook, rst edition, 1909) relates 5

“Xuewu dachen zou ju bianshuju,” 218–223.

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people’s love for their native place with their love for their nation in the following way: The teaching of geography is highly relevant to the cultivation of patriotism. The foundation of people’s love for their nation was their love for their native place. Thus the teaching of native-place geography is pressing. It is especially true in the case of teaching the native-place geography of Chaozhou. Since the beginning of maritime trade, foreign powers have considered China their theater for competition. Previously, the gateways of eastern and western parts of China were blocked. With the improvement in transport, more and more of our senior and junior male members went to Southeast Asia to do business. The total number of these people is uncountable. Subsequently, foreigners used a number of tricks to appeal to and try to assimilate [the Chinese]. However, [the Chinese] were as sturdy as stone pillars, and were not moved at all. This is because they love their nation. They live such a happy life there, and transport is so convenient, why are they not [induced by foreigners]? How is their affection for their nation roused? This is because our schools are founded everywhere. Our senior male members said, “It is appropriate and correct to teach our junior members with native-place gazetteers.”6

Education, in particular native-place education, is therefore crucial to the cultivation of patriotism among overseas Chinese. In terms of teaching techniques, children were expected to be instructed with something “near” ( jin 近) before being taught anything distant ( yuan 遠). In other words, native-place education had to start with something that children found familiar. The compiler of Xuebu shending Jiaying xinti xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 學部審定嘉應新體鄉土地理教科書 (New Style Jiaying Nativeplace Geography Textbook, approved by the Ministry of Education) wrote in the style of traveling journals and introduced to students some local geographical knowledge that he found essential: Chapter One: Jiaying is situated in the eastern part of Guangdong. We love our native place, and we should travel around there. Now I will make an appointment with the students. We will tour Jiaying Department. We will start by walking in the city and then go to the thirty-six villages. Chapter Two: Waking up in the morning, we walk around the city. For civil affairs, there is the Ofce of the Department Magistrate, which oversees the administration of the whole of the department. There is the Ofce of the Chief of Police, which bears the responsibility of maintaining public security. There is the Ofce of the Instructor, which supervises

6

Cai Huize 蔡惠澤, “Preface”, in Weng and Huang 1909.

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may-bo ching the schools of the department. For military affairs, there are the Ofces of the Brigade Commander and Garrison Commandant, both of which take up defense assignments.7

Likewise, the teaching of natural science in a “local” sense meant the teaching of local produce, which is, again, related to the promotion of patriotism. For a short while after the introduction of the new education system, Japanese textbooks were translated into Chinese and used in Chinese classrooms. The result was, as pointed out by some critics, that Chinese students became familiar with Japanese plant specimens, but knew nothing about the variety of plants grown in their own neighborhood.8 The 1909 edition of Xuexian shending Chaozhou Xiangtu Jiaokeshu 學憲審定潮州鄉土教科書 (Chaozhou Native-place Textbook, authorized by the Ministry of Education), therefore, emphasizes that “the animals, plants, and minerals entered in this book are those seen by children in their daily lives. Therefore, no illustrations are needed, as children know exactly what they are like.”9 For example, in one chapter of the book, the mustard plant, a plant indigenous to Chaozhou, is introduced in the following way: Mustard plant: Its smell is strong. Its vernacular name is “big vegetable.” It becomes tastier after a period of frost. Commoners’ families have it salted and called it “salty vegetable,” which is frequently consumed by Chaozhou people.10

Yet scientic knowledge was more than scientic, and the importance of local produce went beyond a locality. In traditional gazetteers, local produce was entered because it was supposedly the tribute presented by a locality to the state. In the late Qing native-place textbooks, affection for one’s local produce was connected with the nationalistic discourse by applying the modern concept of “economic rights” (liquan 利權). Pride in local produce went hand in hand with anxiety caused by the inux of foreign goods. In this regard, the following comments in Zuixin Chenghai Xiangtu Gezhi Jiaokeshu 最新澄海鄉土格致教科書 (Chenghai Native-place Science Textbook, the latest edition) are telling: Sugar: Sugar cane is planted in the yard and contains much sugar. . . . Most of our exported sugar is red sugar, which is transported to Tianjin 天津

7

Xiao and Yang n.d.: chapters 1 and 2. Lin 1909. Lin’s book was prefaced by Cui Bingyan 崔炳炎. Cui was the magistrate of Chaoyang County. 9 Lin 1909: “Editorial Notes”. 10 Lin 1909: chapter 21. 8

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and Yingkou 營口 for sale. Many of our natives make fortunes out of the sugar business. At present, more and more foreign sugar is being imported, and is seizing the market of local sugar. If we do not nd ways to reverse this trend, our sugar industry will decline.11

Further elaboration of such a theme can be found in other native-place textbooks and gazetteers. The compilers appreciated the fashionable ideas of “enlightenment” (wenming 文明), reform ( gailiang 改良), progress ( jinbu 進步), military spirit (shangwu jingshen 尚武精神), economic rights (liquan 利權), and the survival of the ttest ( yousheng liebai 優勝劣敗); and regarded all these as the necessary conditions for strengthening the nation and reinforcing the notion of “being loyal to the sovereign and showing gratitude to the nation” (zhongjun baoguo 忠君報國). The Renhua xiangtuzhi 仁化鄉土志 (Renhua Native-place Gazetteer) claims that “once children are instructed with knowledge about their localities, they will realize how prosperous their native places used to be, and how much they have declined.” “Their cranial nerves will thus be stimulated, and they will become more concerned with their homeland, more absorbed by the idea of reform and progress, and more occupied by the belief in the survival of the ttest.”12 Similar ideas are expressed in the Shixing xian xiangtuzhi 始興縣鄉土志 (Shixing Native-place Gazetteer): [It is crucial to] make students familiar with [native-place knowledge] from their childhood, so that they will not leave their native village thoughtlessly. They will also know that not an inch of Chinese territory can be given to others. Their military spirit will be nurtured in advance. They will be able to stand up to the world that is full of competition. This is how our race can be preserved (baozhong 保種). Our local fauna, ora, and minerals might not have much unique commercial value, but if we can make some modications and progress, we will be able to win in the commercial war. Our economic rights can be rescued, our national income will increase, and our economic losses will be compensated. All these are urgent and related to the development of our nation. Sources [of commercial value] should be explored as quickly as possible.13

Understandably, the commerce and industrial prospects portrayed in the native-place gazetteer and textbooks are, in most cases, merely imaginary. Once again, the compilers had to reconstitute the old categories to t the new picture. The four categories of people, or four

11 12 13

Cai Pengyun n.d.: vol. 4, chapter 17. Renhua xiangtuzhi n.d., “Xuyan” (Preface). Zhang 1907: “Xu” (Preface).

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occupations (scholars, farmers, artisans, traders), were therefore assigned new missions: There are many kinds of artisans in our locality. Most of them work as carpenters, builders, and tailors. . . . At present, [the local people] remain unenlightened. Wandering around, most local people lack expertise. If we do not establish technical plants as soon as possible, our economic rights will be damaged and our people will have nothing to count on. The total number of artisans working in the seventy-two occupations amounts to no more than 3,220. Nonetheless, there is no celebrated expert at all. In an era of commercial war, commerce is the only means to develop a nation. Similarly, only by developing distinctive commercial activities can long-term development be sustained. There is no commercial school in our community. Our people know nothing about currency, remittance, banking, and bookkeeping. . . . If our people continue to abide by old practices and do not pursue commercial studies, I am afraid that our industry will never make any progress, and our commerce will never be competitive enough. Our locality will become more and more impoverished, and will not be able to stand up to the world of struggle.14

To the compilers, opening up China to the world could be both threatening and benecial. The appearance of modern infrastructures in Shantou 汕頭 (Swatow), which had been a treaty port since 1860, was noted positively in Zuixin Chenghai xiangtu gezhi jiaokeshu: To the south of Shantou is Jiaoshi 角石, at which the British Consulate is located. The German Consulate is located at the eastern end of Shantou. . . . In the treaty port, charity halls are constructed, commercial associations are founded, hospitals are established, and electric lights are laid. A water supply company will be set up soon.15

Such chapter titles as “Railways,” “Electricity lines,” and “Postal service” acknowledge the idea of modernity in its own right. The modernity discourse was an extension of the notion of self-strengthening, which was in turn a continuation of Wei Yuan’s famous statement of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to control the barbarians.” To the Chinese literati, the presence of foreign powers posed a threat to the economic rights of China, but the material development made by foreign powers also served as a symbol of advance and progress.

14 15

Zhang 1907: “Shiye” (Occupations), 39. Cai Pengyun n.d.: vol. 2, chapter 16.

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In the native-place gazetteers and textbooks, both foreign imports and local products (as long as they had undergone a process of improvement and modernization) served as symbols of modernity. The logic of this argument is that, with proper development of foreign trade and local produce, a locality would be able to contribute to the development of the nation as a whole.

National Unity and Ethnic Division To the late Qing local literati, the strengthening of the nation depended not only on material constructions, but also on a redenition of the concept of “min” 民 (subjects of the emperor), or in other words, the transformation of the concept of “min” into that of “guomin” 國民 (nationals/citizens). In view of the rhetorical change in the sovereignsubject relationship, some native-place textbook compilers found it necessary to rephrase their local identity. The compiler of Xinning xiangtu dili 新寧鄉土地理 (Xinning Native-place Geography Textbook) connected the various layers of identities in the following manner: Where does the idea of native-place geography originate? Everyone understands the various expressions of people (min), namely, “nationals” ( guomin), “villagers” (xiangmin 鄉民), and “natives” (turen 土人). The idea of people should be substantiated by the idea of native place and nation. A national should not forget his or her nation; a villager should not forget his or her village, and a native should not forget his or her native place.16

It is noteworthy that in contrast to local literati, national opinion leaders, such as Liang Qichao 梁啟超, dismissed local identities and found them a barrier to the construction of national identities. Liang himself had undergone some changes in this regard. Back in 1899, when he published an article entitled “The Future of the Chinese Race,” Liang asserted that the “self-governing” tradition of lineages and villages in China was the foundation for making Chinese the “most powerful race” in the world. However, in many of his articles published after 1902, Liang considered village and lineage organizations unfavorable to the development of a Chinese nation. In his well-known “On New Citizens” (Xinminshuo 新民說), Liang said that the Chinese people regarded their nation as somewhere “under the heavens” (tianxia 天下). 16

Lei Zepu n.d.: “Zixu” 自敍 (Preface).

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All the teachings that the Chinese received made them “qualied to be an individual; qualied to be a family member; qualied to be a member of a village or a lineage; qualied to be a member of tianxia, but not qualied to be the member of a nation.”17 Liang Qichao might be inuential at a national level, but local literati were content to present their own denition of min according to their own interpretation, whether it meant “national” or “subject.” Conforming to the Guidelines for Compiling Native-Place Gazetteers, compilers’ major concern was to decide who within a locality could be counted as “qimin” 齊民, i.e., “subjects who were brought under the rule of the sovereign.” According to the guidelines, whether a person can be counted as “qimin” depends on whether he or she satises three criteria: (1) In religious terms (zongjiao), one should not be converted to “other religions,” such as Christianity and Islam; (2) In occupational terms (shiye), one should be engaged in one of the four traditional occupations, i.e., scholars, farmers, artisans, or traders; (3) In racial terms (renlei ), one will be categorized as “other species” (tazhong) if one was neither Han Chinese nor Manchu.18 The introduction of the idea of race into China in the late 19th century complicated the denition of Chinese idea of qimin. Like many other Western concepts, the concept of “race” was transplanted from Japan and translated into Chinese as “renlei” or “zhongzu.”19 To most Chinese intellectuals, racial discourse was relevant because proof of the racial strength of Chinese implied that China was able to cope with Western challenges. To revolutionaries, racial discourse was meaningful, as they needed evidence to argue that only the Han Chinese, the descendant of the Yellow Emperor (and thus the “yellow race”), was legitimate to rule China. From the Han Chinese literati’s point of view, Han Chinese were superior to Manchus, not only in cultural, but also in biological, terms. This Han Chinese chauvinist opinion can be found in the works published by the members of Society for Preserving National Learning. However, because all textbooks had to be examined by the ofcial

17

Liang 1899, 1902. “Xuewu dachen zou ju bianshuju,” 220. See also Luo Xianxiu n.d.: “Shiye” 實業 (Occupations). Wu Mei and Gong Bingzhang n.d.: “Shiye,” 19. 19 For the introduction of racial concepts into China, see Dikötter 1992. 18

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education authority, the native-place textbooks compiled by the society contain no anti-Manchu element. If there is any, the message is implicit or understated. For example, the Zhili xiangtu lishi jiaokeshu 直隸鄉土 歷史教科書 (Zhili Native-place History Textbook), published by the society, attributed the fall of the Ming to its ignorance of the strategic importance of Yanjing. The Zhili xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 直隸鄉土地理教 科書 (Zhili Native-place Geography Textbook), compiled by the same author, echoes the historical narrative by discussing the geographical location of Zhili in the following way: Since the Yellow Emperor made Zhuolu 涿鹿 [at Zhili] his capital, [the territory of Zhili] was thus resided purely by Han Chinese. However, situated at the frontier, Zhili was frequently disturbed by northern barbarians. . . . In the Song and the Ming Dynasties, [China] was ruled consecutively by Khitan, Jurchens, and Mongolians. Members of the Han had to move to the south.20

The reason for ending all historical accounts at the Ming dynasty is obvious. Nonetheless, to most native-place textbooks and gazetteers compilers, racial discourse expressing any trace of anti-Manchu sentiments was out of their consideration. Rather, the traditional theme of acculturation, as expressed in conventional gazetteers, was replicated in the native-place gazetteers and textbooks. According to the abovementioned 1905 guideline, under the item of “Humans / Race” (renlei ), a native-place gazetteer should answer the following questions: If there are any other species of humans (tazhong ren 他種人) in addition to bannermen and Han Chinese households living in this area, their origins should be investigated, their descendants should be accounted; the number of their households, their residence, and their customs should also be recorded. Roughly speaking, these peoples include the Hui 回, Fan 番, She 畲, Luo 猓, Miao 苗, Yao 猺, Zhuang 獞, Ling 狑, Ya 犽, Lang 狼, Ming 皿, Yang 犭央, Dasheng 打牲, Diao 貂, Li 黎, and Tusi 土司 (indigenous chiefs).21

In answering these questions, some native-place textbooks and gazetteers compilers took the opportunity to assert the racial purity of their local residents. The 1906 edition of Guangdong xiangtushi jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土 史教科書 (Guangdong Native-place Textbook) states that:

20 21

Chen Qinglin 1907: chapter 17. “Xuewu dachen zou ju bianshuju,” 218–223.

66

may-bo ching In the Southern Song dynasty, to escape from turmoil, many people migrated from the Central Plain to Zhuji xiang 珠璣巷 at Nanxiong 南雄 [a county of Guangdong]. This is why most Yue people [Cantonese] are of the Chinese race (Zhongguo zhong 中國種).22

Another version of the same acculturation story said that the aboriginal Yue race gradually diminished against the rise of Han race: Since the Qin authority moved some of its subjects to reside in Guangdong, Han people (Han zhong) began to enter Guangdong. In the TangSong period, people from the central plain came to the south to escape from the turmoil. Consequently, Han people (Han zhong) ourished more and more in Guangdong and the indigenous Yue people (Yue zhong) vanished gradually.23

This “migration-acculturation-evolution” theme can easily be found in the historical narratives of traditional local gazetteers. What is new to the native-place textbooks and gazetteers is the inclusion of the concept of “zhong” (race) in a biological sense. It implies an introduction of racial discourse into the narratives of local history. Likewise, some native-place gazetteer compilers answered the questions posed by the 1905 guidelines by adopting a “ll-in-the-blanks” approach. Guangning xian xiangtuzhi 廣寧縣鄉土志 (Guangning County Native-place Gazetteer) claims that in Guangning County, there is no other species of humans (tazhong ren), nor are there any bannerman households.24 The Shixing xian xiangtuzhi 始興縣鄉土志 (Shixing County Native-place Gazetteer), alternatively, provides a more elaborate answer: Our county is located in a remote area. Apart from the natives, we never have bannermen, nor do we have such species of people as Hui 回, Fan 番, Luo 猓, Miao 苗, He 犭合, and Ya 犽. In the mountainous area to the south of our county, there used to be some Yao people 猺人 coming from Lian Mountain. There they built their shelters and grew some miscellaneous crops. In recent years, these mountainous Yao people, who previously lived in the mountains, were driven out by bandits and migrated to somewhere else. Traces of Yao people have vanished almost completely as of a few years ago.25

22 23 24 25

Huang Foyi 1906: chapter 2. Huang Peikun and Cen Xixiang 1908: chapter 19. Wu Mei and Gong Bingzhang n.d.: 18. Zhang Baohe n.d.: 36.

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It is worth noting that Shixing County has been populated by Hakkaspeaking people since the Ming-Qing period. By today’s linguistic and cultural standards, Shixing County could be classied as a “Hakka” region. Nonetheless, the compilers of Shixing xian xiangtuzhi did not apply the term “kejia” to refer to the majority of local residents, but the term “tuzhu” 土著 instead. In the chapter on surnames and lineages, the compilers stated that most residents were the descendants of great surnames originated from Emperors Yan and Huang, and they were all “tuzhu” with no single case of “keji” 客籍 (guest households). By contrast, in the native-place gazetteer of another Hakka-speaking county in Guangdong, Xingning, an explicit expression of Hakka identity can be found. In the chapter on “Humans/Race” (renlei ), the compilers of Xingning xian xiangtuzhi 興寧縣鄉土志 (Xingning Nativeplace Gazetteer) stated that: The people (renlei ) of our county were originally crowned nobles coming from the central plain. When the Song rulers moved to the south, these people also migrated southward. They were in most cases migrants from Fujian and Jiangxi. Their language and customs differed from that of the indigenous population and were called by the indigenous people kejia 客家. Hence when they migrated to other places, they also called themselves kejia. To show that they do not forget their ancestral origin, they never change their language and customs. . . . The Yao 猺 people originated from the race of Panhu 槃瓠種 and were dispersed in the mountainous region of Lingnan 嶺南. . . . In the early Qing time, there were still some Yao people who lived in stone shelters in Tieshan zhang 鐵山嶂, which was located 60 li to the east of our county. They lived a simple life and remained uncivilized. Few of them were intelligent. The Yao people have disappeared gradually since a hundred years ago. . . . An alternative species of Yao was She 畲. They lived by re plowing, hunting, and collecting fruits. . . . Their race has been vanishing and can no longer be investigated. The Dan 蛋 households were previously under the authority of the Fishing Tax Ofce (Hebo suo 河泊所, established in the Hongwu reign of the Ming dynasty) . . . At present, only two or three residents with the family name Mai are of the Dan race (Danzu 蛋族). On top of this, there are ve to six hundred Sha 沙-surnamed residents, who are of Mongolian origin. Yet their language and customs have already been transformed. There are no Hui 回 and Fan 番 people in our county.26

26

Luo Xianxiu n.d.: chapter on “renlei.”

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The above citation states that in Xingning County, “tazhong ren” occupies only a small minority; and that the major residents are migrants from the central plain. They were called by the indigenous people kejia, which later also became their self-marker. What is not stated clearly in this chapter is that the kejia residents are equivalent to “Han,” but the “fact” that they are descendents of central plain migrants implies that they are of the Han race. Despite the claims made by the Hakka, in the eyes of some Cantonese literati, whether the Hakka people could be considered as descendants of the central plain migrants was doubtful. In a chapter that dealt with the racial composition and origins of different groups, the Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土地理教科書 (Guangdong Native-place Geography Textbook), complied by Huang Jie 黃節 and published in 1907 by the Society for Preserving National Learning, states that: The Yue region [Guangdong] has been populated by a pure Han race since the Qin dynasty, when the people in the north were exiled and moved to the Yue region. Before the Qin dynasty, the Hundred Yue peoples (Baiyue 百粤) were of different races. They once had their own rulers, who submitted themselves to the Yue Kingdom. The King of Yue [that is, Gou Jian 勾踐] was the descendant of Wu Yu 無余, the son borne by a concubine of Shaokang 少康, the emperor of the Xia dynasty.27 Therefore, those descendants of Shaokang who moved to the region south of Five Ranges (Lingnan) were of the Han race. Those [of this race] who mixed with the Hundred Yue races were called Zhuang 獞. Now, the Zhuang, Yao 猺, Lang 狼, Li 黎 (also known as the Li 俚, a variation of which is known as the Qi 歧), the Dan 蜑, Kejia 客家 [Hakka], and Fulao 福佬 [Hoklo] races are still found scattered in different areas [of the Yue region].28

Following the above paragraph, the compiler attached a table which indicated an even clearer distinction and classication among the different ethnic groups of Guangdong:29

27 For a record of the legendary ancestors of Gou Jian, see Shiji 史記 1975: vol. 5, 1739. It is also stated in the Shiji that the emperors of the Xia dynasty were the descendants of the Yellow Emperor. See Shiji 1975: vol. 1, 49. 28 Huang Huiwen 1907: chapter 12, 6a–7a. 29 I have simplied the original table, which lists also the regions inhabited by these ethnic groups.

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Table 1: Classication of peoples as illustrated in the 1907 edition of Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu Han race

a) Zhuang 獞 (the descendants of the Yue who mixed with the Hundred Yue) b) The people exiled by the Qin dynasty and settled in the Yue region

Hundred Yue races

a) Liao 獠 b) Li 俚 c) Yao 猺

Races coming from outside

a) Kejia [Hakka] 客家 b) Fulao [Hoklo] 福佬 c) Dan race 蜑

The table clearly shows that, according to the compiler, the Liao, Li, Yao, Hakka, Hoklo, and Dan were not of the Han race, whereas the Zhuang people were a less pure Han race. Without mentioning the Cantonese by name, the table implies that the Cantonese were equivalent to the people who had come from the north, because it was well known that the exiles moved to Nanhai County when Guangzhou city was founded. By implication, the Cantonese were pure Han. The implication that Hakka people were not of Han racial stock immediately provoked a storm of protest among the Hakka literati in Guangdong. Among them were Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905), Qiu Fengjia 丘逢甲 (1864–1912), and Zou Lu 鄒魯 (1885–1954), all of whom were at the time actively involved in either reform or revolutionary affairs. A Society for the Investigation of the Origin of the Hakka People was formed among the Hakka people from Jiaying, and further actions were threatened. Zou Lu recalled in later years that he “called upon several tens of the Education Promotion Ofces (quanxue suo, an ad hoc ofce of local gentry for promoting new-style education during the late Qing reform period) run by the Hakka and Hoklo people in Guangdong Province to present their disagreements, and to take action to stop the publication of the textbooks.”30 Representatives from the Education Promotion Ofce of Dapu 大埔 County, a Hakkaspeaking county under the jurisdiction of Chaozhou Prefecture, sent their complaints to the Ministry of Education. According to the ofcial

30

Zou Lu and Zhang Xuan 1910: 21.

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reply, the controversial textbook was once used in the Guangdong Law and Political Sciences Academy (Guangdong fazheng xuetang 廣東 法政學堂) and caused considerable disputes. Eventually, the Ministry of Education banned the publication of the book.31 The Society for Preserving National Learning compromised by publishing a revised edition of the textbook in 1908, removing the whole paragraph on the Hakka and the Hoklo.32 Criticism of Huang Jie was extended to another current Hakka native-place gazetteer. In the “Local Celebrities” section of the Xingning xiangtuzhi 興寧鄉土志 (Xingning Native-place Gazetteer), the biography of Hu Xi 胡曦, a notable local Hakka scholar, was accounted as follows: [Hu Xi] died in 1907. A few days before his death, Hu Xi read the nativeplace history compiled by a certain Guangzhou man, who accused the Hakka people by saying that they are not of the Han race. Hu argued against such an accusation, presenting several ten of thousands of words on the issue. After discussing the issue with his friends till mid-night, Hu passed away at the age of sixty-four.33

The controversy caused by Huang Jie’s textbook did not bring a halt to the discrimination against the Hakka. Some Cantonese textbook compilers remained insensitive to the racial issue. In the Xinning Nativeplace Geography published in 1909, the compiler still called the Hakka “bandits” (kefei 客匪): Chapter 10 Mountains Dalong Mount 大隆山: . . . It is always occupied by the Hakka bandits and much disturbance is caused. To bring social order to Xinning 新寧 County, it is necessary to be cautious and defensive in this area.34

31

See the ofcial order made by the Ministry of Education published in Xuebu guanbao 1907. 32 Compare the 1907 and 1908 editions of Huang Huiwen’s Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu; the offending remarks about the Hakka is deleted in the latter edition. Regarding the founding of “Society for the Investigation of the Origin of the Hakka People,” see Luo Xianglin 1933: 5–6, 27–28. For a brief account of the incident, see Leong 1985. 33 Luo Xianxiu, “Qijiu Lu” 耆舊錄 (Biographies of Elderly), in his Xingning xian xiangtuzhi. Hu Xi (1844–1907) was well known for his contribution to collecting local historical documents and maps. For details of his background, see the special issue on Hu in Xingning wenshi 興寧文史 (The Literature and History of Xingning County), edited by Xingning xian zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, No. 17 (1993): 46. Luo Xianglin, the well-known Hakka scholar, also wrote a biography for Hu Xi and mentioned how seriously Hu was irritated by the offensive remarks made by Huang Jie. See Xingning wenshi, No. 17: 163. 34 Lei Zepu n.d.: 12.

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In the Xinning Native-place History compiled by the same author, the signicance of the textbook is highlighted in the same manner: In spite of my ignorance, I took up the task of compiling the Xinning Nativeplace History. The objectives of the textbook are two-fold. First, I collect the excellences of our previous celebrities so as to remind our students of their quality of integrity. Second, I make an account of the violence caused by the Hakka bandits and the subsequent calamities caused to the natives, so as to remind our primary school students that our locality has experienced such a dreadful disaster.35

The compiler’s offensive statement has to be read against the background of the Cantonese-Hakka feuds that occurred in Xinning County in the 1860s. The hostilities between the two groups became so brutal that the Guangdong-Guangxi governor-general and the Guangdong governor appealed to the emperor in 1867 to separate the Hakka residents from the Cantonese and place them under different administration. A Chixi Department (Chixi ting 赤溪廳) was established to the southeast of Xinning and became an exclusively Hakka region as a result.36 Probably in view of the continuous accusations made by Cantonese writers, Hakka leaders kept on stressing their racial purity. In 1910, with the support of some overseas Chinese, Zou Lu published Hanzu kefu shi 漢族客福史 (The History of the Hakka and Hoklo of the Han-Chinese Race), articulating the Han-Chinese purity of the Hakka and Hoklo: It is well known that the Kejia (Hakka) and Fulao (Hoklo) originated from Henan. Henan is located in the centre of Huaxia (華夏, i.e., China). Therefore Kejia and Fulao were the direct descendants of Han. This is discussed in details in the chapter of this book, entitled “The Origins of Han-Chinese Kejia and Fulao.” There are four waves of Kejia and Fulao migration: The rst began in the Qin-Han period and ourished at the time when Sun Quan was recruiting talents. The second occurred when China was disturbed by the Five Barbarians and people had to move to the south in order to escape from the turmoil bought about by Hunag Chao’s rebellion. The third referred to the period when the ofcials and subjects of the Song and Ming dynasties who remained loyal to their rulers stayed in the south. The fourth phase marked the expansion of Kejia and Fulao populations, when they moved to Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and Burma. Records about their exile and migration, and about the similarities and differences among different types of Hakka / Hoklo dialects, are also accounted and studied by various experts. Generally speaking, to the

35 Lei Zepu, “Xinning xiangtu lishi zixu” 新寧鄉土歷史自序 (Preface to Xinning Native-Place History) in Lei Zepu 1923. 36 Lei Zepu n.d.: chapter on the founding of Chixi Department.

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may-bo ching north of the river, both the terms Hakka (Kejia) and Hoklo (Fulao) are never heard of. [This is because] the north is the [native] land of Ke as well as the origin of Fu. To the south of the river, there is only one type of “Ke,” and “ke” (guest) and “tu” (natives) are merely relative terms.37

The Hakka-Hoklo allies on this matter have an earlier historical root. Chen Chunsheng’s study illustrates that after Shantou (Swatow) became a treaty port in 1860, it developed into an economic and cultural center beside the Hanjiang area. The rise of Shantou attracted merchants and literati from Chaozhou and Jiaying Prefectures; among them there were both Hakka and Hoklo speakers. In the rst few years of the 1900s, the two groups still identied themselves with reference to administrative boundaries (prefectures) rather than to their dialects, and it is not uncommon to see activities or institutions jointly run by the two dialect groups. A new-style school founded in 1902 in Shantou admitted both Hakka and Hoklo students coming from Chaozhou and Jiaying prefectures. Launched in 1903 by a few Hakka writers, a newspaper, Lingdong Ribao 嶺東日報, ran a special column called “Chao-Jia News” for articles from the Chaozhou and Jiaying areas. In most of the news reports and commentaries published in Lingdong Ribao, regional identities of Chaozhou and Jiaying were expressed much more frequently than those of Hoklo and Hakka. Nonetheless, it was also under such circumstances that the two different dialect groups encountered each other and noticed more and more their dialect, and therefore ethnic, differences.38 The controversy caused by the Guangodng xiangtu dili jiaokeshu and subsequent publication of Hanzu kefu shi should also be appreciated against the wider political-social context of late Qing. While involved in the Hakka-Hoklo vis-à-vis Cantonese disputes, Zou Lu, the author of Hanzu kefu shi, was also participating actively in anti-Manchu revolutionary activities. For the revolutionary cause, Zou Lu and his colleagues would have promoted the consolidation of the Han race. It is therefore understandable that the accounts in the Hanzu kefu shi had to avoid provoking further controversies within the supposedly unied Han race, even though these accounts were meant to speak against the Cantonese on behalf of Hakkas and Hoklos. The preface, written by Qiu Fengjia, fully demonstrates how such a balance was maintained:

37 38

Zou Lu and Zhang Xuan 1910: 19–20. See Chen Chunsheng 2006.

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If the world had already entered into the stage of unication, and people had already been enjoying a prosperous life, there would be no need to differentiate one race from another. Nonetheless, the reality is that the world has not evolved to that stage, and competitions among nations and races are so intense that the differences between species (zhong) and races (zu) have to be identied. Why must we make such a distinction? We do this because we want to ally people of the same race by making them a consolidated group and by strengthening their spirit, so as to ght against the alien race ( yizu 異族). If [people of the same race] discriminate against one another and are jealous and suspicious of one another, the alien race will gain advantage. In view of the intense competition, people of the same race might still be conquered [by an alien race] no matter how united they are. If any disagreements occur among [our people of the same race], [our] race will run the risk of being extinguished. Whenever I think of this, I feel terried.39

Qiu Fengjia was careful to avoid mentioning the Manchus. What he did instead was to relate the so-called “alien races” to the “Miao, Yao, Li, and Zhuang,” who are considered “minorities” by contemporary standards. To maintain the purity of the Han, Qiu Fengjia even said that these “alien races” were only “historical remnants” (lishi zhi yiwu 歷史之遺物) and few of them existed. Following Qiu’s arguments, Huang Jie deserved condemnation, because not only had he offended the Hakka and Hoklo, but he also damaged the greater revolutionary cause. It is interesting to note that Huang Jie was also anti-Manchu although, unlike Qiu Fengjia and Zou Lu, he did not join the Tongmenghui. Coming from Shunde 順德 County, a Cantonese-speaking region of Guangdong province, Huang Jie was a co-founder and one of the few radical anti-Manchu members of the Society for the Preservation of National Learning in Shanghai.40 Like Qiu Fengjia, Huang’s antiManchu sentiment was expressed subtly enough that it did not irritate the Qing government directly. In 1905, Huang Jie published a series of articles under the title “Yellow History” (Huang shi 黃史) in the Journal of National Essence (Guocui xuebao 國粹學報), in which he expressed blatantly his anti-Manchu sentiment.41 In the “Yellow History,” Huang argued that under the rule of the Manchus in the Qing, just as under the rule of the Mongols in the Yuan or the Tartars in the Northern Wei, China lost its character as a “nation” (Zhongguo zhi bu guo ye 中國之不國也). To rediscover the character of the “nation,” Huang examined ancient

39 40 41

Qiu Fengjia 丘逢甲, “Preface,” in Zou Lu and Zhang Xuan 1910: 2–3. See Lawrence Schneider 1976: 66; Leong, 1985: 308. Huang Jie 1905.

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sources. He asserted that the race that was sanctioned to rule China originally came from Kunlun Mountain. Led by the Yellow Emperor, the race entered into the land that was later known as China, and the descendants of the Yellow Emperor were called Han. Huang’s purpose in promoting this racial theory was to link the emergence of the Cantonese to migration from the north, implying that they were the Han race who migrated to south China. Huang’s controversial statement was a reection of his dual role as a promoter of anti-Manchuism and as a Cantonese native. As a Han chauvinist, Huang Jie surely viewed the Manchus as his enemy. However, being also Cantonese, Huang might perceive the Hakka and the Hoklo people as no less barbarous than the Manchus. Huang Jie’s case shows clearly that the late Qing discourse of race was not only a result of the wider nationalist movement, but was also an expression of the pride of a dominating ethnic group over what it considered a subordinate group.

The Aftermath The racial discourse narrated in the native-place gazetteers and textbooks illustrate various layers of rhetoric manipulation. To the establishment, racial theories were applied to unite the nation to counteract foreign aggression. To the revolutionaries, racial theories were used to challenge the legitimacy of the Manchu rulers. To some Cantonese or Hakka literati, racial theories were used to dene “insiders” and “outsiders” in a local context. To the third group, native-place gazetteers and textbooks were transformed from a platform for promoting patriotism to an arena for articulating ethnic conicts within a region. The fashion of compiling native-place textbooks and gazetteers might have cooled down after the 1911 Revolution, but the very idea of native place (xiangtu) relative to the modern concept of nation ( guojia) has been rmly established. Chinese students bought up in the rst and second decades of the 20th century found native-place education important and impressive.42 The idea continues to be appreciated by the Communist government, as indicated by the compilation of Guangdong xiangtu dili

42 My personal interview with Mr. Xu (1912–2002), dated March 27 and April 3, 2001, Guangzhou. Part of the interview is included in Cheng 2001.

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廣東鄉土地理 (Guangdong Native-place Geography), initiated by the Education Department of Guangdong Province in 1959,43 as well as the recent revival of native-place education among various local education authorities since the 1990s. Likewise, the concept of race (zhongzu, which was later replaced by minxi 民系 or minzu 民族 when referring to different dialect or ethnic groups) has been authenticated through various means. From the early 20th century through today, the Hakka articulation of their pure Han identity has continued and intensied. Academics, pioneered by Luo Xianglin 羅香林 (1906–1978), a prominent Hakka scholar who advocated Hakka studies starting in the late 1920s, produced a huge amount of literature that helped turn the myth into reality. The late Qing native-place textbooks and gazetteers played a part in racial articulation when the idea of Hakka was yet to take shape; but in time they became part of the literature verifying the very presence of the history of Hakka.

References Cited Chen Chunsheng 陳春聲 (2006), “Diyu rentong yu zuqun fenlei: 1640–1940 nian Hanjiang liuyu minzhong “kejia” guannian de yanbian 地域認同與族群分類: 1640–1940 年韓江流域民衆“客家”觀念的演變 (Regional identity and racial classication: the transformation of the idea of “Kejia” among the people in Hanjiang area from 1640 to 1940),” in Kejia yanjiu 客家研究, 2006, 1, 1–43. Chen Qinglin 陳慶林 (1907), Zhili xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 直隸鄉土地理教科書 (Zhili Native-place Geography Textbook). Shanghai: Guoxue baocun hui. Cai Pengyun 蔡鵬雲, Zuixin Chenghai xiangtu gezhi jiaokeshu 最新澄海鄉土格致教科書 (Chenghai Native-place Science Textbook, the latest edition). N.p and n.d. Cheng Meibao 程美寳 (May-bo Ching) (2001), “Cong minsu dao minzu: difang wen hua yu guojia rentong 從民俗到民族: 地方文化與國家認同 (Folklores Studies and Nationalism in the 1920s and 30s),” in Qinghua shehuixue pinglun 清華社會學評論, 2001, 1, 104–126. —— (2003), “You aixiang er aiguo: Qingmo Guangdong xiangtu jiaocai de guojia huayu 由愛鄉而愛國: 清末廣東鄉土教材的國家話語 (To love my native-place, to love my country: The national discourse on native-place textbooks in late Qing),” in Lishi Yanjiu 歷史研究, 2003, 4, 68–84. Dikötter, Frank (1992), The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Guangdong xiangtu dili 廣東鄉土地理 (Guangdong Native-place Geography) (1959), Guangdongsheng jiaoyuting Guangdong xiangtu dili bianxie xiaozu 廣東省教育 廳廣東鄉土地理編寫小組.

43

See Guangdong xiangtu dili 1959.

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Huang Foyi 黃佛頤 (1906), Guangdong Xiangtushi jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土史教科書 (Guangdong Native-place history textbook). N.p. Huang Huiwen 黃晦聞 (1907), Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土地理教科書 (Guangdong Native-place Geography Textbook). Shanghai: Guoxue Baocunhui. —— (1908), Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土地理教科書 (Guangdong Nativeplace Geography Textbook). Shanghai: Guoxue Baocunhui. Huang Jie 黃節 (1905), “Huang shi 黃史 (The History of the Yellow Race),” in Guocui Xuebao 國粹學報, 1905, 1, 1a–10b. Huang Peikun 黃培坤 and Cen Xixiang 岑錫祥 (1908), Guangdong xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 廣東鄉土地理教科書 (Guangdong Native-place Geography Textbook). Yuedong bianyi gongsi, 1908 reprint. Lei Zepu 雷澤普, Xinning xiangtu dili 新寧鄉土地理 (Xinning Native-place Geography). N.p and n.d. —— (1923), Songxia shuxue ji 松下述學集. Yuedong bianyi gongsi. Leong, Sow-Theng (1985), “The Hakka Chinese of Lingnan: ethnicity and social change in modern times,” in David Pong and Edmund Fung (eds.) (1985), Idea and Reality: social and political change in modern China. New York: University Press of America, 287–322. Liang Qichao 梁 超 (1899), “Lun Zhongguo renzhong zhi jianglai 論中國人種之 將來 (On the Future of the Chinese Race),” in Yinbingshi heji, wenji 3 飲冰室合集: 文集之三. Zhonghua shuju, 1936 reprint. —— (1902), “Xinminshuo” 新民說 (On New Citizens), in Yinbingshi heji, zhuanji 4 飲冰室合集: 專集之四. Zhonghua shuju, 1936 reprint. Lin Yanqiong 林宴瓊 (1909), Xuexian shending Chaozhou xiangtu jiaokeshu 學憲審定潮 州鄉土教科書 (Chaozhou Native-place Textbook, authorized by the Ministry of Education). Shantou Zhonghua Xinbao guan. Luo Xianxiu 羅獻修 (ed.), Xingning xian xiangtuzhi 興寧縣鄉土志 (Xingning County Native-place Gazetteer). Manuscript, n.d., n.p., collection of Guangdong Provincial Library. Luo Xianglin 羅香林 (1933), Kejia yanjiu daolun 客家研究導論 (An Introduction to Hakka Studies). Xingning: Xishan shucang. Qu Xingui 璩鑫圭 and Tang Liangyan 唐良炎 (eds.) (1991), Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi ziliao huibian: xuezhi yanbian 中國近代教育史資料匯編: 學制演變 (A Collection of Documents on Modern Chinese Education: Changes in School System). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. Renhua xiangtuzhi 仁化鄉土志 (Renhua Native-place Gazetteer). Manuscript, n.d., n.p., collection of Guangdong Provincial Library. Schneider, Lawrence (1976), “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia,” in Charlotte Furth (ed.) (1976), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 57–89. Shiji 史記 (A Record of History). Zhonghua shuju, 1975 reprint. Wang Jianjun 王建軍 (1996), Zhongguo jindai jiaokeshu fazhan yanjiu 中國近代教科書發 展研究 (Study of the Development of Textbooks in Modern China). Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe. Wang Xingliang 王興亮 and Zhao Zongqiang 趙宗強 (2005), “Liu Shipei yu difang zhi” 劉師培與地方志 (Liu Shipei and gazetteers), Zhongguo Difangzhi 中國地方志 2005, no. 2. Weng Huidong 翁輝東, Huang Renxiong 黃人雄 (1909), Shouban Chaozhou xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 首版潮州鄉土地理教科書 (Chaozhou Native-place Geography Textbook, the rst edition), vol. 1. N.p. Wu Mei 伍梅 and Gong Bingzhang 龔炳章 (eds.), Guangning xian xiangtuzhi 廣寧縣鄉 土志 (Guangning County Native-place Gazetteer). Manuscript, n.d., n.p., collection of Guangdong Provincial Library.

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Xiao Qigang 蕭 岡 and Yang Jianai 楊家鼐, Xuebu shending Jiaying xinti xiangtu dili jiaokeshu 學部審定嘉應新體鄉土地理教科書 (New Style Jiaying Nativeplace Geography Textbook, approved by the Ministry of Education). N.p, and n.d. Xingning wenshi 興寧文史 (The Literature and History of Xingning County), No. 17 (1993), edited by Xingning xian zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui 興寧縣政協文史委員會. Xuebu guanbao 學部官報 (Gazette of Ministry of Education), No. 31 (1907): 44–45. “Xuewu dachen zou ju bianshuju jiandu biancheng xiangtuzhi limu ni tongchi bianji pian” 學務大臣奏據編書局監督編成鄉土志例目擬通飭編輯片, in Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany), 1905, 9, 217–218. Zhang Baohe 張報和 (ed.) (1907), Shixing xian xiangtuzhi 始興縣鄉土志 (Shixing Nativeplace Gazetteer). Qingfengqiao Wenmao yinju, n.d., prefaced 1907. Zou Lu 鄒魯 and Zhang Xuan 張煊 (1910), Hanzu kefu shi 漢族客福史 (The History of the Hakka and Hoklo of gthe Han-Chinese Race). Guangzhou: Guoli Zhongshan daxue chubanbu, 1932 reprint.

EDUCATING THE CITIZENS: VISIONS OF CHINA IN LATE QING HISTORY TEXTBOOKS Tze-ki Hon

In recent years, the late Qing invention of national history has received considerable attention. Taking a “history of ideas” approach, scholars such as Prasenjit Duara, Rebecca Karl, Xiaobing Tang, Edward Wang, and Ying-shih Yü discuss how late Qing historians adopted foreign concepts such as the nation-state, linear progress, and scientic rationality.1 Stressing what was new and western in the late Qing historical writings, scholars emphasize their role in laying the foundation for the “new historiography” (xin shixue 新史學) of the May Fourth New Culture Movement. While this “history of ideas” approach has undoubtedly yielded new insights into late Qing historical discourse, it also takes the discourse out of its own context. Seen as a precursor to the May Fourth “new historiography,” the late Qing historical discourse is understood not by what happened at the turn of the 20th century, but by what occurred later during the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly numerous threads, cultural and political, connected the late Qing period with the May Fourth period. Nevertheless, as David Der-wei Wang has pointed out, we miss the originality and creativity of the late Qing thinkers if we judge them by events that occurred thirty years later.2 In what follows, I will examine the late Qing historical discourse from the perspective of the social and political changes at the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on history textbooks, my premise is that the late Qing historical discourse emerged in a critical moment when the Qing government was building a national school system to replace the civil service examinations. Described by Ping-ti Ho as “the ladder of success” for the literati, the civil service examination system had been

1 See Duara 1995: 17–50; Karl 2002; Xiaobing Tang 1996: 46–79; Edward Wang 2001: 1–50; Ying-shih Yü 1994. 2 See David Der-wei Wang 1991: 1–52. Elsewhere I have discussed the May Fourth New Culture Movement as a paradigm in studying modern China. See Ip, Hon, and Lee 2003; Hon 2004b.

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the main vehicle of social mobility for the educated elite for centuries.3 Although plagued by problems of fairness and accountability, the examination system not only bestowed power to successful candidates to rule the country, but also established a body of knowledge and a cluster of texts to dene the membership of the learned community.4 Thus, after centuries, the replacement of the civil service examinations by the national school system led to a re-denition of the learned community. Instead of training the literati (shi 士), the new school system produced, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, a “state nobility” who were licensed by the state and acculturated in the state ideology through years of institutionalized learning.5 In many ways, the new nobility of the state were different from the old literati. Rather than obtaining their elite status by passing the civil service examinations, the state nobility spent years in the national school system. Instead of joining ofcialdom, the state nobility had a variety of career options, ranging from working as teachers and writers to publishers and businessmen. But in the 1900s, as the Qing government was building the school system, the line between the state nobility and the scholar-ofcials was still unclear. As we shall see, many authors of late Qing history textbooks had spent years studying for the civil service examinations. Some of them were junior members of the literati community by virtue of passing the lower level examinations. Because of their literati backgrounds, they had to imagine—some creatively and some less so—what schooling could do to mold a “citizen” ( guomin 國民) who was directly responsible to the state rather than to their families, clans, and native places.6 Similarly, the political status of the new nobility of the state was ambiguous. Would they, like the old literati, have the opportunity to partake in governing the country? If so, what forms of political participation would they assume in order to make the largest impact on the state? Would they, unlike the old literati, be able to maintain their elite status without family or local support? In the 1900s, these

3

See Ho 1962; Chaffee 1995. For a study of the social and political impact of the civil service examination system, see Elman 2000: especially 125–172, 239–370. 5 See Bourdieu 1996: 1–53. 6 I follow the current practice of translating guomin as citizen. But in some cases in late Qing China, guomin also meant a national’s duties to the state, rather than the inalienable rights of a citizen. For a discussion of the late Qing understanding of guomin, see Fogel and Zarrow 1997: 3–38. 4

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questions were not easy to answer because the shape of the new social and political structure remained unclear. Nevertheless, they were pressing issues to the authors of late Qing history textbooks when they interpreted the past. More important, as junior literati who became textbook authors, they knew that they were in a precarious situation. On the one hand, they understood that education had traditionally been an autonomous domain of local gentry who, through supporting schools, gained inuence over local affairs and attained leverage to bargain with central authority.7 On the other hand, they realized that they were the “educators of citizens,” participating in nation-building by forging a collective identity among young Chinese. As a result, in writing history textbooks, the authors saw themselves not only contributing to the history curriculum of the new school system, but also clarifying the relationship between learning and governing, state and society, citizen and nation. To deepen our understanding of the social and political signicance of late Qing historical discourse, I will compare three major history textbooks: Liu Yizheng’s 柳誼徵 (1880–1956) Lidai shilüe 歷代史略 (A Brief Account of the Past, 1902), Xia Zengyou’s 夏曾佑 (1863–1924) Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新中學中國歷史教科書 (The Newest Chinese History Textbook for Middle School, 1904), and Liu Shipei’s 劉師培 (1884–1919) Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 中國歷史教科書 (Chinese History Textbook, 1906). In various ways, these three textbooks were based on the “East Asian history” (tÔyÔshi ) textbooks of Meiji Japan. They were examples, in the words of Douglas Reynolds, of the “Golden Decade” of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges during the New Policy period (1901–1911).8 In addition, they were published by three different venues: Liu Yizheng’s textbook was published by a government press in Nanjing; Xia Zhengyou’s textbook by the Commercial Press in Shanghai; Liu Shipei’s textbook by the self-nanced Guoxue baocun hui 國學保存會 (Association for Preservation of National Learning) in the foreign concessions of Shanghai. As a whole, the three textbooks represent the range of possibilities available to late Qing edu-cated elites, resulting from the proliferation of printing press, bookstores,

7 For a discussion of the relationship between education and society in late imperial China, see Elman and Woodside 1994: 1–16, 417–522. 8 See Reynolds 1993: 5–14. For the characteristics of TÔyÔshi, see Tanaka 1993: 31–104.

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academic associations, and private organizations.9 As we shall see, both the Japanese inuence and the expanded social space allowed the three authors to be creative and imaginative in envisioning a new social and political order. In narrating the past, the three authors not only offered different images of the Chinese nation, but also redened the roles of the educated elite in post-imperial China.

The Two-pronged Approach to Teaching History Two sets of documents set the tone for the late Qing educational reform. The rst set of documents, known as Qinding xuetang zhangcheng 欽定學 堂章程 (School Regulations by Imperial Order), was issued in 1902 for two purposes. First, it proposed to establish a school system consisting of pre-schools, primary schools, secondary schools, teacher-training schools, and universities.10 Second, it attempted to link the schools to the civil service examinations such that the two systems would complement each other. For instance, graduates of the school system would be given titles equivalent to successful candidates of the civil service examinations, and in turn successful examination candidates would be allowed to enter into the school system.11 Due to conicts in the top leadership, however, the plan was never put into practice. Two years later, in 1904, another set of documents was made public. This new set of documents, known as Zouding xuetang zhangcheng 奏定學 堂章程 (Approved School Regulations), was more elaborate in spelling out the details of the new school system. It described the goals and the expected outcomes of four levels of schools—primary schools, junior high schools, high schools, and universities. In addition to being more elaborate in planning, the second set of documents differed from the rst in two areas. One was that the new school system was no longer linked to the civil service examinations, silently pronouncing the death of the examination system.12 The other was that the school system was seen as a vehicle for promoting national identity. For example, teachers of lower-level primary schools (for age seven to twelve) were told to strengthen students’ “foundation for loving the nation” (ai guojia 9 10 11 12

For a discussion of the late Qing social and cultural changes, see Xiong 1994. See Li and Wang 2000: 302–3. Li and Wang 2000: 302. Li and Wang 2000: 311. See also Liu Longxin 2001.

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zhi genji 愛國家之根基).13 Likewise, teachers of higher-level primary schools (for age twelve to sixteen) were told to help students develop their health, knowledge, and good character as “the citizens of the nation” ( guomin 國民).14 Its overt reference to the nation notwithstanding, the 1904 documents did not promote a hegemonic nation-state. A case in point is the two-pronged approach to teaching history. On the one hand, the documents recommended the teaching of “national history” ( guoshi 國史 or zhonguo lishi 中國歷史) to educate students about the country’s long history and the “virtuous rule of the emperors of the current dynasty” (benchao liesheng dezheng 本朝列聖德政).15 On the other hand, the documents suggested the teaching of “the history of native place” (xiangtu lishi 鄉土歷史) so that students would be proud of their place of birth—its land, its indigenous products, its distinguishing leaders, and its collective achievements.16 The goal of this two-pronged approach was to develop a sense of collectivity among students to view their villages, towns, provinces, and nation as parts of an organic whole. The link between the local and the national could be tangible and intangible, depending on one’s locale. But the point was that this sense of collectivity had to be developed rst in one’s native place and then extended to the rest of the country. Cogently summarized by May-bo Ching as “from loving one’s native place to loving one’s nation” ( you ai xiang er ai guo 由愛鄉而愛國), this sense of collectivity was partly built on the Western notion of the nation, and partly stemmed from the Confucian concept of root and branch.17 Central to this late Qing national identity was the Confucian assumption that human emotive ties expand, like concentric circles, from what is near to what is distant. For this reason, it is not surprising to nd that during the late Qing, a popular Chinese term for the nation-state was guojia 國家 (nation and family) that explicitly referred to the continuum between one’s family/ lineage and one’s nation. This emphasis on linking the local and the national was an extension of the late Qing approach to local mobilization, known as “local selfgovernment” (difang zizhi 地方自治). As Philip Kuhn has pointed out,

13 14 15 16 17

Li and Wang 2000: 312. Li and Wang 2000: 313. See also Liu Longxin 2001: 492. Qu and Tang 1991: 295–6. Qu and Tang 1991: 295–6. See Cheng 2003.

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late Qing governance was based on the model of “control-autonomy interaction” where the central government mobilized the country by delegating power to the local elite.18 A major goal of the “New Policies” (xinzheng 新政) was to effectively activate “local political energy” and channel it into the political structure of the nation-state. To achieve this goal, there were two expected outcomes of this mobilization. First was that members of the local elite were encouraged to actively manage local affairs, and to take over much of the local administration at their own expenses. The second outcome was that local activism would be linked to national programs such that the central government would have a direct control over local affairs without incurring extra costs. In this regard, the establishment of national school system was part and parcel of the Qing government’s plan to enlist local energy into the nation-state. And the emphasis on linking the local and the national in teaching history was an exemplication of the late Qing approach to local mobilization. As Marianne Bastid and Ernest Schwintzer have shown, respected local leaders—such as Zhang Jian 張謇 (1853–1926) and Huang Yanpei 黄炎培 (1878–1965)—did participate in local self-government by forming local education associations to nance new schools and build a new curriculum.19 Some of these local education associations, most notably the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association ( Jiangsu sheng jiaoyu hui 江蘇省教育會), were so inuential in national politics that they became an unofcial forum for demanding local representative government during the nal years of the Qing dynasty.20 By all accounts, despite its failure to resuscitate the dynasty, the educational reform of the “New Policies” was successful in mobilizing the local elite.

The Japanese Model Of the three history textbooks examined here, Liu Yizheng’s Lidai shilüe is unique. In addition to being the earliest text among the three, it was the only one approved and published by the Qing government. First published in 1902 by the Jiangchu shuju 江楚書局 (Bookstore of the Eastern Yangzi Region) in Nanjing, Lidai shilüe was a product of

18 19 20

See Kuhn 1975. See Bastid 1988; Schwintzer 1992. See Schwintzer 1992: 132–142; Bailey 1990: 71–112.

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the Qing government’s attempt to transplant the Japanese educational system into China after the Sino-Japanese War.21 The textbook was commissioned by the reformer Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), and was adapted from Shina tsushi 支那通史 (A General History of China) by Naka Michiyo 那珂通世 (1851–1908). The author, Liu Yizheng, was a shengyuan 生員 (licentiate) who passed the entry level examination. He was a protégé of the philologist Miao Quansun 繆荃蓀 (1844–1919) who gave him the job of adapting Michiyo’s work into a textbook. While Liu was completing Lidai shilüe, he was sent to Japan as a member of the Qing mission to study Japanese school system. During his two months of touring, he was impressed by the country’s success in adopting the Western school system.22 After returning to China, he began teaching history at schools that were set up as pilot projects for the new school system. He rst taught at Jiangnan High School and then Liangjiang Teachertraining School. In both places he used Lidai shilüe as a textbook, and he claimed that the book received enthusiastic responses from students.23 In 1905, the Ministry of Education (Xuebu 學部) in Beijing put Lidai shilüe on the list of approved textbooks, thereby ofcially designating it as a national textbook. Although a large portion of Lidai shilüe was adapted from Shina tsushi, it does not mean that Liu Yizheng made no contribution to the late Qing historical discourse.24 At rst glance, Liu appeared to have an easy job in converting Michiyo’s book into a textbook. Michiyo wrote his book in classical Chinese, and his writing was so uent and eloquent that it required little editing. Furthermore, being a well-trained sinologist, Michiyo was well versed in Chinese history, and his historical account was, on the whole, accurate and well supported. More important, adopting the Western style of periodization, Michiyo divided Chinese history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods, thereby offering

21 Liu Yizheng began to write Lidai shilüe in January 1902, and he nished the rst draft in September of the year. Upon its completion, Zhang Zhidong immediately asked the Jiangchu Bookstore to publish it. Zhang republished the textbook in 1903 and the Zhongxin shuju 中新書局 re-issued it in 1905. In this chapter, I use the Zhongxin shuju edition kept at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. For an account of Liu’s writing of Lidai shilüe, see Sun 1993: 47. 22 Sun 1993: 9 –13. 23 Liu Yizheng 2002. 24 For a discussion of Liu Yizheng’s contribution in adapting Shina tsushi, see Ou 2003.

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a new framework of understanding China’s past from the perspective of the evolution of the nation. Easy as it might seem, Liu’s adaptation required three major changes. First, he needed to change the perspective of Michiyo’s book. Writing his book for Japanese readers, Michiyo presented China as a neighboring country and a threatening power in East Asia. This was obviously not an image of China that Liu would have wanted to give to Chinese primary school students. So in Lidai shilüe, through cutting and pasting, adding and deleting, Liu re-oriented Michiyo’s book such that it centered on the triumph and glory of the Qing. An example is how Liu described China. For Michiyo, China was a country in Asia to the west of Japan, and the Qing emperors inherited the country from the rulers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song and Ming dynasties.25 For Liu, in contrast, China and the Qing dynasty were synonymous. He spoke of the “huge size of the Great Qing nation” (daqing jianguo zhi di 大清建 國之大) and compared it to other nations in the world.26 He stressed that the “Great Qing” was a major power in East Asia, and intentionally avoided discussing where Japan stood in the East Asian power politics.27 Also, Liu avoided discussing the ethnic background of the Manchu rulers, prompting him to delete all of Michiyo’s sections on different ethnic groups in China.28 Second, to help readers fully appreciate the signicance of Lidai shilüe, Liu added sections to explain why the tripartite periodization, although a foreign historical framework, was suitable for understanding Chinese history. To do so, Liu added a short discussion of historiography at the beginning of Lidai shilüe, entitled “The Purpose of History” (lishi dazhi 歷史大指). There, he compared two historical genres: the general history (tongshi 通史) that covers thousands of years, and the dynastic history (duandai shi 断代史) that focuses on a single dynasty.29 After indicating his preference for general history, he proposed to modify the genre to serve the needs of the 20th century. The new general history, he said, would provide an overview over a long span of time, exactly like what the old general history had done. However, its goal was no 25 See, for instance, the discussion of Chinese geography in Naka 1898: juan 卷 1, 1–3. Liu Yizheng deleted this section in Lidai shilüe. 26 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 1. 27 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 1. 28 For instance, in Lidai shilüe, Liu Yizheng deleted Naka Michiyo’s entire section on “ren zhong zhi bie” 人種之別 (appears in Naka 1898: juan 1, 4). 29 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 3.

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longer to serve the rulers, the specialists, or the educated elites; rather, it would be directed toward the public, particularly young learners, helping them understand the link between past and present.30 In this new historical genre—a type of writing that is similar to what we today call national history—Liu emphasized four characteristics: the discussion of the structure of government, the summary of thought and ideas, the focus on territorial boundaries, and the emphasis on foreign relations.31 Although not explicitly said, he saw these four areas as the basic knowledge of a “citizen” ( guomin 國民) who would, if needed, be willing to sacrice for the nation. According to Liu, the best way to make these four areas clear to young readers was to adopt the tripartite periodization. Following Michiyo’s example, he divided Chinese history into three parts: the ancient period (shangshi 上世) covering from the Xia dynasty to the Qin dynasty; the medieval period (zhongshi 中世) covering from the Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty; and the current period ( jinshi 近世) covering from the Song dynasty to the Ming dynasty.32 Since Michiyo only covered up to the Song dynasty in Shina tsushi, Liu’s third task was to complete the rest of the historical account.33 For Liu, it was a challenge to add the new chapters on the Yuan and the Ming dynasties. First, the added chapters had to match the previous chapters both in style and structure. Second, the added chapters dealt with recent events, some of which (e.g., the fall of the Ming) were still politically sensitive if not political taboo. Third, the added chapters were to give Lidai shilüe closure. Consequently, Liu had to address the question of what one would learn from the entire book. In comparison, Liu was more successful in dealing with the rst two problems than the third one. To preserve the coherence of the book, he imitated Michiyo’s writing style in composing the new chapters. To avoid politically sensitive issues, he offered just a summary of facts in his new chapters, giving no comments or observations on key historical

30

Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 3. Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 4. 32 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 1, 4. 33 From the various versions of Shina tsushi that I have found, including a translation of the book into modern Japanese in 1938, Naka Michiyo appears to have nished only the rst four volumes of the planned seven-volume work. He covered the history of China from pre-historic time to the Northern Song. Hence, in Lidai shilüe, Liu Yizheng added the last three volumes covering from the eleventh century to the seventeenth century. 31

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events. But with regard to what one might learn from Lidai shilüe, Liu appeared to be hesitant and indecisive. Part of Liu’s problem originated from Michiyo. In Shina tsushi, Michiyo divided Chinese history into three parts to show that since the Han dynasty, China had been experiencing a gradual decline, with no progress on political, social, and economic fronts. There were, of course, eeting glorious moments when China added new territories or created more wealth. Yet, Michiyo saw these glorious moments as reinventing the wheel, creating false hopes for an inefcient and decaying system.34 Expectedly this was not the view that Liu would like to give to his young readers. In Lidai shilüe, he deleted all of Michiyo’s negative comments on China, and attempted to present a more favorable picture of the country in the added chapters. For instance, he discussed at great length the composite nature of the Yuan government which, he claimed, was aimed at serving its diverse peoples.35 In the chapter on the Ming dynasty, he added a discussion of the Christian missionaries in China, showing that the Chinese were always open to foreign ideas.36 However, despite these efforts, Lidai shilüe did not provide readers with a clear picture of the Chinese nation and its changes over time. In particular, as an experiment in adapting Japanese textbook, Lidai shilüe was awed in two areas. First was the lack of discussion of the meaning of the tripartite periodization. Rather than a scheme denoting change over time, in Lidai shilüe the tripartite periodization functioned as another marker of time, no different from dynastic names or reign titles. The three periods—ancient, medieval, and current—passed on like one dynasty gave way to another, signifying nothing but the passage of time.37 It is true that given Michiyo’s negative view of Chinese history, Liu was hard pressed to convert the tripartite periodization into a scheme of dramatic changes with desirable results. Yet, in editing and expanding Shina tsushi, there were still things that Liu could have done to spell out what the three periods meant and how they were related to the formation of the Chinese nation. For instance, as he did

34 See Naka 1898: juan 1, 6–7. Naka’s view of China was part of the Meiji historians’ attempt to separate Japan from China. For a discussion of the characteristics of Meiji TÔyÔshi, see Tanaka 1993: 115–152. 35 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 5, 1–51. 36 Liu Yizheng 1905: juan 6, 1–37. 37 An example is Liu Yizheng’s discussion of the “middle” (zhongshi ) period. In there, he described one dynasty after another, without showing what had changed during those few hundreds of years. See Liu 1905: juan 2, 1–66; juan 3, 1–97.

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in “The Purpose of History,” Liu could have inserted discussion of the implications of the three periods in the main body of Lidai shilüe. Or better yet, he could have added another chapter at the end of the book to fully explain the historiographical signicance of the tripartite periodization. With no attempt whatsoever to clarify the meaning of the tripartite periodization, Lidai shilüe read like an abbreviated version of imperial history adorned with a new temporal frame. While it is unclear whether this shortfall was Liu’s fault or due to the government’s restrictive guidelines, it reveals the limitations of adapting Japanese textbooks. Perhaps the foremost challenge was that in adapting Japanese textbooks, the Chinese authors had to adjust to the original authors’ viewpoints which, in many cases, were not entirely compatible with the Chinese needs. The second problem in Lidai shilüe was its content. Focusing on government, diplomacy and territorial boundary, Lidai shilüe (like Shina tsushi ) was not completely a national history offering a complex view of the polity. Still shaped by the perspective of imperial history, Liu considered government narrowly as policy debate and political networking that involved only government ofcials, diplomats, and military generals. To a great extent, Liu’s narrow view of government was based on Michiyo’s, which in turn reected the Meiji Japan’s policy of implementing a socio-political reform from the top. On the other hand, Liu was also partly responsible for his silence on elitism. In no small measure, Liu’s narrow view of government stemmed from his own background. For him and the literati of his generation, government was an exclusive eld reserved for the best and brightest who shared, in Peter Bol’s words, “this culture of ours”—i.e., the common experience of passing the civil service examinations.38 Certainly, by glorifying the achievements of the past dynasties, Liu did give readers a sense of belonging to a great nation which remained constant despite the rise and fall of various dynasties. However, he said little about how to translate that sense of belonging into concrete actions to serve the nation. Nor did his government-centered view of politics allow room for citizens—educated and uneducated, rich and poor, young and old—to actively participate in the political process. As such, Lidai shilüe was clearly one sided if measured by the late Qing model of “controlautonomy interaction.” It was strong in emphasizing the need for full

38

See Bol 1992: 1–31.

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control from the top in administering political reform; but it was weak in stressing the importance of local autonomy and state-society interaction to motivate the learned community. Put differently, the problem of Lidai shilüe was that there was too much state-building in the book, and too little local participation. As a result, despite being one of the earlier textbooks that covered the entire history of China, Lidai shilüe was not enthusiastically received during the nal years of the Qing dynasty.39 Overall, it was a sincere but awed attempt to adapt the Meiji Japanese model to the Chinese setting.40

The Three Periods In contrast to Liu Yizheng, Xia Zengyou made his mark by writing at length about the meaning of the tripartite periodization. Published in 1904, two years after Lidai shilüe, Xia’s Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu (hereafter Zuixin jiaokeshu) was printed by the privately owned Commercial Press in anticipation of the new school system. According to Douglas Reynolds, the early history of the Commercial Press can be divided into two periods: a “period of founding” (1897–1902) and a “period of joint Sino-Japanese enterprise” (1903–1913).41 Starting out as a small press in Shanghai, the Commercial Press became a dominant private printing press in the mid 1900s by specializing in publishing textbooks. With new printing technology imported from Japan, the Commercial Press quickly claimed a lion’s share of the textbook market, overshadowing even the government-supported presses. The extant sources do not show the circumstances under which Xia Zengyou was invited to write a history textbook for the Commercial Press, but three things are clear. First, Xia went to Beijing in 1889 to attend the metropolitan examination. Like Liang Qichao 梁啟超

39 In current writings on late Qing historiography, Lidai shilüe is either ignored or only mentioned in passing. This lack of interest in Lidai shilüe reects the negative view of the history textbook dated back to the Republican period. An example is Zhou Yutong’s often cited overview of modern Chinese historiography. See Zhou 1941. 40 Besides Lidai shilüe, there were at least two other government sponsored history textbooks adapted from Japanese texts: Chen Qingnian 陳慶年, Zhongguo lishi 中國歷史 (1903) and Wang Rongbao 汪榮寶, Benchao shi 本朝史 (1903–4). Like Lidai shilüe, the other two textbooks were also not widely used. For a discussion of the limitations of these history textbooks, see Hu and Zhang 1991: 265–71. 41 Reynolds 1993: 121–2.

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(1873–1929) and Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 (1865–98), friends whom he met in Beijing, Xia had passed the provincial level examinations and was well versed in classical studies.42 Apparently he did not pass the municipal examination; nonetheless his status as a junior member of the literati opened doors for him to the burgeoning publishing industry. In the mid-1900s, he contributed articles to Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 and Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 under the pen-name Bieshi 别士 (a distinctive scholar),43 and based on his reputation as a prolic writer, the Commercial Press invited him to write a history textbook. Second, Xia wrote the textbook specically to satisfy the anticipated demand of the new school system. To market Xia’s book, the editors of the Commercial Press included it in a comprehensive series of primary textbooks and gave it an attractive title: “The most recent Chinese history textbook for primary school.” The title not only specied the target audience of the textbook—primary school students; it also claimed its authority and thereby its marketability as being the most updated textbook. Third, Xia appeared to enjoy more freedom in writing the textbook. In stark contrast to Liu Yizheng, Xia was instructed to write his own textbook rather than to adapt a Japanese book. Thus he did not need to adjust to the viewpoint of another author; nor did he need to deal with the complexity of transforming a foreign book into Chinese. Also, it did make a difference that Xia’s textbook was published by a private press. Unlike Liu, who was under the strict supervision of Zhang Zhidong and Miao Quansun because his textbook was sponsored by the Qing government, Xia could be more creative in interpreting the Chinese history, as long as his textbook would satisfy two conditions: conforming to the government guidelines, and selling well in the book market. Yet, despite the freedom that Xia enjoyed, Zuixin jiaokeshu was remarkably similar to Lidai shilüe. Both books began with remarks on the inadequacy of imperial history and a plea for a new general history.44 In addition, both books presented the history of China based on a tripartite periodization, dividing the history into ancient, medieval, and current periods. In the two books, even the dates of the three

42

Liang 1996a. Liang 1996a. 44 Xia 1933: fanli 凡例, 2. Xia Zengyou’s Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu was originally published in 1904. It was republished in 1933 by the Commercial Press under the title Zhongguo gudai shi (History of Ancient China). In this chapter, I use the 1994 Taiwan reprint of the 1933 edition. 43

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periods were identical—the ancient period covered the mythical leaders, the Xia, the Shang and the Zhou dynasties; the medieval period covered from the Qin dynasty to the Tang dynasty; the current period covered from the Song to the Qing.45 More astonishing still, not only were the dates of the three periods identical, the emphasis of the two authors on them was similar as well. For Liu, following Michiyo, the golden age of China appeared in the ancient period during which the basic structure of the Chinese government was formed after the Qin unication in 221 BCE. There might have been intermittent changes in the following two periods, but by and large the basic structure of the Chinese government remained constant over thousands of years. Likewise, Xia considered the ancient period to be the golden age that laid the foundation for the later two periods. To drive home his point, he compared the Zhou dynasty in China with ancient Greece in western civilization, emphasizing that in both cases an ancient period dened the contours of a civilization.46 Based on the idea of the Renaissance (i.e., the return to the ancient literature and arts), he presented the history of China as a three-part story—the founding of the Chinese civilization in the Zhou dynasty, the deviation from the Chinese civilization during the medieval period, and the return to the foundational Chinese civilization in the Qing dynasty.47 For Xia, the challenges that Qing China faced at the turn of the 20th century were blessings in disguise. He admitted that foreign defeats and internal rebellions certainly created a sense of urgency and an atmosphere of apprehension in China, leading some people to wonder whether the country would soon disintegrate “as had happened to Egypt and India.”48 But he reminded his readers that these challenges were actually signs of hope, making Chinese even more determined to return to the roots of their civilization. He predicted that, as Europeans had experienced after the Renaissance, the late Qing would “open a new epoch that had never been seen since the Qin dynasty,” if the Chinese could succeed in reviving their civilization.49 Their similarities notwithstanding, Zuixin jiaokeshu differed from Lidai shilüe in one important area. Unlike Liu who let the tripartite

45 46 47 48 49

Xia Xia Xia Xia Xia

1933: 1933: 1933: 1933: 1933:

fanli, 1. 29. 5–6. 6. 6.

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periodization function like another symbol of time, Xia used it to tell a coherent story. Xia’s story contains many facts and dates that ll ve hundred pages, but its theme is simple: the need to return to the sources of Chinese civilization after centuries of missteps. Also it is a story of hope. It encouraged its readers to look forward to a better future by rejuvenating and reinventing the Chinese tradition. For this reason, Xia felt justied in devoting two-fths of his book to the history of the Zhou dynasty (particularly the birth of Confucianism) which, he believed, epitomized the ideals of Chinese civilization.50 To make his point clear, he used the analogy of a house. He compared Confucius to the foundation of a house, the Qin and Han dynasties to the rooms and oors of the house, and the other dynasties to periodic renovations done to the house.51 What this analogy shows is that as time unfolds, the Chinese have found ways to perfect a system that is originally founded by Confucius. Xia did not bestow such a high honor on Confucius just to promote Confucianism. In honoring Confucius as the founder of Chinese government (zheng 政) and learning ( jiao 教), he called for a partnership between political and cultural leaders. According to Xia, this partnership was not new to China; instead, it had long been part of Chinese civilization. For instance, in discussing the contributions of the Qin and the Han dynasties, he stated: “Whereas Confucius created Chinese learning, the Qin founded Chinese government and the Han dened the Chinese territorial boundaries.”52 Here, by highlighting learning, government, and territory as three equally important components of imperial China, Xia made clear that the goal of returning to the golden age was to reestablish the collaboration between political leaders and the educated elite. For him, this partnership of learning and governing was built on trust, as epitomized by the Han system of selection based on recommendation (zhengpi zhi fa 徴辟之法).53 On the one hand, the Han system allowed the educated elite to have full control of education, providing schooling to the best students recruited from around the country. On the other hand, it linked education to government by assigning students, after nishing schooling, to be apprentices for major political leaders. After years of service, students would be promoted 50 51 52 53

Xia Xia Xia Xia

1933: 1933: 1933: 1933:

29–192. 225. 225. 509.

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to higher ranks in government based on their performance. For Xia, this combination of schooling and practical experience in politics was a prime example of the collaboration between political leaders and the educated elite in training future leaders of the country. He was so impressed by the Han system that he believed “China would not have faced its current problems, had the [Han] system still been in practice.”54 There is no clear evidence to prove that Xia had the late Qing educational reform in mind when he discussed the Han system of selection. But the parallel is obvious because Xia, like many of his contemporaries, was concerned with the status of the educated elite when the civil service examinations were no longer the ladder of success. An example of this preoccupation is Xia’s discussion of the rise and fall of scholars’ fortunes in Chinese history. For him, scholars had changed their social status at least three times in Chinese history.55 First, from the ancient time to the end of the Han dynasty, scholars were classicists ( jingshi 經師) whose main duty was to uphold Confucian orthodoxy to legitimize the imperial government. Second, from the Han to the Tang dynasties, scholars were detached observers (mingshi 名士) who, in order to avoid political persecution, concentrated on non-political scholarship. Third, from the Tang to the Qing dynasties, scholars were candidates of the civil service examinations ( juzi 舉子) who studied nothing but the assigned texts of the examinations. Implied in this threefold development was Xia’s nostalgia for the pre-Qin cultural environment in which independent scholars could move from place to place to look for political employment and enjoyed an equal standing with political leaders. Also suggested in this threefold development was Xia’s negative view of the civil service examination system, which he believed was more an expedient means for suppressing intellectual creativity than a vehicle of social mobility. Since Zuixin jiaokeshu covered only up to the beginning of the Sui dynasty, it was half nished. As an incomplete book, some of the main arguments in Zuixin jiaokeshu were not fully developed. A glaring problem, for example, is Xia’s claim that the Qing would reinvent the Chinese tradition by returning to the golden age of pre-Qin China. As hopeful as it may sound, his call for reinventing the Chinese tradition remains

54 55

Xia 1933: 519. Xia 1933: 389.

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more rhetorical than substantive. Except for a few brief statements at the beginning of the textbook, he offered little information on how the reinvention of tradition might take place. Nevertheless, compared to Liu, Xia was more forthcoming in addressing the relationship between learning and governing. By being more balanced in dealing with the partnership between the cultural eld and the political arena, he was closer than Liu to the late Qing model of “control-autonomy interaction.” Because Xia stressed the partnership between learning and governing, his textbook remained popular beyond the 1911 Revolution, especially among scholars, school teachers, and college students who yearned for a more prominent role in the government. In 1933, Xia’s book was so popular in Republican China that the Commercial Press decided to reissue it under a new title, Zhongguo gudai shi 中國古代史 (Ancient history of China), when a new type of educated elite, professional academics, attempted to make their voice known in the government.56

The Golden Age For Liu Yizheng and Xia Zengyou, the tripartite periodization made their textbooks inspiring. By contrast, analysis of the political philosophy of the Zhou dynasty made Liu Shipei’s textbook memorable. Born to a family of distinguished scholars in Yangzhou, Liu Shipei was trained from childhood in the guwen 古文tradition of Qing philology. With a solid classical training, he earned a juren 舉人 (recommended talent) title in 1902, but failed in the jinshi 進士 (advanced scholar) examination in the following year. Shortly before the Subao 蘇報 case in 1904, he befriended Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), and after 1904 devoted himself to writing pamphlets to promote anti-Manchu revolution. In 1905, he joined the Guoxue baocun hui (Association for Preservation of National Learning), an anti-Manchu organization based in the foreign concessions of Shanghai.57 Financially supported by social celebrities in Shanghai and neighboring areas, Guoxue baocun

56 Xia Zengyou’s history textbook consistently received positive review after his death in 1924, leading to the Commercial Press’s decision to reprint the book in 1933. See Zhou 1941: 531–2. See also Wu, Yuan, and Gui 1989: 132–52; Wang Qingjia 2001: 596. 57 The above information is based on Zarrow 1998. See also Zarrow 1990: 32–45.

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hui published the journal Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 ( Journal of National Essence). The journal carried a wide range of scholarly articles on such topics as the Renaissance in Europe, the different schools of thought in pre-Qin China, and the history of the Han race. As a member of Guoxue baocun hui, Liu Shipei regularly contributed articles to Guocui xuebao under the pen-name, Guanghan 光漢 (“restore [the rule of ] the Han race”).58 Besides publishing Guocui xuebao, the Guoxue baocun hui also published history textbooks such as Liu Shipei’s Zhongguo lishi jiaokushu. At rst glance, it seems contradictory that being an anti-Manchu organization, the Guoxue baocun hui would assist the Qing government in preparing for a national school system. But at a closer look, the publication of history textbooks was compatible with the political agenda of the Guoxue baocun hui, namely, launching the dual revolution to topple the Manchu dynasty, and in turn, to end the absolute monarchy in China.59 This goal of achieving a dual revolution was clearly stated in the writings of Deng Shi 鄧實 (1877–1945) and Huang Jie 黃節 (1873–1935), the leaders of Guoxue baocun hui and the editors of Guocui xuebao. For them, the reason to rebel against the Qing was not only because it was an oppressive government of a foreign race, but also because it perpetuated the system of absolute monarchy dated back to the Qin Dynasty. Thus, the toppling of the Qing was to kill two birds with one stone, that is, to end the oppression by a foreign race and to end the oppression of an unjust political system.60 In 1905, the year when the Guoxue baocun hui was founded, the organization was poised to promote its political agenda by shaping the curriculum of the national school system. At a time when classical scholarship was still the dominant mode of learning and a symbol of social status, the Guoxue baocun hui was ready to use its members’ literati status to promote its political agenda. By designing and publishing history textbooks, it intended to plant revolutionary seeds in the minds of young students. A case in point was Liu Shipei’s Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu (hereafter Jiaokeshu). To spark revolution in young students, Liu wrote the textbook

58 Elsewhere I have discussed Liu Shipei’s role in using history to promote revolution. See Hon 2004a. 59 Elsewhere I have discussed the relationship between anti-absolutism and antiManchuism in the Guocui group, see Hon 2004c. For further discussion, see Tang Zhijun 1989: 316–325; Ding and Chen 1995: 341–356; Zheng 1997: 111–54. 60 See Huang 1905; Deng 1905.

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in the form of a political treatise, seeking to explain philologically the meaning of major political concepts from the ancient times to the Western Zhou period (ca. 1050–771 BCE). In terms of content, his goal was to clarify the political vision of the Western Zhou people, rather than to narrate the history of ancient China. For this reason, the tripartite periodization played no role in Jiaokeshu. Reecting the Japanese inuence of the time, Liu began the textbook with a long discussion of the alleged migration of the Chinese from Mesopotamia.61 The hypothesis, formally known as “the western origin of the early Chinese civilization” (xi lai shuo 西來説), was rst proposed in 1894 by Terrien de Lacouperie (1845–94) of University College in London. It was built on archaeological discoveries in West Asia that were linked by comparative philology to Chinese classical texts (particularly the Yijing).62 Lacouperie’s hypothesis, translated and transmitted in Japan, was important to Liu Shipei. For him, the migration of the Chinese from Mesopotamia provided an answer to the question of why the Western Zhou political philosophy contained so many contemporary European concepts. Despite the geographical distance and their cultural differences, Liu claimed, the Chinese and the Europeans shared similar political ideas, such as equality and balance of power, because both peoples had originated from Mesopotamia in ancient antiquity.63 For instance, Liu Shipei argued that the balance of power was a common idea that Chinese and Europeans shared. Using philology to discuss philosophy, he explained the meanings of the characters jun (君, king) and qun (群, people) in the minds of the Western Zhou people.64 For him, the character jun 君stands for the legislative and administrative power of a king, as indicated in its two components—a magistrate ( yin 尹) and a mouth (kou 口). But even possessing legislative and administrative power, a king will not be a full-edged ruler until he receives popular support. Hence, for Liu, the ultimate political authority lies not in the hands of the king but in the people, as symbolized in the character qun 群—a ock of sheep ( yang 羊) following their leader ( jun 君). This 61 Liu Shipei 1906: juan 1, 1–52. Liu stated that his discussion of the Western origin of the Chinese race was based on Shina bunmeishi 支那文明史. Although Liu did not mention the names of the authors, Shina bunmeishi was co-authored by Shirakawa JirÔ (1875–1919) and Kokubu Tanenori (1873–1950). 62 See Lacouperie 1894: 1–81. For a biography of Lacouperie, see Butt 2002: 72–74. 63 Liu Shipei 1906: juan 3, 52. 64 Liu Shipei 1906: juan 1, 23–24.

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balance of power between the rulers and the ruled applied to rituals as well. According to Liu, an example can be found in the two Chinese characters for rituals, fengsu 風俗. Whereas feng refers to teaching ( jiao 教) initiated by the government, su suggests local customs (signied by the particle ren 人). Thus, for Liu, rituals are never xed; instead, they are exible, malleable, and adaptive depending on the dialogue between the government and its people.65 In discussing the Western Zhou political system, Liu Shipei paid special attention to the limits of the government’s power. He admitted that as time passed, the Zhou kings gathered more power, extending their control over matters relating to religion, land distribution, and property transmission. But the basic structure of the Zhou system, he argued, remained in tact. It was still a system of checks and balances wherein the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers were separately controlled by different players in the political arena. To underscore this point, he discussed at great length the rights (quanli 權力) enjoyed by the Zhou people, such as the rights of free speech, assembly, and joining the government. At the same time, he reminded readers that the Zhou people paid equal attention to performing civic duties, such as paying taxes and serving in the army.66 All in all, in Liu’s mind, the Western Zhou political system resembled a contemporary European government, characterized by “its combination of governing and learning” (zhengjiao heyi 政教合一) and “its use of rituals in shaping social behavior” ( yi li fang min 以禮坊民).67 Obviously, in Jiaokeshu Liu Shipei focused not on what really happened during the Western Zhou but on how its history might shed light on the political structure of late Qing China. As a history textbook, Jiaokeshu said little about the history of ancient China; but it inspired young students to think about what an ideal Chinese government would look like in the 20th century. More important it taught a valuable lesson regarding how to read the classical texts allegorically and creatively to serve contemporary needs.68 In 1906, when Jiaokeshu was 65

Liu Shipei 1906: juan 1, 48. Liu Shipei 1906: juan 2, 23–30. 67 Liu Shipei 1906: juan 3, 50. 68 In current writings on Liu Shipei and the Guocui scholars, there is a tendency to de-emphasize their contribution in reinventing classical studies in the new political context of late Qing China. They are described either as “outdated” or “conservative.” For a sample of this view, see Schneider 1976; Hu and Zhang 1991: 272–9; Wang Qingjia 2001: 601–2. My discussion below aims to call attention to the contemporary signicance of the Guocui scholars’ creative re-invention of classical studies. 66

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published, the civil service examinations had already been abolished for a year. For many former examination candidates, the abolition of the civil service examinations was a traumatic event because it raised a host of questions concerning classical learning: Would classical studies still be the center of scholars’ attention? Would they be gradually marginalized, as poetry and prose had been in earlier times when no longer tested in examinations? Would they be reinvented to serve the new system of the nation-state? In the 1900s, these were not idle questions to junior literati such as Liu Shipei and his friends at Guoxue baocun hui. For better or worse, they had already invested years, if not decades, in studying the classical texts and perfecting their philological skills to prepare for the examinations. Now the examinations had been abolished, and classical learning was no longer directly linked to political power and social status. Rather than giving up the fruits of their hard labor, they sought to adjust to the new environment by converting their classical learning into new forms of cultural capital. In Jiaokeshu, Liu proved that classical learning could still play a role in political discourse after the end of the civil service examinations. Through creative interpretation and allegorical imagination, he demonstrated that classical texts were the repository of ideals and wisdom, educating young students about their rights and duties as citizens of the nation.69 In addition, as Liu Shipei suggested, classical learning could be an effective means of local mobilization. For Liu Yizheng and Xia Zengyou, before they began commenting on the relationship between government and society, rst they had to write hundreds of pages to demonstrate the underlying pattern of Chinese history. Sometimes they were so overwhelmed by historical facts that they could only briey touch on the state-society relationship. Instead, by using philology, Liu Shipei directly explained his understanding of the “control-autonomy interaction.” While at times the accuracy of Liu’s analyses of the Western Zhou system may have been doubtful, his readers could hardly have missed his argument for a balance of the power between the rulers and the ruled, the state and society, and the center and the periphery. Clearly, among the three authors, Liu Shipei was the most radical in interpreting the “control-autonomy interaction.” He would not accept government control of learning as Liu Yizheng did; nor would he settle, like Xia

69 For a further discussion of the reinvention of classical studies in early 20th century China, see Tang Zhijun 1989: 246–365.

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Zengyou, for the collaboration between the learned community and the government. Instead, in idealizing the Western Zhou, he looked forward to a political system in which philosophers would be kings.

The Social Approach to Historiography From this comparison of three late Qing history textbooks, we can draw two conclusions. First, we need to re-examine the Chinese adoption of linear progression. The current view in the eld assumes that when Chinese authors adopted the Western form of national history, especially the tripartite periodization, they automatically accepted linear progression in time.70 This may have been true in some particular cases; however, to many Chinese authors at the turn of the 20th century, time did not consistently move forward even though they adopted the tripartite periodization.71 As discussed above, for Liu Yizheng, Xia Zengyou and Liu Shipei, time actually could be seen as moving backward in the sense that lessons from ancient antiquity could aid in creating an ideal political system in the present and future. Of course, underlying their notion of time is the Confucian idea of the “golden age,” which presumably sets the standard for humanity for centuries to come. But their propensity to look backward rather than forward was not necessarily a result of their cyclical thinking. Rather, it was due, as Liang Qichao put it, to their belief in “liberation by returning to the antiquity” ( yi fugu wei jiefang 以復古為解放).72 It is, of course, not easy to identify one single source of this belief in “liberation by returning to the antiquity.” Perhaps part of it came from the longstanding Confucian tradition of glorifying the Zhou dynasty. Perhaps part of it came from the recent success of Meiji Japan in modernizing the country by “restoring” (ishin 維新) the imperial system.

70 See Duara 1995: 17–50; Xiaobing Tang 1996: 1–45; Q. Edward Wang 2001: 1–50. 71 Note that the current scholarship on the Chinese “new historiography” is centered on Liang Qichao. See Duara 1995; Xiaobing Tang 1996; Q. Edward Wang 2001; Karl 2002. While there is no doubt that Liang Qichao is a key gure in modern Chinese historical discourse, focusing on him creates an imbalance in the study of modern Chinese historiography, leaving out many equally important historians. As I have shown, the historical discourse in early 20th-century China was far more complex and variegated than a focus on just Liang Qichao would suggest. 72 Liang Qichao, 1996b.

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But if we take their words seriously, both Xia Zengyou and Liu Shipei saw a parallel between late Qing China and Renaissance Europe. Repeatedly they compared their Chinese “golden age” with classical Greece, and considered themselves as following in the footsteps of the Renaissance humanists in returning to the ideal world of the past. For them, as suggested in the word “renaissance,” return means the rebirth of life after reconnecting with the past. For this reason, despite the implied linear progression in the tripartite periodization, Xia Zengyou did not consider the temporal scheme to be progressive or linear. Although he occasionally discussed the gradual progress from one dynasty to another in his historical narrative, Xia put his hope in returning to the “golden age” of the Zhou dynasty after centuries of missteps. For him, the Zhou dynasty was not a time in the past but an ideal for the future. Apparently there was an element of progressivism in Xia’s return to the Zhou dynasty, and yet his progressivism was undoubtedly rooted in an idealization of the past. The second conclusion is that late Qing historical discourse was far more complex and diverse if we look at it from the social perspective. As stated earlier, the social approach—i.e., relating historical discourse to the changing role of the educated elite—need not replace other approaches. Approaches focusing on methodology, concept, or world view are equally valid in elucidating the complex nature of modern Chinese historiography. However, the social approach adds a new dimension to our understanding of late Qing historical discourse, namely, the connection between historical discourse and socio-political change. Certainly, it is widely accepted that late Qing historical discourse was part of the social and political transformation of China after the mid-19th century. The challenge, though, is how to make the connection explicit. In this chapter, I have attempted to make the connection clear by focusing on the impact on the learned community of the Qing government’s decision to replace the civil service examinations with a national school system. In comparing the three history textbooks, it is evident that the abolition of the civil service examinations had profound social and political implications. Socially speaking, the abolition of the civil service examination was tantamount to a re-denition of the educated elite, causing many members of the literati to lose their social privilege. The three authors examined here were, in one way or another, making adjustments to their post-examination lives. Liu Yizheng transformed himself into a school teacher. Xia Zengyou became a prolic writer.

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Liu Shipei assumed the role of a political theorist. Politically speaking, the founding of a national school system triggered a re-thinking of the political structure of late Qing government. As the Qing government assumed more responsibilities as a nation-state, it exposed its weaknesses and became increasingly vulnerable to criticism. The three history textbooks examined here are examples of how quickly the Qing government lost its credibility in its attempt to become a nation-state. In Lidai shilüe (1902), Liu Yizheng was condent that the “Great Qing” would provide effective leadership in rejuvenating China. In Zuixin jiaokeshu (1904), Xia Zengyou remained optimistic about the outcome of a Qing-led reform. But when we reach Jiaokeshu (1906), we nd Liu Shipei demanding the sharing of power between the rulers and the ruled to create a participatory government. This steady erosion of trust in the Qing government indicates that the creative ambiguity of the “control-autonomy interaction” might have back-red on government leaders. Instead of being a platform to garner local political energy to serve the central government, it turned out to be a forum for the educated elite to demand power. In this respect, late Qing history textbooks should be examined as part of the negotiation of power between the state and the society, and between the national and the local, during the nal years of the Qing dynasty. In raising the educated elite’s hopes in political participation but refusing to delegate power to them, the Qing government created widespread dissatisfaction and disillusionment among members of the learned community. As Joseph Esherick has pointed out, it was more this expanding “climate of dissatisfaction and disillusionment” than the revolutionary movement that eventually brought down the Qing.73 And, in the three history textbooks, we see clear traces of this expanding climate of dissatisfaction and disillusionment. We also see the sprouting political aspirations of the new educated elite who eventually made the imperial system obsolete. Above all, if history writing is indeed a “vector of memory” bringing the past to the present,74 these three history textbooks created a memory of the past that famed the discussion of social and political change in early 20th-century China.

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Esherick 1976: 143–76. For the signicance of “vector of memory,” see Rousso 1991: 1–11, 219–270.

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References Cited Bailey, Paul J. (1990), Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bastid, Marianne (1988), Educational Reform in Early 20th Century China, translated by Paul J. Bailey. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. Bol, Peter K. (1992), “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions of T’ang and Sung China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, translated by Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butt, Richard (2002), The Book of Changes (Zhouyi). London; RoutledgeCurzon. Chaffee, John W. (1995), The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China, new edition. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cheng Meibao 程美寶 (May-bo Ching) (2003), “You ai xiang er ai guo: Qing mo Guangdong xiangtu jiaocai de guojia huayu” 由愛鄉而愛國﹕清末廣東鄉土教材 的國家話語 (To love my native-place, to love my country: The national discourse on native-place textbooks in late Qing), in Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 2003, 4, 68–84. Deng Shi 鄧實 (1905), “Guoxue tonglun” 國學通論 (A Study of National Learning), in Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 3 (1905), 261–278. Ding Weizhi 丁偉志 and Chen Song 陳崧 (1995), Zhongxi tiyong zhi jian: Wanqing zhongxi wenhua guan shulun 中西體用之間﹕晚清中西文化觀述論 (Between Chinese Essence and Western Function: A Study of the Late Qing Views on Eastern and Western Cultures). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Duara, Prasenjit (1995), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elman, Benjamin A. (2000), A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— and Alexander Woodside (eds.) (1994), Education and Society in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Esherick, Joseph W. (1976), Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fogel, Joshua A, and Peter G. Zarrow (1997), Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890 –1920. Armork, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Ho, Ping-ti (1962), The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911. New York: Columbia University Press. Hon, Tze-ki (2004a), “Revolution as Recovery: The Use of History in Minbao and Guocui xue bao,” in Asian Prole, 32, 1 (February 2004), 7–19. —— (2004b), “Cultural Identity and Local Self-government: A Study of Liu Yizheng’s History of Chinese Culture,” Modern China 30, 4 (October 2004), 506–542. —— (2004c), “National Essence, National Learning, and Culture: Historical Writings in Guocui xuebao, Xueheng, and Guoxue jikan,” in Historiography: East and West 1: 2 (Fall 2004), 240–287. Hu Fengxiang 胡逢祥 and Zhang Wenjian 張文建 (eds.) (1991), Zhongguo jindai shixue sichao yu liupai 中國近代史學思潮與流派 (The Trends and Currents of Thought in Modern Chinese Modern Historiography). Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 265–71. Huang Jie 黃節 (1905), “Guocui xuebao xu” 國粹學報敘 (Preface to Journal of National Essence), Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 1 (1905), 11–17. Ip, Hung-yok, Tze-ki Hon, and Chiu-chun Lee (2003), “The Plurality of Chinese Modernity: A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement,” in Modern China 29, 4 (October 2003), 490–509. Karl, Rebecca E. (2002), Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Kuhn, Philip A. (1975), “Local Self-government under the Republic: Problems of Control, Autonomy, and Mobilization,” in Wakeman, Frederic Jr, and Carolyn Grant (eds.) (1975), Conict and Control in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 257–98. Lacouperie, Terrien de (1894), Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization from 2,300 B.C. to 200 A.D. London: Asher & Co. Li Guojun 李國鈞 and Wang Bingzhao 王炳照, (eds.) (2000), Zhongguo jiaoyu zhidu tongshi 中國教育制度通史 (A History of Chinese Education System) volume 6, part 2. Jinian: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1840–1911. Liang Qichao (1996a), “Wang you Xia Suiqing xiansheng” 亡友夏穗卿先生 (In Memory of My Friend Xia Suiqing), in Yinbing shi heji: Wenji 飲冰室合集﹕文集 (Collected Writings of Ice-Drinking Studio: Articles) (1996), vol. 44. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 20–21. —— (1996b), “Qing dai xueshu gailun” 清代學術概論 (A Study of Qing Thought), in Yinbing shi heji: Zhuanji 飲冰室合集﹕專集 (Collected Writings of Ice-Drinking Studio: Monographs) (1996). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 34: 6. Liu Longxin 劉龍心 (2001), “Xueke tizhi yu jindai zhongguo shixue de jianli” 學科 體制與近代中國史學的建立 (The Curriculum System and the Establishment of Modern Chinese Historiography), in Luo Zhitian 羅志田 (ed.) (2001), Ershi shiji de Zhongguo: Xueshu yu shehui—Shixue juan 二十世紀的中國﹕學術與社會—史學卷 (Scholarship and Society in Twentieth Century China: Section on Historical Studies). Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 449–585. Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1906), Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 中國歷史教科書 (Chinese History Textbook), in Liu Shenshu yishu 劉申叔遺書 (Collected Writings of Liu Shenshu) (1997), vol. 4. Shanghai: Jiangsu guji chubanshe. Liu Yizheng 柳誼徵 (1905), Lidai shilüe 歷代史略 (A Brief Account of the Past). Shanghai: Zhongxin shuju. Originally published in 1902. —— (2002), “Zizhuan yu huiyi” 自傳與回憶 (Autobiography and Memories), in Liu Zengfu 柳曾符 and Liu Jia 柳佳 (eds.) (2002), Qutang xueji 劬堂學记 (Record of Learning of Qutang). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 8–9. Naka Michiyo 那珂通世 (1898), Shina tsushi 支那通史 (A General History of China). Shanghai: Tongwen xueshe. Ou Zhijian 歐志堅 (2003), “Lishi jiaokeshu yu minzu guojia xingxiang de yingzao: Liu Yizheng Lidai shilüe ququ Nake Tongshi zhina tongshi de neirong” 歷史教科書與民族 國家形象的營造﹕柳誼徵《歷代史略》去取那珂通世《支那通史》的內容 (History Textbooks and the Construction of the Image of Nation-State: The Selective Appropriation of Naka Michiyo’s Shina tsushi in Liu Yizheng’s Lidai shilüe), in Bian Xiaoxuan jiaoshou bashi shouchen lunwenji 卞孝萱教授八十壽辰論文集 (The Collection of Essays on the Eightieth Birthday of Professor Bian Xiaoxuan). Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 71–96. Qu Xingui 璩鑫圭 and Tang Liangyan 唐良炎 (eds.) (1991), Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi ziliao huibian: Xuezhi yanbian 中國近代教育史資料匯編﹕學制演變 (Collection of Historical Documents on Modern Chinese Educational History: Changes in School System). Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe. Reynolds, Douglas R. (1993), China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. Rousso, Henry (1991), The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schneider, Laurence A. (1976), “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia,” in Charlotte Furth (ed.) (1976), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 57–89. Schwintzer, Ernest P. (1992), “Education to Save the Nation: Huang Yanpei and the Educational Reform Movement in Early 20th Century China.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.

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Sun Yongru 孫永和 (1993), Liu Yizheng pingzhuan 柳誼徵評傳 (A Biography of Liu Yizheng). Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe. Tang Zhijun 湯志鈞 (1989), Jindai jingxue yu zhengzhi 近代經學與政治 (Classical Learning and Politics in Modern China). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Tang, Xiaobing (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tanaka, Stefan (1993), Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wang, David Der-wei (1991), Fin-de-Siècle Splender: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wang, Q. Edward (2001), Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wang Qingjia 王晴佳 (Q. Edward Wang) (2001), “Zhongguo shixue de kexuehua— zhuanke hua yu kua xueke” 中國史學的科學化—專科化與跨學科 (Turning Chinese History into Science: Professionalization and Inter-disciplinary Approaches), in Luo Zhitian 羅志田 (ed.) (2001), Ershi shiji de Zhongguo: Xueshu yu shehui—Shixue juan 二十 世紀的中國：學術與社會—史學卷 (Scholarship and Society in Twentieth-century China: Section on Historiography). Jinan: Shandong daxue chubanshe. Wu Ze 吳澤, Yuan Yingguang 袁英光, and Gui Zunyi 桂遵義 (eds.) (1989), Zhongguo jindai shixue shi 中國近代史學史 (History of Modern Chinese Historical Studies). Yancheng: Jiangsu guji chubanshe. Xia Zengyou (1904) [1994 reprint of 1933 edition], Zhongguo gudai shi 中國古代史 (History of Ancient China) [original title: Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新 中學中國歷史教科書 (The Newest Chinese History Textbook for Middle School]. Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan. Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之 (1994), Xixue dongjian yu wanqing shehui 西學東漸與晚清社會 (The Rise of Western Learning and Late Qing Society). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Yü, Ying-shih (1994), “Changing conceptions of National History in Twentieth-century China,” in Erik Lönnroth, Karl Molin, and Ragnar Björk (eds.), Conceptions of National History: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 155–75. Zarrow, Peter (1998), “Liu Shipei,” in Wang Ke-wen (ed.) (1998), Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 193–4. —— (1990), Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Zheng Shiqu 鄭師渠 (1997), Wanqing guocui pai: Wenhua sixaing yanjiu 晚清國粹派﹕文化 思想研究 (The Guocui Group of the Late Qing: A Study of Culture and Thought). Beijng: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe. Zhou Yutong 周予同 (1941), “Wu shi nian lai Zhongguo zhi xin shixue” 五十年來中 國之新史學 (Chinese New Historiography in the Last Fifty Years), in Zhu Weizheng 朱維錚 (ed.) (1983), Zhou Yutong jingxue shi lunzhu xuanji 周予同經學史論著選集 (A Collection of Zhou Yutong’s Writings on Classics and History). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubenshe, 534–5.

PART TWO

GENERAL HISTORY AND WORLD HISTORY

DISCONTINUOUS CONTINUITY: THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SYNTHESIS OF “GENERAL HISTORY” IN 20TH-CENTURY CHINA Mary G. Mazur*

In the midst of the transformative currents in early 20th century thought and political culture in China, a modern genre of Chinese history known as “general history” (tongshi 通史) appeared. The most familiar form of historical writing to general Chinese readers today, this genre was created by historians to fulll the need for a sense of China’s identity, the need to understand China’s heritage from the past during this time of rapid change. The earliest phase in the development of these general histories began before the collapse of the Qing dynasty, about the time the idea of nation was emerging in the 1890s and 1900s. It was also when the rst halting steps were being taken in reforms that led to what would become the post dynastic polity. My aim here is to examine the beginnings of this new genre to assess what made it different from past historical writing. Over the course of the next several decades, the historians creating the genre were consciously working at shaping a form of new historical writing for civil society, writing free of the authoritative gestalt of the dynastic polity with its organic necessity for a historical narrative submissive to its internal requirements for legitimation. During and preceding the period in which this new historical form was beginning to reweave the tapestry of historical memory out of threads from the past and the present, the “present”1 was an agonizing time of internal rebellion and division, of humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1895, aggressive moves by other foreign

Earlier versions of this article were presented at annual meeting panels of the American Historical Association (1994) and Association for Asian Studies (1997). A translated version Ma Zimei 1997, 56–65. My appreciation goes to Charles Hayford, Prasenjit Duara, Joshua Fogel, Tze-ki Hon, Donald Price, Guy Alitto, Kevin Doak, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom for comments, encouragement and advice on various versions. 1 Wilson 1992 stresses the framework of the “present” in studying the political culture of the transformational Bakumatsu period in 19th century Japan. Cohen 1997 develops the same kind of contextual approach.

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imperialist powers, and weakness in the dynastic leadership. The constraints of the ofcial examination bureaucratic recruitment system, with its canonical curriculum that had dominated political culture for centuries, were fast becoming a major focal point of concern in the burgeoning reform effort. Those who rst called for and theorized the new historical genre in these years felt a sense of “mission”2 to write history to meet the needs of the present and future. We can ask: what did these historians see as the needs of their “present” and the future ahead? One answer was to demonstrate the autonomous existence of Chinese cultural identity, separate from the dynastic state framework of past histories. Another intention was to provide narratives of the past that, by strengthening cultural consciousness, would lead to a vital sense of national identity for the foundation of the emerging polity in the present and future. There was discontinuity and yet continuity in this use of the historical past to inform the present cultural identity and create a national consciousness. As the past was questioned and existing histories critiqued, it was reordered and rewritten, but still we see that the narrators continued as signicant agents in relation to the polity, as their historian forebears had for thousands of years. Here, my additional premise is that the growing awareness of the distinctness of cultural identity over time and the development of the general history genre in China were a part of the worldwide development in new historical studies as the 20th century opened. This analysis differs from the interpretations of early modern historical writing in China as mainly inuenced by the Japanese model, as described by Joshua Fogel and others, or as strictly a part of the so-called defensive rationalization process of the Chinese struggle for modernization and Westernization, as proposed by Joseph Levenson.3 Several papers in the rst section of this collection have discussed the late 19th and early 20th century Qing years, the prelude to the owering of the new historiography. Peter Zarrow looks at the late Qing reform program’s primary school history textbooks. In his essay, “Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks,” Tze-ki Hon has introduced three historians: Liu Yizheng, Xia Zengyou, and Liu Shipei, who made major contributions to the emergence of the new historical writing.

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For “the mission of history,” see Zhang 1904. Fogel 2004; Levenson 1965; and Levenson 1970.

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In this second section of this collection, we look further at the seminal period of the last years of the 19th century and early decades of the new century. In these years of dynastic collapse and the formation of a republican government, just as the whole polity was subject to searching thought and deep change, conceptions of how history should be analyzed and written were undergoing serious questioning and change. Tongshi, i.e., general history, especially became the focal point of historical discussion. In this paper, my discussion of the theoretical writing on historiography and general history of two of the most inuential Chinese writers of the time, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 and Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (Zhang Binglin 章炳麟), will be followed by my choice of two early key examples of modern general histories by the historians Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 and Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛. I will bring out the little recognized, early and signicant inuence on Liang of a translated history of 19th century Europe by Robert Mackenzie well before Liang went to Japan. My discussion of Xia Zengyou’s tongshi, discussed by Tze-ki Hon from a different standpoint in his essay, will point out Xia’s seminal efforts to break through traditional themes that had structured history and emphasize streams of action and disjuncture in the past, previously largely ignored or deemphasized. In examining Gu Jiegang’s tongshi, we will look at the penetrating historical view of one of the 20th century’s most important Chinese historians.

Forerunners of Modern Theorizing of General History For as long as the entity that today is called “China” has existed, the practice of writing the past, that is to say “history,” has been an integral part of the ordering and rule of society. Those who possessed knowledge of the past and wrote of it, the shi 士 or knight-scholars, were powerful in civil society for they could understand “how men had fared when they lived in accord with or in deance of the moral injunctions of the classics.”4 In China, in historical time, history and political rule have always been intertwined; one did (does) not exist without the other. This fundamental and continuous interdependence of the two has no parallel in our own experience of contemporary civilization. These writers of history in the traditional society were scholars who were invested with great moral authority by the nature of their task, 4

From the Zuo zhuan. See Chang 1983: 88; Wright 1963: 37.

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their most important reader being the ruler who dared not ignore what the historical record contained. The subject matter of the historian was of concern to the ruler and the elites and hence reected the value system of this group. One of the main purposes of the history written was to substantiate the rule. Since legitimation was dispensed or withdrawn through praise and blame in the historical record, over the centuries each reign made certain that the narrative recorded the story favorably for it and the dynasty. With few exceptions, this was the nature of the vast production of historical writing, whether ofcial or private, up to the end of the 19th century.5 This deeply ingrained valuation of the role of the historian remained in the political culture in the 20th century even as historical writing was discussed and debated. Familiar as we are in Western polities with the nonengaged, sideline commentator position of the historian, it is not easy to comprehend the sensitive nature and engagement intrinsic in the role of historian in China.6 More than a hundred years before Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan began to write about the need for a new form of historical writing as the Qing collapsed at the turn of the century, one of their forerunners had written of the need for a new kind of historical writing. The pioneering mid-Qing historian Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) had called for a true general history (tongshi ) that would establish a critique of past histories. A primary requirement of Zhang’s for this history was that the historian must pay particular attention to the importance of historical context and the details of related events. In his call to historians, Zhang Xuecheng said that, contrary to the history that had been written in the past, the new histories should avoid repetition, select the important from the unimportant, and include interpretation and evaluation of right and wrong. In short, he sought the distinguishing characteristic of analysis, rather than simply a record or chronicle. Signicantly, in Zhang’s vision this general history would have the capacity “to establish the principles to rule the nation.” Although he never wrote a general history himself, this critical notion of history and its use was available at the turn of the century to stimulate the reformers who looked to a re-formed history as an instrument for redening the past and creat-

5

Balazs 1964: 135. For the Chinese historian’s engagement in the role of historian vis-à-vis the state in the period from the 1930s until 1965, see Mazur 1997: 63–85. 6

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ing autonomous historical narratives that would be the foundation of historical consciousness in the future nation.7

Writing History and the Transformation from Examination Canon to “Culture” Around the turn of the century, the question of what we will call culture and cultural identity emerged for writers of history as the central issue intertwined with the role of history and new ideas of nation. “Culture,” in the sense we are using it here, very generally signies “the social and intellectual formations of a group.”8 In this situation of foment, with the abolition of the examination system in 1905, the entire Confucian academic-bureaucratic system undergirding the polity ended in what was gradually understood to be a profound seismic change.9 The system’s demise meant the political-social gestalt that had shaped the world of Chinese thought and the lives of the intelligentsia for centuries was weakened, with no orienting or dening structure in the political culture to provide continuity. The world of thought and politics was no longer an institutional unity standing on the bedrock of the orthodoxy of the classical canon as prescribed and controlled by the examination system. In this situation there were serious implications for historical conceptions and writing. As the examinations ceased to structure the minds and lives of the leaders in the polity, thought was freed from political practice. Expansion and broadening, rethinking and questioning the political culture and its basis in past as well as present thought and values became possible. It seemed that the classical heritage with its permutations actually existed separately and could be examined piece by piece beyond institutional, canonical control. It became possible to deal with the heritage of the past in the context of the contemporary situation and to consider present

7

He Bingsong 1928: 7. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1975. Williams 1958, in his work on the conception of culture, discusses the development of the idea and the use of the word itself in Anglo-European society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development in China a hundred years later of the modern idea and use of the word bears similarities, but takes its meaning from the ancient idea in China. 9 Franke 1960; Borthwick 1983; Mazur 1980. Borthwick, 85–86, points out that in abolishing the examination system the government had, without realizing it, “done away with a large part of its spiritual authority.” 8

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thought and needs previously shut out by the examination canon. As the world of thought became independent from the structural body of the polity, it came to be conceptualized separately as a part of China’s “culture” wenhua 文化.10 However, while it now stood as an autonomous conception, “culture” (the social and economic formations of the group) was not actually a radically new idea in China at all. From the classical period the character wen had carried the meaning of “writing” or “civil,” as opposed to “military.” Hua represented the idea of change or transformation. Together in Chinese they also sometimes signied “civilization,” as the word “culture” did in English. Even as far back as the Han dynasty, wenhua had been used to represent cultivation by education in civil rule.11 Since the Qin-Han era, wenhua had represented the highest level of orthodoxy, the Great Tradition.12 Now, as they coped with the shifting position of the classical heritage, intellectuals began to endow the word wenhua with the meaning of the social and intellectual conceptions within that heritage and within their present social context. Consequently, ideas far beyond the classical canon could be considered. It was in this atmosphere that new ideas about the content of history were discussed.

Theorizing Modern General History In the course of this political and cultural transition two men, Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan, were important agents of change in the transformation in historical writing. Widely read and respected, the inuence of each on the development of general history was through theoretical works on historical writing. Neither actually ever wrote a

10 In the Comprehensive Chinese-English Dictionary 1991, wenhua is dened as culture, or civilization. In English, culture in this sense means “the social and intellectual formations of a group,” American Heritage Dictionary. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the “civilization, customs, artistic achievements, etc., of a people, esp. at a certain stage of its development or history.” For background on this section esp. Schneider 1976, 57–89 and Furth 1976, 113–50. See also Kenji 1990; Wong 1989. 11 Ciyuan vol. 2, 1356, illustrates wenhua with the model expression wenzhi he jiaohua, used by Liu Xiang in the Han dynasty. 12 For a very different view of the relation of culture (culturalism in his construction) and nation see Levenson 1965, and Townsend’s 1992 discussion of Levenson’s construction, 97–130.

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general history of China, although in later years Liang began a project on cultural history.13 The man most closely connected with stimulating the idea of writing New History linked with strengthening the idea of nation at the end of the Qing was Liang Qichao (1873–1929). As a young man he had studied with the iconoclastic scholar reform leader Kang Youwei 康有為. In his widely read writings over the next years, Liang addressed the crucial, nodal areas of the nature of society and polity over time and the questions of change and the relation of men, society, and nation. In 1897 the young Liang developed his fundamental theme of qun 群, the formation of the people into groups, and the key role of popular grouping in the transformation of the polity in the essay “Shuo qun” 說群.14 He identied the critical issue as the transformation of the people and the country into a nation, which, even before he was exiled at the fall of the reform movement in 1898, he was referring to as guojia qun 國家群, nation-group.15 As Liang’s ideas on transformation of the polity developed, he gave key importance to the knowledge the group had of the historical past and to the writing of the past into history for the group. As a brilliant scholar candidate in the early 1890s, he had prepared for the civil service examinations by studying the canon of classical texts, which led him to a deep knowledge of the past. At the same time, while preparing for the examinations, Liang had read translations of Western books. One volume in particular inuenced him—the translation by the missionary Timothy Richard16 into Chinese of Robert Mackenzie’s Nineteenth Century,17 rst published in China in 13 Q. Edward Wong 2001, passim, for the view that the crux of the changes in historical writing in China was a result of the May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. This has been a popular view among Western and Chinese analysts who were drawn to the notion of the May Fourth era as a revolutionary demarcation point in cultural change. However, study of the late nineteenth century and the rst half of the twentieth century has convinced me that deep change, even iconoclasm, began much earlier and continued to come to fruition long after the May Fourth era. 14 For Liang’s ideas on qun, see Liang 1936. For Liang, see Hao Chang 1971; Huang 1972; Tang 1996; Karl 2002. 15 See Liang 1936. This is discussed in Hao Chang 1971: 109. 16 See Bohr 2000 for Timothy Richard (1845–1919), a Welsh Baptist missionary who supported the reform movement in China. 17 Ma Kenxi, Taixi xinshi lanyao (The Outline of Occidental New History) translated by Li Timoutai (Timothy Richard) (Shanghai: Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese, 1895); ninth edition (1902) used here. The English original was Robert Mackenzie, The History of the Nineteenth Century (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1880). Collingwood 1946: 145–46, refers to the Mackenzie history as a third-rate historical work, apparently because it upheld the idea of progress.

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1895, the year of China’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan. Reading this history, known in Chinese as Taixi xinshi lanyao 泰西新史 覽要 (The Outline of Occidental New History) with Richard’s Preface relating it directly to China’s situation, was for Liang a crucial exposure to Western historical writing at the critical moment of defeat by the Japanese. It afforded him a real eye-opener into how history might be written. The signicance of the book’s inuence on Liang Qichao and the intelligentsia during the years of crisis in China cannot be underestimated, although heretofore overlooked in studies on the period. This history, published in Chinese translation in over a million copies, was read and discussed avidly in mid-1890s China by many people interested in reform, including the Emperor Guang Xu, his tutor, and the two viceroys, Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 and Zhang Zhidong 張之洞. Published in at least nine legitimate editions, with many more in pirated editions, the books were sold throughout the country.18 In 1896, two years before the reform movement crested, Liang Qichao, at the time actually Timothy Richard’s secretary, published a bibliography of important Western books available in China under the title Xixue shumu biao 西學數目表. In this widely circulated bibliography, Liang particularly recommended this history to his readers for its high value.19 In the Mackenzie history the multitudes of readers across China discovered a history quite different from the histories to which they were accustomed. Within one relatively short volume, in straightforward style written for a popular audience, they found a general history of 19th century Europe and the United States. Published in Chinese translation by Richard as Taixi xinshi lanyao, the book included not only internal political events in England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, the Turkish Empire, and the United States, but also the trans-European Napoleonic campaigns, intellectual thought, society and economy, the British empire in India, and a chapter on foreign missionaries. Relationships among the various countries were emphasized, particularly

While Collingwood, beneting from hindsight from two world wars and the Great Depression, saw what to him was the fallacy of Mackenzie’s positivism, Liang in his “present” did not have the benet of that prescience in 1895. In fact, Collingwood may not have carefully read the book. For one example among many, Mackenzie 1880: 206–17, is pessimistic about England’s ability to maintain its economic lead in the world due to inability to compete. 18 For the publication and readers of Taixi xinshu lanyao in China see Soothill 1924: 183 and 221. The history had also been reprinted many times in England. 19 Liang 1896: 3b–4. See also Chen 1962: 111–12.

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with regard to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic campaigns, and English imperialism. A reading of Mackenzie’s Nineteenth Century reveals that the substance and point of view is akin to the new historical thinking emerging in Europe and England in the 1880s and 1890s, inuenced by such historians as Karl Lamprecht in Germany who were moving away from the political emphasis of the Rankean school of historical writing.20 Lamprecht, a positivist maverick among European historians in late 19th century Europe, held that the German idealism of the political histories of von Ranke and his followers restricted the understanding of what was actually going on in the world at any given time. Lamprecht was turning instead to a broader view, one of culture as the conceptual framework for history, emphasizing both the broad social aspects of national civilizations and their economies. American historian Earle Wilbur Dow, in the American Historical Review in 1898, wrote of Lamprecht and the “New History” he was creating: “Questions of civilization, compared with those properly political, are of equal, if not of far greater importance.”21 The Mackenzie history of 19th century Europe is part of this New History current. The translator Timothy Richard recognized this, referring to Mackenzie’s history as “new history” in his preface. In recommending The Outline of Occidental New History to his readers, Liang Qichao found, in its account of the century just closing in Europe, a common chord with what he was convinced historical writing should be about in China. In his essay on grouping he emphasized the importance of people and communities of people in events. For Liang, the people in civil society were the fabric of the past and the present that must be taken as history’s proper subject, not merely the rulers and events related to the dynastic state. This was at the heart of the new learning and the new history for Liang from his early years on. The Richard’s translation of this Mackenzie history so widely read during these years, undoubtedly contributed to the shift in China toward the discussion of “new history.” Xiaobing Tang has pointed out that a shift from emphasis on “Chinese learning versus Western learning to old learning versus new learning occurred in general political discussions” 20 Lamprecht 1891, 1905. For Lamprecht see Iggers 1983: 197–200 and passim, on Lamprecht’s positivistic attack on German idealism and promotion of a historical view broader than the Rankean political history. See also Novick 1988: 28. 21 Dow 1898: 431–448.

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around 1895 in China.22 Timothy Richard had chosen for his translation the Chinese title that can be translated into English as The Outline of Occidental New History: 23 Chapters and Supplement on the Important Events of the Last 100 Years of the Occident. As this “new history” of the West circulated widely in China in the midst of the humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan, it would have fed discussions about the scope of the polity and how history ought to be written for the future. Within three years after Richard’s translation was published, the Emperor Guang Xu’s “Hundred Days Reform” campaign, led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to institute deep institutional reforms, raised high hopes for change in China. Disastrously, these hopes were dashed by the coup led by the Dowager Empress, the subsequent imprisonment of the Emperor, and the ight or arrest and execution of the reformers. In Richard’s Preface to his translation of Nineteenth Century, he wrote of China’s 1895 defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, appealing openly to the reform faction in the ruling group—Prince Gong, Li Hongzhang, and Zhang Zhidong—as intelligent people who wanted to correct the mistaken course China was taking. He wrote that they must learn from other countries in the world, that it is shameful to willingly fall behind. He fears that the reformists do not understand reform methods in other countries.23 Timothy Richard openly pointed out the importance of the New History as a guide: “A clear mirror is efcacious to reveal the beautiful and the ugly and New History is efcacious to reveal the ourishing and replacement (of the old).” He thought these people, the readers, are eager for books that are published as guides like Mount Tai, books that will provide “assistance for the voyage of China.” For him this book was a secret key to open the way “to study broadly Western Science to make China ourish.”24 In speaking to the readers of his translation Richard lauds history as the means for Chinese to learn about modern people, about the recent situation in the world, about nations and the way to govern the present world. These were all ideas that t the ancient Chinese notion of history as the guide, but here with a far broader vision of the historical signicance of the past and present. These ideas fed Liang Qichao’s conception of history’s role in the polity. 22 Xiaobing Tang 1996: 16. This is an important study of Liang’s contributions to nationalism and historical writing. 23 Ma Kenxi (Timothy Richard) 1895: preface. 24 Ma Kenxi 1895: 3.

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Readers found models for the writing of history, as well as for the behavior of modern nations, in the Outline of Occidental New History. For example, the chapter on the United States is a careful essay on the American Civil War in its political, social, and economic facets; another chapter discusses the inuence of the war of American independence on the French. From the standpoint of a country still suffering from the effects of the Taiping Rebellion, the problems and recovery from such a “rebellion” as the American Civil War would have communicated much about the viability of democracy under stress. In the Preface, Timothy Richard drew pointedly on the trope of history as a mirror for Chinese readers because he knew well that history was a model Chinese had used as a guide in the past. Beyond the new form of this history, there was more about the Mackenzie history that appealed to the Chinese situation. Europe had been in dark times at the beginning of the 19th century as it was coming out of the French Revolution, but during the course of the century, according to the narrative written for the popular audience, the situation had improved profoundly. Autocracy had fallen, ordinary people were freer, economically far better off. Life was peaceful and more democratic.25 In the Chinese present of the 1890s, times were dark, and new strategies needed for the polity. Mackenzie’s history is about society across all social strata. Neither an elite centered history nor one dealing with static aspects of society, its narrative is about national societies in dynamic change, beset with problems yet overcoming difculties, something very different from the histories Chinese had read before. Among the variety of topics Chinese readers found in the history were the conditions experienced by ordinary people, the inuence of the American independence movement on the French, the longing for political discussion in France, social conditions in Great Britain, and the mistakes the British made in the Turkish Empire. Certainly the closing note in the last chapter, praising change and progress, contributed to readers’ reception of the history in China. There were many facets of Mackenzie’s history for the readers to identify with: the vivid descriptions of the appalling conditions in European society at the beginning of the century, his stress on the expansion of the people’s role in government, and, certainly not the least, the broad, inclusive parameters of the society in the historical narrative.

25

Ma Kenxi 1895: 7–29.

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This was undoubtedly Liang’s rst reading of the New History currently being written in Europe. After eeing to Japan in 1898 following the debacle of the Hundred Day’s Reform, Liang would read more European and American history translated by the Japanese and Chinese. He was also certainly inuenced by Japanese historical writing and experience in modernizing. However, his direct experience of European historical writing in the Mackenzie history of 19th century Europe provided fertile ground for his thought, as did his own ideas on the grouping (qun) of people in 1897, before he left China. From Liang’s writing in the years after this, we know that his own conception of New History became a means of promoting change in China. Although Liang’s years of refuge in Japan were important in the scope of his whole life, to evaluate his inuence in shaping the new genre of tongshi the starting place must be his interest in the Mackenzie history. Liang was a man of wide-ranging interest and broad vision which led him to explore many ideas during his years of exile in Japan.26 During these years he also traveled widely in Europe and in the United States and Hawai’i. In a long essay, “New History” (Xin shixue 新史學),27 in 1902, Liang put forth his ideas for the creation of New History in China by calling for the writing of a new history to provide a view of China’s long history for the sake of the country.28 The way the rst words of “New History” convey the importance of writing history is reminiscent of Richard’s expression in his preface on history as a clear mirror and a guide for the strengthening of China. Both men reected the Chinese conception of the central role of history in the polity. Liang wrote that history was ourishing in the Occident and he connected this with the ourishing of European nationalism. Liang’s idea was that when

26 Fogel 1984, 2004 have provided important explication of the experience and inuences on Liang during his exile in Japan. See also Karl 1999: 1096–1118. Rebecca Karl introduces Liang Qichao in her very interesting paper on a small number of intellectuals, many of them (but not all) Chinese who gathered in Japan in the early years of the twentieth century to form a radical group that voiced an Asian identity, Liang was one of the group and his use of the label “Asia” ( yazhou) as particularly signicant. As for Liang’s inuence on the new tongshi genre in Chinese historical writing however, his interest in the identity of Asia as differentiated from the West seems to have had little particular relevance. His interest was in China in the whole world with emphasis on national identity. 27 Liang 1902a: 1, 7. 28 Xiaobing Tang 1996: 3 and passim, discusses the momentous change in Liang’s thinking represented by “Xin shixue.”

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people know their country’s history, they “will unite and the society will evolve.” But Liang then asks: how is it that “although history in China ourishes, its weakness still exists?” He answers with a critique of the ofcial histories as nothing but “family genealogies”—those that historians have been unable to generalize. They only transmit but do not create (analyze the past). The old history must be changed “to create a new historiography.” In “New History,” Liang laid out new parameters for historiography when he identied four sources of problems in the previous writing of Chinese history. He said that in the past, historians had understood that there were dynasties, but not that there was a country. They had written about individuals who were powerful heroes on the stage of history, but not about the masses of people. They had written about the past, but had not concerned themselves with the present, and they had not made the past a mirror for the present. Finally, they had understood the facts, but not the ideas of the past. Now, Liang said in his manifesto for a new Chinese historiography, historians must write a new history that meets the needs of China in the present age; they must explain the relationships and the cause and effect of events, not merely relate the facts; they must investigate the experience of all of the people in groups and movements, and they must pay particular attention to change.29 Liang’s goal was to put history in the service of the whole polity, his aim to create a national consciousness. In this Liangian “New History” there was no doubt that the purpose was to provide a mirror for the present, for political and economic issues. But his purpose extended further. Liang was advocating the use of the legitimating power of history to legitimate the nation as histories in the past had served to legitimate the imperial rule. He wanted to co-opt the political power of history for the new nation when he wrote that it was the masses that were legitimate, not the emperors; for this reason history must be written with the people in mind. The ruler could only rule a nation in which the people participated in the union.30 29

Liang 1902a: 2–4. In 1902, the same year that Liang wrote The New History, he also wrote a companion piece, On The New People (see Liang 1902b). Here he also insisted that the writing of China’s history was crucial to the development of a sense of nationhood and national consciousness and to the development of the people’s relationship to the nation. For Liang’s ideas about the collectivistic nature of the people and the relation of these groups to the polity see Hao Chang 1971: 165–190. 30

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Later, in the 1920s, the years of Liang’s most mature thought on historiography, he would give two series of lectures at Qinghua University where he expanded his ideas about the writing of the New History and emphasized the need for teaching tongshi, general history, which by this time he was calling cultural history, to provide youth with an overall conception of the nation through an understanding of its history. At Qinghua, he laid plans to write a cultural history that would have been a general history, but he died before he was able to nish it.31 His student in these years, the historian Zhang Yinlin 張蔭麟, has written an important evaluation of the position of Liang Qichao (Liang Rengong 梁任公) in 20th century Chinese thought.32

Zhang Taiyan: Theorizing General History A second major contributor to early thinking about general history in this era was the classical scholar and revolutionary anti-Manchu political leader Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936), also known as Zhang Binglin. In his 1904 essay “Ai Qing shi” 哀清史 (Lament for Qing History), Zhang advocated the writing of general histories (tongshi ) to inform the people, concluding with a “Summary for a General History of China.” Here he set forth his ideas for the contents of these new histories.33 The construction of this genre of history was intended to embody the historians’ ideas of the truth, freed from the control of the ruler, to remedy China’s problem of a weak, dying dynasty. The Qing, had, in fact, throughout the dynasty suppressed documents unfavorable to their dynasty and conducted inquisitions to silence historians. As with those he was criticizing, Zhang’s reconstructed history would have a political purpose, his being to create an autonomous history free of dynastic control that would enable the creation of an independent political consciousness in the polity.34

31

For Liang’s writings on General History ( pubian shi and tongshi ) see Liang 1922: esp. 35 and Liang 1926: 1–2. For discussions of Liang’s work see Qi Sihe 1949: 21 and Xu 1986 & 1989. 32 For an important evaluation of Liang in this period see Su Chi (Zhang Yinlin) 1929. In the present volume for Zhang Yinlin see Brian Moloughney, “Zhang Yinlin’s Early China.” 33 Zhang Binglin 1904: 156–59, quote on 159. 34 Dikotter 1992 sees racialism as the overarching theme of much of the thinking of this period. Although Zhang Taiyan certainly led anti-Manchu opinion and conscious-

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The need to educate the people for the coming new age, particularly young people, motivated his concern. First he considered models from past histories which he saw as narratives without abstract comment or evaluation: Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 (Records of the Historian); Sun Yue’s history written in chronological order; and the histories created by Yuan Shu that took types of events or themes and followed them throughout their development, jishi benmo 紀事本末. After considering them, Zhang discarded all as models because they lacked the deductive method that yielded comment and evaluation. He turned instead to his own combination of methods from the East and the West for his formulation of the new genre. Actually, Zhang advocated two different models for modern historical works. In the rst, he proposed evolutionary change be traced through division of history into time periods. For the second model or approach, methods of comparison and classication must be used to develop a subject. He likened the latter arrangement to an artist drawing the peaks and valleys of mountains, the former to drawing the long course of a river. Zhang’s characterization of the two forms is suggestive of the two genres, General History (tongshi ) and Specialized History (zhuanshi 專史), into which modern Chinese historical writing eventually settled.35 Much as Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan saw, in the decline of late Qing China, that the traditional purposes of history no longer served the polity of the present. History had a mission, and challenges of the times called for the creation of a new kind of history: The scope of the mission of history is very different at the present from the past and consequently the style of history writing must change. Today’s history books must not depend only on the literary records of China. All of the ancient legends and the practical traces of the races existing under the earth can supplement what is missing in the old history books. Foreigners talking about China always praise it a great deal and admire its long history; this is not untrue. For at the beginning of the world, the situation of the East and West was the same. With the cultural evolution [the situation] between the yellow race and the white race became different, so we must compare the similarity and difference to understand which is good and which bad and the corresponding causes. Therefore

ness of race was fed by Social Darwinism, Dikotter’s emphasis seems to distort the point that the fundamental concern of many was the preservation of the sovereignty of the country and the strengthening of the country as a state. 35 Zhuanshi has come to mean monograph.

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mary g. mazur the history of Greece, Rome, India and the modern West is related to China. As far as psychology, society, and religions, the principles of their development are quite similar; this is the key to writing history.36

Stirring here in Zhang’s 1904 comment we can hear the currents of social psychology and cultural history in European historiographic thought. Social Darwinism’s stress on causality threads through his desire for evaluation of the good and bad in the past. However, beyond these currents coming from outside China, a very important indigenous factor inuenced Zhang and other historians in their ideas on the recasting of history. This was a time of discovery of abundant, hitherto unavailable, sources of historical artifacts and documents. Many things were unearthed in archeological diggings beginning in the 19th century. Sites of early Shang dynasty cities such as at Anyang, bronzes with their inscriptions, scapula and tortoise shell artifacts, stone stele, pottery, the ancient Buddhist manuscripts and wall frescoes in Dunhuang caves, rediscovery of vernacular literature and textual evidence of early myths, the later recovery of hidden and lost Ming/Qing period documents—the list is long. These discoveries of historical materials had great import for the analysis and reconstruction of historical events. It became possible to identify with certitude disruptions in the orthodox history where continuity had previously been accepted without question. Historians now could rethink what China was. Zhang saw the future writers of general histories choosing from among documents and facts what was to be written. In his words, “Although beginning with the Tang Dynasty there was a special [ofcial] bureau to write history according to periods, today when general history is written the purpose must be to determine it according to the importance of the subject and to use detail to describe when needed, but to be brief when necessary.”37 In his vision, the broad general histories would provide condensations of past history, and the old history texts would be preserved to provide detail. Implicit in his scheme for the creation of general history was the assumption that independent private scholars such as he (the forerunners of professional academic historians), not government bureaus, would construct these histories. History no longer would be controlled by the dynasty or the government. In this way, what was most important to pass on to future generations would be

36 37

Zhang 1904: 161–62. Zhang 1904: 161–62.

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written and taught in the historical narrative, beyond the demand for legitimation of the rule. Nonetheless, Zhang’s assumption that re-creation of the historical narrative in this way would benet the polity reected the notion of custodianship enjoyed in the past by historians in China. Actually, Zhang Taiyan’s sketchy outline of a general history blends Chinese traditional and Western modern in both form and content. After a beginning section of tables (a traditional format), the author, in the second section, would deal with social and economic institutions and characteristics of life (quite a modern avor) such as: race, housing, water control and construction, handicrafts and technology, agriculture and commerce, language, religions, scholarship, ritual and customs, dress and social status, law, military and defense. In the third section, named Records, key political events would be treated thematically, without commitment to comprehensiveness and not necessarily systematically. In his example, the rst subsection in Records would be the Zhou political system, the second the Qin Emperor system. The third section would skip the entire Han period and move on the Southern Zhou, a southern minority kingdom, while the fourth subsection would skip again to the separated military border commanders in the Tang period. His selection of the eras of basic change or breaks in political organization for the structure of the narrative emphasizes times of radical political disjuncture, some of them formative of new modes of political organization, such as the Zhou and the Qin. While the inuence of the Western emphasis on change is at work in Zhang’s prescription, it lacks any idea of inexorable linearity. His fourth major section, of more traditional hue, was to be biography. These were to be the biographies of certain strong emperors, grouped together rather than arranged in separate dynastic sections. Generally, his choices were either revolutionaries or reformists, again breaking the accepted model, with no effort made to be comprehensive. His last major category, special biographies, would include people of all sorts, as well as several collective biographies of types such as assassins and political parties.38 His heavy emphasis on biographies reects the inuence of the Sima Qian Shiji model of historical writing. Zhang, unlike Liang Qichao, did not stress mass or group participation as an essential part of the historical narrative.

38

Zhang 1904: 161–62.

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Although Zhang Taiyan’s General History was never written, he was convinced in 1904 that the writing of general histories about events and qualities in the past that had relevance for the future was essential for the education of the people. The sense of mission that Zhang and others felt for writing these general histories was intensied by the gap left by the demise of the examination system and the pressing need for an appropriate historical curriculum. The traditional canon must be replaced with a modern canon that served the people’s need to know the country’s past and present.

Xia Zengyou’s General History: A New History for Popular Readers Indeed, the question of how the past should be written for the needs of the present was on the minds of many in these years of change. Those who were concerned about the content of history knew that it was important for education39 but even more for the shared cultural life of people of all ages in the civil sphere. Two years after Liang Qichao, exiled in Japan, had published his seminal article on New History and contemporaneous with Zhang Taiyan’s theorizing about general history, Xia Zengyou, a friend of Liang and Tan Sitong and a member of the reform group in China, wrote what seems to have been the rst general history of China written originally by a Chinese and published in China.40 Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新中學中國歷史 教科書 (The Newest Chinese History Textbook for Middle School) was published in 1904 by the Commercial Press, a private publisher in Shanghai. This is the press that began to supply textbooks for the new schools. Xia’s history was widely used by the schools during the Republican period. Written as a middle school textbook, Xia Zengyou’s work has been considered a ne early example of modern historical writing, according to Teng Ssu-yu. Teng has pointed out that Xia did not intend the history for beginners, but for mature students who had already received a relatively rigorous training in the classics.41 These 39 Early textbooks written at the end of the Qing have been discussed in the rst section of the present book by Tze-ki Hon and Peter Zarrow. 40 Xia’s book was republished by Shangwu yinshuguan as Zhongguo gudai shi 中國古 代史 (History of Ancient China) in 1933. Xia was a close friend of both Liang and Tan Sitong, who was executed after the reformers were declared traitors in 1898. In the present discussion the Zhongguo gudai shi edition is used. 41 Teng Ssu-yu 1949: 131–156, praised it. In an interview with the present author

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were the students who had already attended or would have attended the Qing xue yuan academies and later attended the modern middle schools. A general history of China, Shina tsushi 支那通史 (General History of China), had been published in 1891 in Japan by the Japanese historian, Naka Michiyo 那珂通世. In 1902, two years before Xia Zengyou published his general history in China, this work of Naka’s was published in China by Liu Yizheng 柳誼徵 as Lidai shilue 歷代史略 under his own name as his own work. Liu had made additions and adaptations to the work, originally written by Naka in Chinese, but from the perspective of a Japanese writing about a foreign country. However, Liu did not acknowledge that the main body or core of the history he published was borrowed from the Japanese historian’s general history. In the rst section of the present volume, Hon Tze-ki has explored Liu Yizheng’s publication of this volume in China as well as Xia Zengyou’s history and a text by Liu Shipei, in “Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks.”42 In the preface to his history, Xia wrote about the ideas of evolution and progress that stemmed from Darwin’s Origin of the Species, stressing his intention to structure the book with change as its central principle, a new approach at this time in historical works in China.43 Xia wanted to emphasize the causes that had produced contemporary society. Historical gures were only mentioned when they had a part in the ourishing or fall of dynasties—fame was not enough merit for a hero to be included. Xia used the same principle in regard to society. For example, detail on social customs and regions was only included when relevant to periods of great change.44 Xia had become familiar with Social Darwinism before he wrote the history.45 Xia’s conviction that his general history was a path-breaking endeavor to create a new historical genre with no prior model is evident in his introduction. He writes of the lack of “cart tracks” to follow for Chinese historical

in 1985, Teng Ssu-yu discussed the Xia history and its importance as an early model of modern general history and as an inuential textbook that had been widely used for many years. It should be noted these middle schools were at least at the level of American high schools. 42 See Zarrow’s essay on late Qing textbooks in the rst section of this volume. 43 Xia 1933: 1–2; Zhou 1941: 12–18. 44 Xia 1933: preface, vol. 2. 45 Zhou 1941: 12–18 for Xia Zengyou. For Darwinist texts in China in these years, see Huxley 1898; Spencer 1903. For the spread of Darwinism, see Pusey 1983.

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studies at this juncture, although he knows that there are ample “cart tracks” for those writing Western historical studies.46 Xia was clearly inuenced in his project by Western general history writing which was reaching him in at least two ways. He would have read the 1895 translation of Mackenzie’s Nineteenth Century recommended by his close friend, Liang Qichao, and was so widely discussed throughout China especially by the reformers in Beijing in the mid-1890s. The stress in this kind of New History on the pace of change and the struggles in 19th century Europe had the effect of inuencing readers to look at history in terms of change rather than the stasis that dominated the climate of dynastic histories. The stress in New History encouraged readers to look beyond the ruling class to the breadth of the people, their lives and movements. After Xia went to Japan, he was also exposed to Western historical writing through Japanese histories of China that had been inspired by Western, particularly German histories. Naka Michiyo’s Shina tsushi, written in the style of Western general history and published in 1891 in Japan but actually written originally in Chinese,47 particularly attracted Xia. In Naka’s history periodization xed historical time in three eras: ancient, medieval, and modern, the time arrangement European historians were using. In Xia’s outline for the complete General History, he had divided historical time into three periods: rst, the ancient period covering the era from the mythical Three Emperors to the Qin; second, the medieval period from Qin through Tang; and the last period extending from the Song to contemporary times.48 Unfortunately, Xia died tragically in 1924 after a long period of depression before he completed the volumes he had planned; the work he published before his death only reached the Sui Dynasty, prior to the Tang.

46

Xia 1933: preface. Naka Michiyo 1891, introduced into China with a preface by Luo Zhenyu in 1899. Luo was an ardent proponent of learning from Japan. Zhou Yutong, 1941 has evidence that Xia knew of Naka’s work and of other Japanese general histories of China. I am grateful to Joshua Fogel for his personal communication on the general histories of Naka and Xia. See Fogel 1979: 219–235, esp. 221. A copy, with some adaptation, of Naka’s history of China was published by Liu Yizheng under the title Lidai shilüe 歷代史略 without acknowledgment of the original writer. 48 Xia 1933: 5. For Naka as a model for Xia see Zhou 1941: 17. Xia used the same periodization and chapter divisions that Naka had used. According to Zhou Yutong, Xia drank himself to death in 1924, probably as a result of depression that had begun with the disastrous failure of the Hundred Days Reform and the execution of his close friend, Tan Sitong. 47

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While there is abundant evidence that one of the ways knowledge of Western historical writing came into China was through Japan, the engine for the development of general history in China actually was deeply powered by indigenous factors addressing dire internal problems and the pressing need created by internal change in the prior century as well as by stimuli from the West. For example, Xia Zengyou’s deliberate choice to use simple, popularly known names for historical gures in his general history was something new in a history of China. This history published in China, written by a Chinese, was intended for a broad readership, not merely the ruling group and the elite literati stratum of the past.49 In his history, Xia was aiming to educate and stimulate people to want change in China. Shunning Zhang Taiyan’s chosen structural arrangement for his history arranged in the fashion of premodern Chinese histories with Basic Annals of the rulers, Treatises, Tables and Biographies of heroes, Xia Zengyou chose instead the Western model of chapters following one another in the general chronological arrangement of early, medieval, and modern. However, lest we conclude he was following the Western model as a simple pattern, it must be noted that he established a very important difference from the usual Western idea of chronological sequence. While he did arrange the history chronologically, his narrative was far from a straight linear progression through history. As had Zhang Taiyan, Xia also abandoned the traditional effort to encyclopedically cover every dynasty, every ruler to display China’s imperial glory. Rather, Xia Zengyou chose to emphasize the junctures where signicant change or dislocation occurred as conicting forces came into contact. His new approach (reminiscent of Zhang Xuecheng’s ideas in the 18th century on the way to write a history) was evident in the proportion of emphasis he gave in the relatively brief history to non mainstream, relatively heterodox subjects. These included the ourishing of necromancers and religious Daoism that began in Later Han and extended into the following period, emphasis on the advent of Buddhism coming from India into China, and stress on pre-Confucian religion in earlier times. In fact, Xia’s emphasis on the early interaction of religion and philosophy in Chinese thought pregured important new work that is being done currently on the development of early pre-Han religion.

49 Xia deliberately chose the simplest, most popular, form of all names for the benet of the readers, according to his preface.

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The central question of the origin of Chinese historical civilization Xia Zengyou treated in a straightforward matter-of-fact way that today does not attract our attention, but in the context of the readers of the early 20th century was a sensitive issue. The question of the prehistoric past of China and the actual existence of the earliest rulers—the Three Kings and Five Emperors—was to become a very sensitive political issue in the 1920s and 1930s. Xia handled it by treating these gures as legends. His method was to treat them in a matter-of-fact explanation where he made the demythifying point that the earliest the ancient gures are found in the records is in early Zhou texts.50 At the time he was writing, his attribution of the formation of China’s culture to the Zhou period, rather than to the dim pre-Zhou past, was an iconoclastic treatment. This can be seen by comparison with some of the historians of the late Qing, discussed in Peter Zarrow’s essay in the rst section of this volume. However, Xia’s account went without challenge from ofcials or scholars, perhaps because they were involved in the disruptive contemporary problems of institutional change, formation of the new educational system, and the abolition of the civil service examination system. As we will discuss shortly, twenty ve years later, in a very different political climate, the same subject was to become an issue of national political controversy, resulting in the Ministry of Education’s ban of another general history textbook.51 Another signicant departure in the Xia tongshi was his focus on the place in the past of non-Han groups such as the Turkic Xiongnu, Northern Wei, Toba Wei, and others. What today we would call ethnicity (in the early 1900s translated as race, later as nationalities, or as national minorities) was one of the historical factors in China’s past that Xia particularly emphasized.52 In short, Xia’s historical narrative emphasized as positive the heterodox aspects of the culture subject to multiethnic inuences, as well as of a society in ux politically and socially. It highlighted the role of change in China’s past, giving decreased attention to long periods of stability. Furthermore, largely absent from his narrative is the concept of progress in the sense of advance upward—his is a morally neutral narrative. Since the historic past was the great legitimator of action as

50 51 52

Xia 1933: 7. The textbook was Gu and Wang 1924. See footnote 56. Fincher 1972: 59–69; Townsend 1992: 97–130.

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well as the “clear mirror,” even in his present Xia turned his new focus to the disjunctive and disruptive changes in history that had been there all along but seldom stressed, rather than feature the ordered stability and successes of past rule, as had the old histories to meet the dynastic ruler’s need for stasis and legitimation. Bringing these changes into the historical narrative provided a perspective on the past that suited a China needing to cultivate the motivation and ability to change for success in the present.

Gu Jiegang’s General History: The Benguo shi In the early 1920s, a young, iconoclastic scholar named Gu Jiegang53 was also thinking about the development of new forms of historical writing. Gu had studied with both Zhang Taiyan and the eminent scholar and leader of the literary revolution, Hu Shi, an outspoken proponent of learning from Western countries. Gu, himself a scholar of the classics but not as oriented to Western thought as Hu Shi, was to become a leader in critical analysis of the classical heritage and one of the founders of historical geography. In his Autobiography Gu describes how, in 1922–1923, encouraged by his mentor Hu Shi, he wrote one of the earliest general histories of China for the Commercial Press to be used as a middle school text. He was assisted in the endeavor by Wang Zhongqi 王鍾麒, a friend and editor at the press.54 Gu is customarily recognized as the author of the history by later historians, such as Laurence Schneider and Xiaofeng Tang.55 The writing style of Gu’s Benguo shi 本國史, given the English title History of China for Junior Middle Schools by the Commercial Press,56 was a very simple, concise vernacular with a direct pedagogic method, rst stating an interpretation clearly and then backing it up with simple exposition of the relevant facts. In his Autobiography Gu makes the point that he was insistent on writing the history “entirely from my own point of view.” According to him, he aimed to create “a living narrative so

53

For a biography of Gu see Schneider 1971. In Ku 1931, Gu Jiegang describes his being hired by the Commercial Press to write the book in (see 95–103). For a differing account of authorship of this tongshi see Culp 2001: 17–62. 55 Schneider 1971; Xiaofeng Tang 2000: 94. 56 Gu and Wang 1924. 54

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that readers might have an opportunity to look at historical movements in their entirety and so be inspired to pursue their studies further, from a genuine historical point of view.”57 At the beginning of the rst of the three volumes he sets forth four fundamental themes: the relationship of history and geography, historical evolution, the various nationalities (ethnic groups) in China’s history, and divisions of historical time. With the simple denition of history as “the evolutionary process of everything,”58 he equated history with the process of change, not stasis. However, Gu made the spatial and geographical approach to history and the historical past his primary paradigm. Consequently, in the opening section of the historical narrative he situated China in the world, and then proceeded to identify it geographically as a particular state in a region of the world. In this way he symbolically underscores the equivalence of China with other states in the world. It was in this nexus of the interrelationships of geography, ethnicity, and history that Gu Jiegang made some of his most seminal and powerful contributions to historical scholarship over the next decades. Today he is considered to have been a principal founder of Chinese historical geography.59 Since Gu Jiegang stressed spatial location, it followed that, in his conception of history no state is isolated; each is situated and has relationships with other countries. These relationships must be studied also, bringing into the center of the historian’s lens issues such as the nature of nationality (ethnicity) within China, of the inuence of foreign countries on China’s culture, and the questions of how China had inuenced other countries and how China’s present territory was shaped by its relationships.60 Thus for Gu, ethnicity and geography are rmly linked in China’s history at the same time that China is located in a mesh of intercultural, interstate relationships. Change shaped the social organization of mankind and the history of the times.61 According to Gu Jiegang’s concept of the historical narrative, rather than producing a simple linear history, evolutionary changes occurred over time in sectors of society, not only at the change of dynasties 57

Ku 1931: 95. Gu and Wang 1924: vol. 1, 1–22; quote on 1. 59 Personal communication from Hou Renzhi 侯仁之, Beijing University. For the importance of Gu Jiegang as a leader in the 20th century emergence of the eld of historical geography in China see Xiaofeng Tang 2000: 94–113. 60 Gu and Wang 1924: vol. 1, 4. 61 Gu and Wang 1924: vol. 1, 4. 58

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or through the success and failure of heroes. To learn about change over time, he tells his readers, four aspects of men’s activities must be studied: nationalities (that is, ethnic groups), society, politics, and intellectual thought and the arts. Gu’s focus was to explain the collective development of man in these four aspects. For him, penetrating, in-depth study of these factors should be left to professional experts in their specialized studies. To his readers he explained change and cultural relationships are the nexus within which the history of mankind must be understood: “History is the life of the whole of humankind, therefore we must have . . . (an) understanding of its development. . . . At least, we must have an overview of the evolution of these main aspects and understand the cultural relationships.”62 Gu’s attention to ethnicity (nationalities) was extraordinary for the 1920s present. He describes seven ethnic groups in China among whom the Hua (the Han Chinese) people are but one.63 He brings the ethnicity of these groups right into the center of Chinese history, rather than treating the question of nationalities as peripheral. Inuences from outside the Han group brought vigor to Chinese culture and civilization. Gu sees Confucianism itself as static. Without the inuence of Buddhism coming into China from India, there would have been a static state without vitality. However, among his contemporaries in Nationalist China were many who promoted Great Hanism: the identity of the Chinese state and culture as a Han state with Han culture.64 For these people Gu’s views as embodied in his tongshi threatened what they saw as the core identity of the Chinese state and society. For them these ideas were impermissible. In an overview of the chapter headings in Benguo shi,65 volume one is divided into two major sections, dened by historical period. In the rst section, “Remote Antiquity: Before the Qin,” Gu dives in with a chapter on the evolution of society and the founding of the kingdoms; second, he has a chapter on the legend of the ood. Next comes feudal system and clan doctrine, then a chapter on feudal lords and society of

62

Gu and Wang 1924: vol. 1, 5. Gu and Wang 1924: vol. 1, 12. 64 Chow 2001, 47–83, presents an in depth discussion of the ideas of earlier thinkers, especially Zhang Binglin (Taiyan), on Hanren as the essential Chinese. Zhang Taiyan’s ideas on race were very different from Gu Jiegang’s. Zhang had been consumed by opposition to the Manchu Qing rulers, because they were not Han. 65 Benguo shi was published by the Commercial Press in three volumes: Shang, Zhong, and Xia. 63

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the time, and so on, with the chapter organization stressing analytical themes. The second section of volume one, “Middle Ancient: From the Beginning of the Qin to the Close of the Five Dynasties,” begins with a chapter on the Qin unication and the establishment of a unied government, then the second chapter takes up the Great Wall and the Xiongnu. A later chapter deals with the collapse of the political center. Chapter nine in this section focuses on the arrival of Buddhism and the ourishing of Daoism. The second volume, on the Middle Period, covers from the beginning of the Song to the close of the Ming, but it does not dwell on the dynastic perspective of the polity in these times. Rather, Gu takes the reader into theme oriented chapters on the establishment of academies and schools of thought, the military strength of the Mongols and communication with Europe, the government of the Yuan and the characteristics of scholarship, overseas communication, and the inuence of Christianity in the period. Moving on to the third volume, which is in two parts, the rst section deals with the Qing period. In the rst chapter the reigns of the rst three Qing emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, are gathered together. The second chapter focuses on Yellow Lamaism—Tibetan and Mongol, then chapter three takes up textual criticism (kaoju 考據) and the examination system. The Opium War is the subject of the fourth chapter, while the fth chapter plunges into its topic: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Nian Rebellion. After ve more chapters in part one, part two of this last volume deals with the post 1911 Revolution period in ve chapters, the last of which is “Literary Revolution and the Vernacular Language Movement.” From this overview we see that Gu opens his lens to take in diverse aspects of the past, many of which brought fundamental change and introduced new factors in the Chinese polity. When we consider that three years after Gu Jiegang’s Benguo shi was published, the anti-evolution Scopes Monkey Trial took place in the United States, in this context, Gu’s words, “Needless to say, human beings gradually evolved from the monkey-like to human beings . . .,”66 together with his challenge of sacred Chinese culture heroes, seem bold and sophisticated even today, as confrontational debates over Creationism and Intelligent Design linger on in the United States. In fact, by

66

Gu and Wang 1924: 9.

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relegating the ancient founding gures strictly to myth in his history, the iconoclast Gu had set the stage for what became a storm of opposition to his book and its publisher some years later.67 After the Nationalist Party came to power in 1928, according to Gu’s own account many years later, the Ministry of Education decided to ban the book on the grounds that the material in the history was unacceptable as a textbook for young people in school, even though the book had already been in circulation for several years. The offense was that he had challenged the stories of the founding culture heroes, the Three Kings and Five Emperors from the period of the Great Flood, and dismissed them as legends that were mere “ction,” that could not be taken as reliable historical facts since there was no scientic evidence of their existence.68 This treatment of the earliest kings and emperors as myths, plus Gu’s raising the multi-ethnicity of China to a high status, brought disaster on the Commercial Press after the Nationalist Republic was founded in 1928, although it didn’t seem to hurt Gu’s own reputation in academic circles at all.69 The press had planned to publish more than a million copies of the history for sale to schools, but the Education Ministry forced the withdrawal of the textbooks by threatening the Commercial Press with an enormous punitive ne.70 Although this incident was negative, the act of censorship only served to conrm the conviction of historians writing these general histories of the importance of their project to the transmission of the cultural heritage that stimulated and shaped national consciousness. Twenty years earlier, when dynastic China still existed, no one had blinked when Xia Zengyou’s history contained a similar handling of the ancient stories of origins. The difference was not that history was more or less important to the construction of the nation in the two periods. On the contrary, with the new Nationalist party-state trying to unify a badly fragmented

67 For example Gu dismissed as legend the creation of Pangu, the rst Chinese man, supposed to have been made from clay. He compared the Chinese creation story to the way Darwinian thought illuminated the biblical Adam and Eve as myth, showing that it should be eliminated as a real explanation and understood, rather, as legend. This interpretation of the Pangu and other early stories as legends brought Gu Jiegang serious trouble a few years after publication even though Xia Zengyou’s history had also dealt with the early stories as prehistoric legends. 68 Gu and Wang 1924: 18. For the whole incident see Gu 1982. 69 Fu Sinian once referred to Gu as “the Newton and Darwin of Chinese ancient history.” See Xiaofeng Tang 2000: 94. 70 Gu 1982: 18–19. Dai Jitao was the spokesman for the Guomindang in the incident.

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China, the stakes of legitimacy were much higher. In the Nationalist Republican present of 1928 there was a serious need to make sure the symbolism at the heart of the vision of national identity would ensure allegiance of the populace to the Republican state. Gu’s propensity for objectivity and autonomy stood in the way of this goal as interpreted by the narrowly nationalist ministers of the state. Writing general history, despite the intent of historians to write the past independently, was in fact still a political enterprise, as history had always been. The past must once again be constructed to meet the needs of the state. Now, the contest was about who was going to control construction of the past: the independent academic and publishing world or the state and its ministers. In this case the Nationalist Party impinged on the emerging world of modern professional academic historians in a way reminiscent of the dynastic rulers in validating the rule of the state.

General History Established By the 1930s a number of historians were publishing general histories. These were usually created for general reading and teaching by professional historians, often from the author’s lecture notes. Most of these historians were academics on the faculties of universities such as Qinghua, Beijing, Sun Yatsen, Furen, Yanjing, and Nanjing, making their livelihood by their profession of teaching and writing. Among the tongshi authors there was common agreement that there is far more than politics to the history of the past. Society, indeed the entire civil sphere must be the substance of the historical narrative. Some of the best known authors of later general histories are Deng Zhicheng 鄧之誠, Fu Sinian 傅斯年, Zhang Yinlin, Zhou Gucheng 周谷城, Qian Mu 錢穆, Jian Bozan 翦伯贊, and Fan Wenlan 范文蘭, as well as Liu Yizheng and Chen Dengyuan 陳登原, both authors of cultural histories. While some histories were more widely read than others, all contributed to the creation of narrative history of the nation’s past. This was an era of intellectual excitement and blossom, referred to in retrospect as the “Golden Era” among those who were students of these teachers at the time.71

71

Ho Pingti in personal communication with the author.

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It doesn’t help our insight into the development of this new genre of historical writing if we assume that our own conceptions of schools, textbooks, civil society, and nation drawn from our late 20th, early 21st century experience come from the same environment which nurtured these developments in China’s historical writing.72 In dynastic China, historians were scholars—men trained in the classics by senior scholars who were most often part of landowner families in rural China. The scholars’ role in the dynastic polity was usually dened by the bureaucratic system of ofcial appointment, institutionalized by the imperial examination system that had been the established road since the SuiTang period, carried on and perfected in the Ming and Qing eras. Pingti Ho describes this “Ladder of Success” in his denitive work on the system.73 These scholars shaped the historical works and furnished the historians until the late 19th century. History was studied through classical texts, records, and histories written within this paradigm. Toward the end of the 19th century, pressures on China from foreign lands and the incapacity of the dynasty to deal with the challenges raised the concern of the intelligentsia as we have discussed here. It was in this situation that scholars like Liang Qichao, Xia Zengyou, Liu Yizheng, and Zhang Binglin began to address the issues of the content and writing of history. Many of the works called “textbooks” here in this collection of essays were denitely not conceived of and written as textbooks in the sense of the term used today in our secondary schools and colleges. Indeed, they were written as histories for young scholars who were well educated in the classics and serious about the study of their culture. Often these students had already been through several years of serious study in xue yuan 學院 (academies) or perhaps sishu 私塾 (private schools), or had studied privately with a well-known local scholar and now wanted the imprimatur of the new schools to carry on their lives in the changing polity.74 As the late Qing and early Republican era school system developed many serious students enrolled in classes. These were the students for whom the so-called “textbooks” published by the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan) and other publishers were targeted. Actually, the

72 Tze-ki Hon has pointed to this problem in his essay on early textbooks and I want to underscore it here also. 73 Pingti Ho 1962. 74 For the experience of the father of Wu Han in Yiwu Xian, Zhejiang in the early 1900s as he studied to attain an appointment to an ofcial position, see Mazur 1993.

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books were written as general histories for readerships far beyond the classrooms, not as a separate genre of textbook as in our own cultural situation. The texts discussed here, authored by Xia Zengyou and Gu Jiegang, are examples of tongshi published by the press to be purchased and used as textbooks in schools but conceptually written for the broad popular audience. The volume by Zhang Yinlin discussed in Brian Moloughney’s chapter is a general history that was widely read and used in college general history classes. While the volume published by Zhang Yinlin only covers the rst centuries up to the Song, the original plan, never carried out, was that Wu Han 吳唅 would write the volume on the middle period of China’s history, with Qian Jiaju 千家駒 and other historians dealing with the modern era. During the 1940s Wu Han used Zhang’s volume in his general history classes at Southwestern (Xinan lianda) and Qinghua Universities.75 Some of the historians situate China’s place in a world far more extensive than China and intend that China be seen as being of equal status with other peoples; others don’t go beyond China. Some emphasize geography and ethnicity; some utilize the new discoveries of historical artifacts to push back the boundaries of prehistory. Some explain the folk hero stories from pre-history as simply that—legends granted a secondary position—whereas others accord the stories a prime place at the beginning of the narrative. There is also variety in the periodization of time. Even the Marxist-inuenced general histories published in the 1940s by Jian Bozan and Fan Wenlan were richly nuanced and not given to extreme dialectical materialist interpretations. Broadly speaking, all of the general histories created in the rst half of the 20th century were narratives with the same mission: to give readers a sense of the historical roots from which China, now becoming a nation, had come, and to create knowledge and appreciation of the nature of the present society, nation, and culture. In sum, the emergence of the new genre of general history in Chinese historiography has been a critical change in modern historiography. Contrary to the view that the historical effect of Darwinism was to introduce the idea of inevitable, linear causation, the impact of evolutionary

75 Mazur 1993. Also Ma Zimei (Mazur) 1996. Wu Han carried Zhang Yinlin’s original unpublished manuscript to Kunming for him when Zhang ed Beijing at the moment of the Japanese invasion in 1937. Zhang lived with Wu at Wu’s home when he rst reached Kunming. Personal communication with Qian Jiazhu.

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thinking on historical thought is far more complex. First, rather than causation being linear, heterodox and variant possibilities of causation became possible. The old orthodoxies could be challenged, so they need not be adhered to—change is not abnormal at all. Secondly, within the passage of time, possibilities are achievable through diverse challenge and variety. Through variant factors, man might, through will, have an impact on the future. With this in mind, it seems that the penetration of Darwinian thought into the practice of history was one of the most seminal discontinuities that shaped the transformation of Chinese historiography. The existence of discontinuity meant that notions of change and variety in society began to inuence historians’ examination and narratives of the past to refocus on periods of signicant change, rather than on periods of stasis and social harmony. The acceptance of diversity also meant that dynastic continuity (linearity) and homeostasis lost its appeal in the historical account. The past began to be disconnected by the historians from its singular identication with the dynastic state and institutions, as the existence of a multifaceted polity became possible. History was no longer dominated by the canon of the classics, tied to the state examination system. Dynastic China itself had ended with the Qing inability to cope with the need to change and the modern Western challenge. Periods of discontinuous deep change in society, such as the era of the spread of Buddhism in China, became more germane to understanding the past. The present itself, with the introduction of ideas directly from the West or through Japan, was an equally signicant discontinuity, not to be feared, since it was not a unique phenomenon in Chinese history. The dynamic of Darwinism was as seminal for the production of change in its era as Buddhism, for example, had been in a much earlier era. The re-creation of the heritage as a freestanding, multifaceted culture, no longer bound by the traditional neo-Confucian canon to the dynastic setting tied to the examination system, was fundamental to the emergence of this new historical genre. This conception of Chinese culture appealed to the country’s broad popular readership, as well as to teachers and students who needed a suitable curriculum. Historians saw continuity in being the narrators, the deners and custodians of the culture and its history, as they recast history to meet the needs of the new polity. These historians were creating narratives that enlisted and yet transformed the past in the creation of a national identity for the nation-state that was emerging from the old dynastic state.

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He Bingsong 何炳松 (1928), Tongshi xinyi 通史新義 (The new meaning of general history). Shanghai: Commercial Press. Ho Pingti (1962), The Ladder of Success in Imperial China. New York: Columbia University Press. Huang, Philip C. (1972), Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Huxley, T.H. (1898), On Evolution (Tianyan), Yan Fu (trans.). Iggers, Georg G. (1999), The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Karl, Rebecca E. (1999), “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Century,” in American Historical Review 104, 4 (October 1999), 1096–1118. —— (2002), Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Kenji, Shimada (1990), Pioneer of the Chinese Revolution, Zhang Binglin and Confucianism. Joshua A. Fogel (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ku Chieh-kang (Gu Jiegang) (1931), The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, Arthur Hummel trans. Leiden: Brill. Lamprecht, Karl (1891), Deutsche Geschichte. —— (1905), What Is History? E.A. Andrews trans. New York: Macmillan. Levenson, Joseph (1965), Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, a Trilogy. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (1970), Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liang Qichao (1896), “Xixue shumu biao 西學書目表 (Bibliography of Western Learning),” in Zhixue congshu chuji 質學叢書初集. Zhixue hui, 3b–4. —— (1902a), “Xin shixue 新史學 (On new history),” in Yinbing shi wenji (1926), 4. —— (1902b), “Xinmin shuo 新民說 (On the new people),” in Yinbing shi heji zhuanji 3, 4, 1–162. —— (1922), Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa 中國歷史研究法 (Methods of researching Chinese history). Taibei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1–36. —— (1926), Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (bubian) 中國歷史研究法補編 (Methods of researching Chinese history: supplement). Taibei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju. ____ (1936), “Shuo qun xu 說群序 (Preface to the Treatise on Collectivity),” in Yinbing shi heji: wenji 飲冰室合集﹕文集. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan. Ma Kenxi (Robert Mackenzie) (1902), Taixi xinshi lanyao 泰西新史覽要, Li Timoutai (Timothy Richard) trans. Shanghai: Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese. (The book was rst published 1895. I use the ninth edition (1902) in this article). Ma Zimei 馬紫梅 (Mary G. Mazur) (1996), Shidai zhi zi: Wu Han 時代之子﹕吳唅 (Son of His Times: Wu Han), translated into Chinese by Zeng Yuelin 曾越麟 et al. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. —— (1997), “Bu lianxu de lianxuxing: Guanyu ershi shiji Zhongguo ‘Tongshi’ xin zonghe de yixie chubu xiangfa 不連續的連續性﹕關於二十世紀中國“通史”新綜 合的一些初步想法 (Interrupted Continuity: Some Reections on the Writing of China’s General History in the Twentieth Century),” translated into Chinese by Wu Yanhong 吳艷紅, in Shixue lilun yanjiu. 史學理論研究 2 (1997), 56–65. Mackenzie, Robert (1880), The Nineteenth Century: A History. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Mazur, Mary G. (1980), “The Reception of Early Modern Primary Educational Reform: A Case Study of the Hsu-chou Area.” MA Thesis, University of Chicago. —— (1993), “A Man of His Times: Wu Han, the Historian.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago. —— (1997), “The Four Zhu Yuanzhang zhuans,” in Ming Studies, 38 (1997), 63–85. Naka Michiyo 那珂通世 (1891), Shina tsushi 支那通史 (General History of China). Novick, Peter (1988), That Noble Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Pusey, James Reeve (1983), China and Charles Darwin. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Research, Harvard University. Qi Sihe 齊思和 (1949), “Jin bainian lai zhongguo shixue de fazhan 近百年來中國史 學的發展 (The development of Chinese historiography in the last hundred years),” in Yanjing shehui kexue 燕京社會科學 2 (October 1949). Schneider, Laurence A. (1971), Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (1979), “National Essence and the New Intelligentsia,” in Charlotte Furth (ed.) (1976), The Limits of Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 57–89. Soothill, William E. (1924), Timothy Richard of China. London: Seeley, Service and Co. Spencer, Herbert (1903), Study of Sociology (Qunxue yiyan), translated by Yan Fu. Su Chi 素痴 (Zhang Yinlin) (1929), “Jindai Zhongguo xuexushi shang zhi Liang Rengong xian sheng 近代中國史學史上之梁任公先生 (Liang Rengong’s position in modern Chinese intellectual history),” in Xueheng 學衡 67, 85 ( January 1929). Tang, Xiaobing (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tang, Xiaofeng (2000), From Dynastic Geography to Historical Geography: A Change in Perspective Toward the Geographical Past of China. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press International. Teng Ssu-yu (1949), “Chinese Historiography in the Last Fifty Years” in Far Eastern Quarterly 8, 2 (February 1949), 131–156. Townsend, James (1992), “Chinese Nationalism,” in Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 27 ( January 1992), 97–130. Williams, Raymond (1958), Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, George M. (1992), Patriots and Redeemers in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wong, Q. Edward (2001), Inventing China through History: the May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wong, Young-tsu (1989), Search for Modern Nationalism: Zhang Binglin and Revolutionary China, 1869–1936. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Wright, Arthur (1963), “On the Uses of Generalization in the Study of Chinese History,” in Louis Gottschalk (ed.) (1963), Generalization in the Writing of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 (1933), Zhongguo gudai shi 中國古代史 (History of Ancient China). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan. The book was rst published in 1904 with another title, Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新中學中國歷史教科書 (The Newest Chinese History Textbook for Middle School). Xu Guansan 許冠三 (1986 & 1989), Xin shixue jiushi nian, 1900 —新史學九十年 1900 –(Ninety years of New History, 1900 –), 2 vols. Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe. Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (Binglin 炳麟) (1904), “Ai Qing shi 哀清史 (Lament for Qing history),” in Qiu shu 訄書. Shanghai: 59, 156–162. Zhou Yutong 周予同 (1941), “Wushi nianlai Zhongguo zhi xinshi xue 五十年來中 國之新史學 (Chinese New History studies in the last fty years),” in Xuelin 學林 (1941).

ZHANG YINLIN’S EARLY CHINA Brian Moloughney

The extraordinary social and political changes of the late Qing and Republican periods provided great challenges for scholars. The new education system and the vernacular literature movement meant that the audience for almost all forms scholarship was growing. But it was also of a fundamentally different character. Scholars found themselves confronting a completely new environment, an environment in which they had to try to manage the transition from fragmenting empire to emerging nation-state. For many historians this meant grappling with the issue of what a ‘national’ history might mean, and how to tell that national story in a way that would give meaning to the inherited cultural legacy yet also engage the new audience for scholarship and thus help shape the emerging nation-state. Some historians were unforgiving, intentionally carrying the rich historiographical tradition of the past into the present and expecting readers to rise to this level. If this was well done, as with Liu Yizheng’s (柳詒徵 1880–1956) Zhongguo wenhua shi 中國文化史 (A Cultural History of China) or Qian Mu’s (錢穆 1895–1990) Guoshi dagang 國史大綱 (An Outline of the Nation’s History), then an audience was found, albeit one that was deliberately focused on the retention of considerable skill with the classical language.1 Other scholars decided that a new general history must be of completely different order. If it was to reach as wide an audience as possible, such a history could not be written in the same way as had histories in the past. Not only must it be written in the vernacular language, its style and content needed to respond to the great social changes of the recent past. The most successful book of this kind was Zhang Yinlin’s (張蔭麟 1905–1942) Zhongguo shanggu shigang 中國上古史綱 (Outline of the History of Early China, hereafter Early China), which was rst published in 1941 and has been continuously in print ever since.2 1

See Liu 1932, and Qian 1940. The book has appeared in a number of different editions and under a variety of titles. For details on this see Zhou 2002a: 355. The edition I have used for all references is Zhongguo shanggu shigang published in Taibei by Liren shuju in 1982 [Hereafter Zhang 2

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Zhang’s motivation for writing Early China was similar to that shared by most other writers of general histories during these years, patriotism and a concern for the fate of the Chinese nation and its peoples. He wrote most of the book while living in Beijing in the period between the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931 and then the invasion of China proper in 1937, and he completed the remaining chapters over the next few years after joining the mass exodus to Kunming.3 In the preface to the book Zhang stated: In the context of these troubled times, looking back over the achievements during the past ten years of the new history, from the collation and the synthesizing of materials through to the articulation of new historical perspectives, I want to write a new general history of China in order to help the nation understand itself in a time of unprecedented change. Is this not what a historian ought to do?4

Zhang believed that good history could help Chinese people through this difcult time of invasion and war. In a letter written soon after the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, Zhang wrote that while “the current situation of the country gives people little cause for optimism, if we try to keep focused on wider historical trends we will see that the aggressive Japanese invasion will not last . . . If I only look to the current situation I am pessimistic, but if I look to the future then I am not.”5 As Hon Tze-ki has argued, Zhang believed that good history could provide his fellow citizens with “a sense of mission.”6 One of the lessons of the past was that there had been times in which China had endured similar turmoil, yet it had emerged from this strengthened. Without being overtly patriotic, well written history could help generate a sense of resolve amongst Chinese people, enabling them to look beyond the devastation of the present and to work towards a better future. This was what motivated Zhang Yinlin when he decided to write his general history of China.

Yinlin 1982]. I have chosen to translate the title of the book as Early China because this most closely reects its contents. 3 On this exodus and intellectual life in Kunming during this period see Israel 1998. 4 Zhang Yinlin 1982: preface, 9–10. 5 Zhang Qiyun 1967: 25. 6 Hon forthcoming.

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Artful History Zhang Yinlin’s desire to reach as many people as possible does not mean that we should see him simply as a populist. From the very beginning of his career he demonstrated very high scholarly standards. Zhang was born in November 1905 in Shilong 石龍 township, Dongguan 東莞 county, which is about half way between Hong Kong and Canton. He was to die at a very young age, at only 37 (in 1942), of chronic nephritis.7 While he had a very short life, it was extremely productive. In 1921, aged 16, he entered Qinghua (清華 the school and then the University), where he stayed for eight years studying literature, history and philosophy, both Chinese and Western. And from the age of 18 onwards he was publishing articles and reviews in the leading scholarly journals of the day. His rst signicant publication brought him instant notoriety. This was a critical response to an article by Liang Qichao (梁啟超 1873–1929), arguably the leading intellectual of his generation, and thus not someone to confront lightly. Zhang identied problems in Liang’s interpretation of the fragmentary evidence related to the philosopher Laozi 老子, and provided critical textual analysis to explain why he disagreed with Liang’s reading of this material.8 In other words, Zhang Yinlin’s methodological approach to these issues was based in kaozheng 考證 scholarship, or evidential research, one of the most important methodologies in Chinese historical scholarship since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Zhang showed a deep understanding of the nature of kaozheng scholarship, and in doing so won the admiration and respect of Liang Qichao and others. But Zhang believed that such a skill was not in itself sufcient for the historian. Historical understanding involved more than just excellent research skills. As Li Hongyan has argued, Zhang placed more emphasis on shicai 史才, the ability to develop and convey an empathetic understanding of the past.9

7 For a good brief biography of Zhang Yinlin that concentrates on his scholarship see Li Hongyan 2005. Other biographical material can be found in Zhang and Qian 1967 and Zhou 2002b. 8 Zhang Yinlin 1923, and Liang Qichao 1941: vol. 5, 50–68. 9 Li Hongyan 2005: 259. Although Li does not mention it, Zhang’s use of the term shicai 史才 can be traced to Liu Zhiji’s Shitong, where, in the chapter Hu cai 核才, it states: 夫史才之難, 其難甚矣. See Liu Zhiji 1985 reprint: 328.

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After graduating from Qinghua, Zhang Yinlin spent two years at Stanford University studying philosophy and sociology, subjects he pursued deliberately in order to broaden his appreciation of different perspectives and methodologies so that he would be a better historian. During these years he continued to publish reviews, commentary and articles in Chinese journals. This work can be best described as eclectic. He wrote on many different topics and covered many different elds: history, the philosophy of history, philosophy and literature. He also translated Western works into Chinese, including poetry, and articles on culture, education, politics, and language.10 While closely involved in the transformation of Chinese historical thought and writing in early 20th century China, Zhang Yinlin stood aside from the mainstream of developments and was not closely aligned to any particular school. The various attempts to group historians into schools, each dened by the distinctive positions from which Chinese historians approached the business of researching and writing about the past, have not been very successful and there is no consensus about what these schools were. Some follow the suggestion of Feng Youlan (馮友蘭 1895–1990) and argue that there were three main groups: those who believed in the inherited accounts of the past (xingu 信古), those who doubted the validity of those accounts ( yigu 疑古), and those who sought to explain the past (shigu 釋古).11 The last group are seen as the modern, professional historians. Others prefer a more institutional approach, aligning historians either with Beijing University (Hu Shi 胡適 1891–1962, and his students), Qinghua University (Wang Guowei 王國維 1877–1927, and those inuenced by him), or the Yan’an group, the Marxists. In another recent approach, Zhang Shuxue 張書學 denes historians as positivists, relativists or Marxists.12 Then there are those who see historians as primarily focussed around particular concerns: those who concentrated primarily on issues of methodology, those who were concerned with continuing and developing Qing evidential scholarship, and those whose main concern was with the collection and ordering of historical materials. The historians associated with Beijing University are usually seen to exemplify the modern face

10 For a complete list of Zhang Yinlin’s publications, including books, articles and translations see Zhou 2002a. Zhang used the name Suchi (素痴) in many publications. 11 Feng 1984: 222. 12 Zhang Shuxue 1998.

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of ‘May-Fourth’ historiography, with its emphasis on establishing history as a scientic discipline.13 The problem with all these approaches, however, is that the divisions between schools, the divisions between various groups of historians, are never very clear. The diversity of historical writing of the period undermines these divisions. In one schema a historian can be placed in one particular school, while in another the same historian is placed in a different group and is seen to represent apparently contradictory positions. For instance, for some Wang Guowei was the leader of the Qinghua group, while for others he should be seen as a positivist. Zhang Yinlin provides a problem for any of these approaches, as he seems close to all but aligned to none. For instance, he taught at Qinghua, but could also be included in the group who sought to explain the past. At the same time, as we shall see below, he was critical of scholars intent on dening the new history as a scientic discipline. One of the things that set Zhang Yinlin apart from his contemporaries was his emphasis on the literary aspect of the historian’s work. Unlike most, who sought to ground historical practice in scientic methodology and separate it from literature, Zhang argued that it was necessary to mould evidence into a reliable yet engaging story, that historical writing was a ‘creative’ act. This was a concern that emerged very early in his writing and would continue throughout his life. In an article published in the journal Xueheng (學衡 Critical Review) in 1928 Zhang explained his views about the artfulness of history. Ought history be a science? Or is it an art? I say that it is both. Most specialist historians would sneer on hearing this claim. But the sneering of the specialists is not sufcient to be swayed. Ordinary people know that it requires excellent literary skill to write history, yet specialist historians deny this. And for it to be considered an art, history must go beyond just the display of excellent literary skill! If we compare history and ction, what is it that distinguishes them? Everybody knows that the difference between them is that one deals with the imaginary, while the other deals with the real. But is this distinction sufcient to claim that history is beyond the bounds of art? To paint a picture of an immortal is art. To draw life, to draw the real, and make it lifelike is art. What ction and history have in common is in dealing with that which has life, emotion and expression, which are all aspects of art. Because that which is made manifest in history is the real, its source materials must be collected and arranged in a scientic manner. But simply having materials, no matter

13

Q. Edward Wang 2001.

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brian moloughney how accurate they are, is not to have history. And to synthesize these materials in a scientic manner is also not history. Why not? The true recognition of life, emotion and expression comes through art [. . .]. Ideally, there are two aspects to history: 1) delity to source materials, 2) faithfulness in artistic expression.14

Post linguistic turn, this may not seem particularly radical or contentious. But at the time it was published in China this was a radical view, one that challenged the dominant perceptions about what history should be. For most historians in early 20th century China, the professionalization of the discipline meant the creation and entrenchment of scientic methods of research.15 The transformation of that research into publications, the writing of history, received little or no attention. Zhang Yinlin remained committed to the inherited notion that literature and history were one (wen shi bu fen 文史不分), and he did so in the face of the increasing demands to separate off the one from the other. During this period, scholars were becoming academics and in the process they tried to establish rm disciplinary boundaries. This meant that history could not be literature.16 Yet Zhang Yinlin’s work continually crossed those boundaries, encompassing not only history but also philosophy and literature. Zhang believed that the tendency in modern historiography to emphasize only the scientic aspects of historical research undermined its fundamentally humanistic aspects. He was not at all opposed to new developments. Indeed, he was probably more familiar with the nature of historiographical developments outside of China than most at the time, and of the value of many of the new methodological approaches, but he criticized those who felt new methodologies were all that was needed for good history. On its own, an emphasis on scientic methodology impoverished history, reducing it to little more than a form of narrow-minded positivism. The specic function of history, he claimed, was in portraying the traces ( yiji 遺蹟) that have survived from the past, yet this was not all there was to historical studies because history must also portray the spirit of that which was in the past. It is the artistic nature of history that adds esh and blood to the bone of the scientic nature of historical research. Zhang argued that “the value of consciousness was that it gave the ability to appreciate truth, beauty and goodness.” This was 14 15 16

Zhang Yinlin 1928. Q. Edward Wang 2001: 51–99. Ibid.

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a stage beyond the ‘scientic truths’ that Hu Shi and others placed so much importance on.17 Another aspect of Zhang’s challenge to his professional colleagues was based on what might be called aesthetic grounds. He believed that the artistic aspect of history is integral to its very nature; it is not something external to it. As a record of past humanity, the aesthetic beauty of history lies in its subject, it is an objective aspect of its very nature: “It is the exploration of beauty in the writing of history that I call the artistic aspect of history, and the examination of coherence (or pattern) which I call the scientic aspect of history.”18 These two components, the artistic and the scientic, are inter-related: in essence they are two aspects of the same thing. Similarly, the metaphorical and rhetorical features of historical writing were not mere embellishments but essential skills that enable the historian to relate the nature of the human world and to create a lasting and enriching impression. Zhang noted how in Chinese prose and poetry past events were often deployed deliberately to develop an emotional response in readers, indicating again what he felt to be the fundamentally aesthetic nature of historical composition.19 Zhang reected on this in an essay on the evidential basis for the poem “Hanchao rusheng xing” (漢朝儒生行 ‘Scholars of the Han’) by the Qing scholar and poet Gong Zizhen (龔自珍 1792–1841). In the poem, Gong noted how the archive contains documents that convey the events of the past (in this case the Han dynasty) but it cannot “capture the many different sentiments of the time.” Yet without an attempt to capture those sentiments, Zhang felt that history would fail, and it would do so on two counts: it would not be faithful to the past, but it would also fail to have meaning in the present.20 Related to these issues was the question of accessibility. For Zhang, the most important social value of historical research and writing lay in the person of the reader. Scientic methodology may help verify the truthfulness of evidence, but it is of little help in conveying an appreciation of the past to others. It is through its artistic aspects that history can achieve its social value of broadening and deepening the 17 Zhang Yinlin 1941. Hu Shi did accept that history had an artistic function, but he gave it much less emphasis than the scientic nature of the endeavour, to which he attached overriding importance. See Hu 1926: 340. Much of this discussion is indebted to Li Hongyan 1991. 18 Zhang Yinlin 1932b. 19 For a study of this see Owen 1986. 20 Zhang Yinlin 1933.

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knowledge of readers. Not only did he seek aesthetic value and accessibility in others’ works, he also stove to achieve these things in his own writing. His work was widely admired not just for the high standard of the scholarship displayed but also because of his skills as a writer. This was one of the reasons that Fu Sinian (傅斯年 1896–1950) decided to approach Zhang when he was asked by the government to commission a new general history of China.21 By this time Zhang had returned from Stanford and was teaching in the Department of History at Qinghua University in Beijing. In an article published in 1934, soon after his return to China, Zhang had written about what he saw as the most important tasks facing historians at the time, one of which was the writing of new general histories and textbooks. Fu Sinian’s invitation followed soon after.22 Over the next few years, up until the Japanese invasion in 1937, Zhang worked on this project, and had written all but the last three chapters when he was forced to evacuate the capital. He went rst to Zhejiang University, and then on to Kunming, where he completed the nal three chapters and the famous preface not long before he died. The original plan was for Zhang Yinlin’s book to be the rst in a series of books that would cover all of Chinese history and which could be used as textbooks in secondary schools. Zhang covered the period up to the Eastern Han dynasty, and others were to continue the story down into the present. But with Zhang’s death this plan was abandoned, and his text was left to stand alone as a history of early China.23

General History Zhang had given a great deal of consideration to what would be required to produce a good, accessible general history and in the preface to the book he sets out criteria for the composition of such a work. Zhang believed that the quality of the new general histories

21

Fu 2003: vol. 5, 218. Zhang Yinlin, “Guanyu lishi xuejia de dangqian zeren” 關於歷史學家的責任 (On the Historian’s Duty) in Da gong bao: shidi zhoukan (28 September 1934). 23 It is for this reason that I prefer to translate the title of the book as Early China. The original plan was for Wu Han 吳唅 to write the next volume in the series, covering the period from the Tang on to the Qing, Qian Jiaju 千家駒 the volume dealing with the period from the Opium War onwards while Wang Yunsheng 王芸生 would deal with the period of the Japanese invasion. 22

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produced over the past thirty years was fairly poor. Many of them failed to nd an audience, either because they were too long and detailed, or because they did not manage to stimulate any interest in readers. This was a problem, because it was through general histories, particularly those that were used as textbooks in schools and universities, that many people gained their knowledge of Chinese history. If people were to develop a sense of pride in the achievements of the Chinese past then the general histories produced must be of a higher quality. Zhang had no illusions about the difculty of this task, particularly in light of the length of the Chinese past and the richness of its historical materials. Not all things could be included and not all should. There needed to be some criteria for use in assessing what was of value. This was the purpose of the prefatory essay to Early China. Not only was it intended to inform readers of the methodology Zhang employed in writing the book, it was also intended to help others think more carefully about what was involved in producing a general history so that the overall quality of such works might improve. This was a topic that had received little attention from other historians. He Bingsong (何炳松 1890–1946) had written an extended essay on the subject, in which he drew extensively on his reading of Western theorists such as Langlois and Seignobos to argue that history was a social science. The essay focuses almost exclusively on explaining research methodologies, and says little about the composition of a historical text or the need to engage an audience.24 Fu Sinian also wrote briey about the challenges and aims of general history, noting that it should help develop an understanding of people and their lives, cultivate a sense of patriotism, develop an appreciation of cultural change, and stimulate inquiring minds.25 Zhang also saw general history in these terms, but he developed a much more extensive discussion of what was required to write a general history. It is probable that Zhang Yinlin drew on Western historians in developing his criteria for the composition of a general history, an argument that Li Huazhao makes, but it is unclear exactly who these historians are. It is also the case that Zhang integrates these ideas with his own understanding of historical practice, both Chinese and Western, to develop the arguments he makes

24 Langlois and Seignobos 1897, and Siegnobos 1901, and He 1930. For a comparison of Zhang Yinlin’s writing on tongshi with that of He Bingsong see Xu 1986. 25 Fu 2003: vol. 5, 54–5.

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in the preface. And, as Li notes, Zhang’s success in developing these principles into practice was “unsurpassed in terms of opening up new developments in popular historical writing.”26 There were a number of factors that Zhang considered crucial to the composition of a general history. Firstly, the historian should consider the novelty of particular events. If the events were distinctive, both in terms of their intrinsic nature and their relationship to other events, and if they therefore occupied an important place in the origin of the society, they should be considered for inclusion. Similarly, if historical events had demonstrable long-term effects or were of fundamental cultural value then they should be considered suitable for a general history. Zhang also believed that part of the relevance of history was related to the fact that people were interested in the past as a way of understanding present circumstances, and the source of those circumstances. Thus he believed historians, particularly writers of general histories, must be concerned to establish the genetic relationships between the origins of circumstances and their current manifestations. Such relationships were extremely complex and difcult to tease out in all their detail, so attention should be focused only on those issues that were of greatest contemporary relevance. Finally, he argued that while Chinese historians had always considered the signicance of events in terms of their exemplary nature, in terms of whether or not they conveyed meta-historical principles, this was not a criterion which modern writers should be greatly concerned with.27 Once the historian had decided what to include it was then useful to provide a sense of chronological order to the material. In terms of the gathering and ordering of material, Zhang Yinlin admired the biannian 編年 (chronological) methodology displayed by the Song historian Li Tao (李燾 1115–1184) in Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian 續資治通鑒長編 (An Extension of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government). He recommended all writers of tongshi 通史, or general histories, read this and follow its example.28 But while such a format was valuable for the rst stages of historical work, for the ordering of historical information, this was only the beginning of the process of composition. This material had then to be transformed into a coherent historical narra26

Li Huazhao 2002: 82. Zhang Yinlin 1982: preface, 9–17. For an extensive discussion of this preface, see Diu 1968: 104–113 and 120–123. 28 Diu 1968: 123. 27

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tive. Zhang argued that the synthesis of evidence involved determining relations of cause and effect and tracing patterns of development, but he was opposed to the notion that historical events were the product of universal laws. He also argued that it was important not to burden the text of a history written for a popular audience with long quotations from sources and detailed footnotes. For instance, while Zhang admired Feng Youlan’s scholarship, he was critical of the rst volume of Feng’s Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史 (History of Chinese Philosophy) because Feng ignored its accessibility to readers, and included far too much quotation from source materials. Zhang suggested that there were many places where it would have been better to use his own words to make the text more comprehensible to general readers.29 Such methods might be appropriate for textual analysis, but Zhang believed they were completely out of place in a general history, which ought to be engaging and accessible. The author needed to be thoroughly familiar with the relevant source material and the issues involved, but the purpose of the work was not to parade that knowledge or to become absorbed in the detail of particular issues. Instead, the emphasis in such a work should be on establishing a lively and coherent narrative so as to draw readers into the story being told. Only if a history was well written, Zhang believed, would it be possible to create an interest in the past amongst a general non-scholarly audience. One of the reviewers of Early China argued that what non-specialist readers wanted in a history of this kind was a story, China’s story, based on real events but told in a manner that would provide for readers a sympathetic engagement with what was known of early Chinese history. This was exactly what Zhang had tried to achieve, a lively, interesting and engaging account of Chinese history that people would want to read. There are no footnotes, nor any of the usual scholarly apparatus that specialists would expect in a work of history. But this was not a book for specialists; it was designed to bring the story of Chinese history before a general audience. In his review of the book, Tang Chaohua argued that Zhang had succeeded in writing such a lively and accessible history for all readers, and for this reason he argued that Early China marked the beginnings of a new type of history.30 Other reviewers used

29 Feng 1931, and Zhang Yinlin 1931. See also Li Hongyan 1991b: 45, for a discussion of this. 30 Tang 1937.

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words like ‘graceful’ and ‘elegant’ to describe the book. All praised it for being succinct and accessible.31 It draws on a wide range of materials, and yet demonstrates clear judgment in terms of the selection of what is most relevant. Zhang develops a distinctive interpretation, based on wide reading in source materials and of other scholars, but the narrative is concise and coherent. The book very quickly gained a wide audience. Perhaps more than all his articles, the success of this book was the greatest challenge he gave his colleagues in terms of the need to understand that history was both art and science.

Early China Having set out the parameters for the composition of his work in the preface, Zhang begins his history proper by distancing himself from other general histories that reach back to cosmological origins. In the past, people liked to begin histories with phrases such as ‘When the earth separated from heaven’ (天地部判) or ‘When the world emerged from primeval chaos’ (混沌初開). In recent times, people prefer phrases like ‘when the heavens coalesced’ (星云凝結) or ‘when the earth took shape’ (地球形成). In this book I have no desire to reach back into such a distant past.

He also notes that he will not consider the emergence of “Beijing Man” from his hominid ancestors and what the Zhoukoudian sedimentation tell us about such early forms of life on the North China Plain. Rather, he begins his account of early China with the Shang dynasty, and what the oracle bones uncovered from the ritual archive of the last Shang kings at Anyang tell us. In other words, Zhang Yinlin begins his story with the emergence of written records, arguing that it is really only from then onwards that the history of China can be told. Here, and throughout the text, Zhang also indicates the limits of the archive, suggesting what can and what cannot be known about the past. Zhang’s account of the Shang period sets the pattern for what will follow throughout the book. In the second paragraph he tells us that he will focus on three things: material culture, social change and intellectual developments.32 For the Shang, he begins with an account of

31 32

Most of the signicant reviews of Early China are included in Zhou 2002b. Zhang Yinlin 1982: 23.

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the agricultural system, “the basis of production,” what grains were cultivated and what tools employed in this cultivation.33 He then moves on to discuss what can be known about social organization during the Shang, which is limited because of the paucity of the records, and, nally, he tells us something of the religious and intellectual life during the Shang, nishing with a brief discussion of Shang musical instruments. The result is a very good, succinct synthesis of what could be known from archaeological work, the textual legacy and recent historical scholarship.34 Having established what can be known about the Shang period, Zhang then turns to reect on the pre-Shang era. He notes that little can be said with any certainty about this period, and that there are far too many questions that cannot be answered. What evidence there is tells us more about how people in later ages understood the period than it does about the period itself. But he notes that this is an interesting story in itself, and discusses the main features of these traditional accounts of very early Chinese history.35 Here Zhang Yinlin distinguishes himself from many other historians who chose to see these traditional accounts as simply fabrication, telling us nothing about the period they claim to depict.36 Zhang remained agnostic on many issues that had been the subject of much debate during the Gushi bian 古史辨, or Disputing Antiquity, movement of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that there simply wasn’t the evidence to answer many of the questions that had been raised in these debates. He was particularly critical of the methodology employed by Gu Jiegang (顧頡剛 1893–1980), who, in his most iconoclastic phase, seemed driven by little more than a desire to eradicate all received understandings of early Chinese history. This critique does not feature in Early China, but it is worth considering as it reveals much about the scholarship that lay behind Zhang Yinlin’s account of early Chinese history. In order to deconstruct the received version of Chinese history, Gu Jiegang had focused his attention on Yu 禹, a central gure in the ancient past. Most importantly, Yu was believed to have been the

33

Zhang Yinlin 1982: 25. Zhang Yinlin 1982: 24–32. 35 Zhang Yinlin 1982: 33–36. 36 This is a point Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 makes. He contrasts Zhang’s approach with that of Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑, who tried, he believed, to draw too hard and fast a line between myth and history. See Chen 2002: 91. 34

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founder of the Xia dynasty, the rst of the three great dynasties of the ancient period (Xia, Shang and Zhou). Gu Jiegang questioned this association, suggesting that the relation between Yu and the Xia was simply a fabrication of the Warring States period; indeed, he argued that in the early Zhou dynasty Yu was believed to be divine, a god or a deity, and not a human. It was only much later that this deity was reconstructed as a cultural hero and the founder of the Xia dynasty.37 Zhang Yinlin’s critique of Gu Jiegang’s argument is wide-ranging, confronting each and every aspect of Gu’s case, yet it is grounded in a single methodological perspective. Zhang argues that Gu Jiegang relies on a particular form of historical argument, the argument from silence (mozheng 默證), to develop his analysis, but that he does not understand the limits of this form of argument. It is this lack of awareness of the very limited value of this form of argument that leads Gu Jiegang into problems.38 Zhang notes that many things do not survive in the textual record, but because of this we do not simply claim they did not exist, yet this is exactly the way Gu Jiegang builds his arguments. For example, Gu argues that while Yu appears in the book of Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經) and the Book of Documents (Shujing 書經) Yao 堯 Shun 舜 do not. Thus, the obvious meaning to be derived from this is that in the traditions regarding Yao, Shun and Yu, those relating to Yu appeared rst, while those relating to Yao and Shun were constructed later. Zhang’s response to this is as follows: This argument completely contravenes the limits of the suitability of the argument from silence. We should ask ourselves whether or not the Shijing and the Shujing . . . provide a comprehensive record of the historical perspectives of this period, and whether or not the writings from that time contain a systematic account of all events of the time of Tang 唐 [Yao 堯] and Yu 虞 [Shun 舜]. We should also ask whether or not it was necessary for these texts to be concerned with events relating to Yao and Shun. The answer to such questions is obvious to those with any common sense. Suppose there was the unfortunate situation in which all records of the pre-Tang periods [i.e. before the 7th century] were lost. If we relied on Gu Jiegang’s methodology and tried to ascertain the historical reality of the pre-Tang period from the textual legacy of the Tang, the poems, the prose and the court diaries, we can only hope that the achievements

37 These arguments were set out rst in a letter to Qian Xuantong 錢玄同, and then developed further in subsequent essays. See Gu 1931a, 1931b. 38 Zhang Yinlin 1925, reprinted in Gu 1931c: vol. 2, 271–288.

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of the great Guangwu period [Eastern Han, r. 25–57] would not be seen simply as a creation by people in later times.39

Zhang Yinlin systematically confronts each aspect of Gu Jiegang’s argument in this way, arguing that the misguided use of inappropriate methodology leads Gu to conclusions which cannot be sustained. Moreover, he shows that Gu continually misreads the textual archive, expecting it to provide evidence for things that cannot reasonably be expected from it. Another example of this relates to Gu Jiegang’s attempts to contest claims that Yu was the founding emperor of the Xia dynasty. Gu argued that if Yu was indeed the founder of the Xia, the textual record would provide evidence of this. In particular, he argued that in the Book of Songs or in the Book of Documents we would expect to nd the two characters together, as Xia Yu 夏禹, thus indicating that Yu was of Xia, the founder of Xia. But no such combination of characters can be found in these texts. In fact, it is not until much later, during the Warring States period and the Qin and Han dynasties, that we begin to see this combination of characters. Thus, Gu Jiegang argues that the linking of Yu with the Xia dynasty was a deliberate fabrication of this later period, from the Warring States period onwards. In earlier times, during the Western Zhou, people did not link Yu with the Xia dynasty; indeed, they believed Yu was a deity, not a human being.40 In response, Zhang Yinlin returns to the same point he made earlier. Neither the Songs nor the Documents were intended as comprehensive records of either the Xia dynasty or of Yu, so we should not expect that the relationship of the two should inevitably have been a concern of their many different authors, as Gu claims. If we follow Gu Jiegang’s reasoning, are we to conclude that because, in poetry collections from the Han and the Ming dynasties, we do not nd phrases like Emperor Liu Bang (帝劉邦) or Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang (帝朱元璋), or Han Liu Bang (漢劉邦) and Ming Zhu Yuanzhang (明朱元璋), that there was no Han emperor called Liu Bang nor a Ming emperor called Zhu Yuanzhang.41

39 40 41

Gu 1931c: vol. 2, 273. Gu 1931c: vol. 1, 115–118. Gu 1931c: vol. 2, 275.

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As these examples demonstrate, Zhang Yinlin was so astounded at the nature of Gu Jiegang’s arguments that his response nearly becomes a form of ridicule. This was not because he was fundamentally opposed to attempts to re-examine China’s ancient past—he was not. But on many of the issues raised by Gu Jiegang he remained agnostic. The archive simply did not allow such certainty. What could be said, however, was people in later periods, especially the Zhou, came to understand events in the distant past in this way. And in this he concurred with Gu Jiegang that these accounts tells us much about the cultural life of the people who produced them. To go further than this, however, and claim that these accounts were unfounded, was not possible. The evidence simply did not allow this. One of the central themes of Early China is the transformation from a dispersed feudal society ( fengjian diguo 封建帝國) under the Zhou to a more centralized bureaucratic empire ( junxian diguo 郡縣帝國) under the Qin and Han dynasties, the foundation of the imperial period that lasted down into the 20th century. Zhang begins this story with his account of the rise of the Zhou and it continues on throughout the book. He interweaves social, economic and political factors in his account of this transformation, and binds these into a coherent story with considerable narrative force. It was the social system established during the Zhou, Zhang argues, that laid the foundation for Chinese society and culture, thus he devotes considerable attention to detailing what can be known of this. Material culture provides the basis for his account. He always begins with it, noting that ways in which different forms of production empower different social forces. For instance, he argues that China developed an advanced agricultural economy during the Zhou, one based on a sophisticated metallurgy, and this empowered the aristocratic families that dominated the feudal states of the period. These families were often in conict with each other as they sought greater control of land, water and labor. But as these states grew, and became more complex, new social forces emerged to challenge the authority of the aristocratic families. As agriculture became more commercialized, and with increasing urbanization, cities became the focus for new political and commercial elites, especially merchants and scholars, and these groups captured some of the authority of the aristocratic families. In developing his narrative account of these changes, Zhang provides an analysis of the changing role of all the main social groupings, from common people and slaves through to merchants, military gures and ofcials. He also discusses the dominant features of both family and

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religious life.42 The shift from the looser feudal system of the early Zhou to the more centralized polities of the Warring States period also saw a transition from a rigidly hierarchical social system built around special hereditary prerogatives to a comparatively more open and uid system that allowed greater social mobility. In conjunction with this, new elites emerged whose focus was less regional and more integrated. These elites would guide the process of centralisation that resulted in the formation of bureaucratic empire under the Qin and Han. Here, again, it is worth exploring the scholarship that lies behind the narrative of Early China. Despite his emphasis on material culture and the importance of the forces of production, Zhang Yinlin was not a Marxist. For instance, he argued that the term ‘feudal’ was being used far too indiscriminately, and that in all of China’s long history it was only the Zhou period that could be considered feudal.43 But he was interested in the way in which anthropological and sociological perspectives might enrich historical understanding. He was one of the few mainstream historians to look favourably upon Guo Moruo’s (郭沫若 1892–1978) Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu 中國古代社會研究 (Research on Ancient Chinese Society).44 Despite the criticisms directed at this book, Zhang saw it as a legitimate and distinctive way to research China’s earliest history. He believed that Guo’s book raised all sorts of interesting issues, especially with its focuses on issues of production and social organization, and its attempt to determine patterns in historical change, whether or not there was any historical logic or reason behind the many changes in social structure. Zhang also notes that way in which Guo made good use of anthropology to develop a more comprehensive history of ancient China. Despite this, he felt that the main thrust of Guo’s research followed too closely that of Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, which was published some 50 years before (1877). It was now outdated, Zhang believed, and most contemporary anthropologists had discarded many of its arguments. Guo accepted unconditionally these late 19th century ideas of social evolution and used them to interpret Chinese history, with the result that often his arguments and conclusions were far-fetched and many of the most original points he makes could

42 Zhang Yinlin 1982: 36–80. In English-language studies, a similar approach to early Chinese history is found in Hsu 1965. 43 Zhang Yinlin 1982: 218–220. 44 Guo 1930, and Zhang Yinlin 1932. For a discussion of these debates see Dirlik 1978: esp. 137–179.

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not be sustained. Nevertheless, Zhang was full of praise for what Guo had tried to achieve, and the motivation for producing it. His attempt to bring a materialist perspective to bear on Chinese history was worthwhile, despite its shortcomings. Zhang’s own book can be seen as an attempt to retain some of the insights that came from Guo’s focus on the material and the social, but without his determinism and teleology. He integrated the historian’s attention to texture and complexity with the sociologist’s attention to form and structure. But Early China is not just a story of social change. Early on Zhang Yinlin indicated that he would convey something of the character and actions of a few outstanding individuals, as these lives were integral parts of the Chinese cultural heritage. Mostly the stories are very brief, as when he tells us of the travels of Zhang Qian (張騫?–114 BCE) in order to convey the expansion of the Han empire and the opening of China to the new cultural inuences that came from the west, especially Buddhism.45 But the most extensive biographical section of the book comes with the chapter devoted to the life and times of Confucius.46 Zhang sees Confucius as a paradigmatic gure in Chinese history, and much of China’s subsequent culture can be traced to the inuence of this man. Hence, in telling the story of Confucius, Zhang is able to convey much about one of the core components of the Chinese cultural heritage. He begins with a discussion of the environment in which Confucius emerged, but spends most of the chapter exploring his views on politics and education, as these are the two aspects of his legacy that were to have the greatest impact. The section on education, in particular, forms the heart of this chapter, and includes discussion of Confucius’ patronage of the arts, his interest in poetry and music, and in history. These things would have been well known to many Chinese readers, especially as this was part of the Chinese cultural heritage that had come in for considerable criticism during the New Culture Movement. Zhang avoids the polemical nature of much of these debates, conveying the signicance of Confucius for Chinese culture in a succinct and accessible manner. The more settled patterns of the early Spring and Autumn period were radically transformed during the Warring States era. Zhang notes that there was as much change in ten years during the Warring States

45 46

Zhang Yinlin 1982: 218–220. Zhang Yinlin 1982: 101–121.

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as there had been during a century during the Spring and Autumn period.47 And in one of the few direct references to more recent times, Zhang notes that the only comparable period in Chinese history to the period of radical change during the century between c. 420 BCE and c. 320 BCE was the period since the Opium War.48 In other words, he believed that the Warring States was a crucial period in Chinese history, and a period of much relevance for modern readers. As well as dealing with the forces contributing to social and political change, the centralization of life and administration, Zhang deals with the intellectual developments that contributed to this process. He briey introduces the main currents in the so-called ‘Hundred Schools’ of thought, but concentrates mostly on the Legalists and the contribution these scholars made towards economic development under the Qin and the process of unication. Throughout the text, Zhang uses quotations sparingly. The early chapters contain the odd quote from the Songs, but for most part the narrative force is provided by Zhang’s own discussion and analysis. But when he comes to this section on the Warring States he provides a little more source material for readers. There are several quotations from Xunzi (荀子 c. 313–238 BCE), as well as a description of the annual budget for a peasant household, and, for contrast, an account of the opulence of courtly life from the Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of the South).49 The other signicant quotation in the book comes at the head of the chapter on Qin Shihuang (秦始皇 259–210 BCE) and the formation of the Qin empire. Here Zhang quotes in full Li Bo’s (Li Bai 李白 701–762) famous poem about the First Emperor, the rst in the series of his Gu Feng 古風 or Old Style poems.50 Zhang writes that this poem was really his inspiration for the chapter, and what follows is an exposition of the issues raised by Li Bo. The poem involves a narrative of Qin Shihuang’s conquests, but also his overreaching and grandiloquence. Undoubtedly, many readers would see a contemporary relevance in this. Zhang uses the story of Qin Shihuang to reinforce his view that

47

Zhang Yinlin 1982: 123. Zhang Yinlin 1982: 132–133. 49 Zhang Yinlin 1982: 123–143. Zhang provides no notes, but the annual budget is a fairly well known text, attributed to Li Ke 李克 the author of the Fajing 法經, or Classic on Law, which is included in the Hanshu 漢書. For a brief discussion of this see Hsu 1965: 109. 50 Zhang Yinlin 1982: 171. For a translation and brief discussion of this poem see Owen 1985: 196–8. 48

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history can give readers a sense of perspective. In the short term there may be little but conict and devastation, but in the long run things resolve themselves, and often in new and interesting ways. We also see here a manifestation of Zhang’s belief in artful history. The poem is quoted in full not only to convey a story, but also to generate an emotional response in readers. For Zhang, the past was a rich reservoir from which much good could be gained. Good popular history should draw on that reservoir in order to enrich people’s lives so that they might be better able to confront the challenges before them. The last chapters of the book complete the story of the emergence of a unied, bureaucratic empire. Here the great stories from Shiji 史記 of the Qin-Han transition are retold in a modern narrative, as is the expansion of the empire under the Han. In these last chapters Zhang’s narrative skill is most evident. For this period the textual legacy is much greater, and thus more could be included, yet he does not allow these chapters to grow out of proportion to the rest of the book. Not only does he keep this section in balance with the earlier sections, he also maintains the narrative strength at the heart of the book. Themes established in the earlier chapters are continued. His topic here is really the formation of the bureaucratic imperial system, which will last down into the 20th century, and he wants to convey its central features, what was inherited from the early phase of Chinese history, and what was transformed. Readers end the book with a clear sense of the great drama of early Chinese history, but also with a rich appreciation of the foundations of Chinese culture. The concentration on material culture, social change and intellectual developments is maintained throughout the book, and this means Zhang Yinlin is able to convey to ordinary readers a story that has resonance with their own lives. This ability to speak across the centuries ensured that Early China found a sympathetic audience.

Zhang Yinlin’s Contributions During the early 20th century, political chaos went hand in hand with social and cultural transformation. The refashioning of historical thought and writing was part and parcel of this process. Most historians believed that the way out of the political chaos that followed the collapse of empire, the rebuilding of China, required a new sense of the past and its place in the present. And for most, conceptualising China

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in national terms was a crucial step towards the creation of a viable nation-state. The challenge was to recast Chinese history as a ‘national’ story, and to convey that story in a way that would give meaning to the inherited cultural legacy yet also help shape the emerging nation-state. The richness of the inherited traditions of historical thought and writing made this task even more challenging. Some suggested past practice was redundant and should be abandoned, but for most this was not a possibility. The formulation of a new national history had to be done in a way that maintained the integrity of the cultural traditions that gave meaning to the Chinese community. Without these there could be no Chinese nation. This challenge became even greater following the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931 and then the invasion of China proper in 1937. Could history help Chinese people through this difcult time of invasion and war? Zhang Yinlin believed that it could. Cultivating a sense of history amongst Chinese people was one way of generating the necessary cohesiveness and commitment that might enable them to endure the current turmoil and work toward a better future. But good national history must do more than this. It must reect the radically different understanding of the Chinese past that had emerged as a result of the transformation in historical practice over the preceding decades. During this time, the foundations of modern professional historiography had been established, and any new national history had to be engaged with the results of that work. In addition, it must also speak to as wide an audience as possible. General history was just that; it was written for a non-scholarly audience, not for an audience of academics. The methods that might be employed to convey the results of historical research to academic colleagues were entirely inappropriate for the writing of general history. One of the things that distinguished Zhang Yinlin from his contemporaries was that he was more attentive to these issues of audience, and perhaps because of this he was more successful in bringing the results of academic research before as wide an audience as possible. Zhang Yinlin’s concern with the question of audience reected a distinctive understanding of modern historical practice. He argued that history was much more than an academic enterprise. Zhang did not disagree with the increasing emphasis on the scientic nature of historical research that came with the attempt to establish history as modern discipline. But unlike many of his colleagues, he argued that this did not mean that history should be separated off from other

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forms of literary endeavour. On the contrary, he argued that history was both science and art, and that its artistic aspects were integral to its very nature. The rhetorical and metaphorical features of historical writing were not mere embellishments; they were fundamental to the nature of historical understanding. Similarly, while a modern scientic methodology, with its roots in kaozheng scholarship, was crucial for historical research, it was of little help in conveying an appreciation of the past to others. It was through its artistic aspects that history could achieve its social role of broadening and deepening knowledge amongst readers. And when Chinese people were confronted by the challenges they faced in the 1930s, when the very survival of China itself was in question, the social and political signicance of historical knowledge was of even greater importance. Zhang Yinlin’s Early China is a rich book, with many aspects to it. While it is important to note that the book was written during a time of invasion and war, and that part of his purpose was to help Chinese people through this difcult period, he also wanted to do more than this. Zhang wanted to provide an example of how a new form of tongshi might be written, a history that reected the best of contemporary scholarship and spoke to the general reader. And in this he was largely successful. At the same time, there is a sense of real substance about this book. Without resort to hyperbole, Zhang conveys the richness and complexity of China’s early history. In doing so he gives readers a sense that China is much more than the current moment, that it will live on beyond the turmoil and troubles that beset it in the present, just as it had done through times of trouble in the past. The book itself has also managed to live beyond the current moment. It is one of the few histories written in the early 20th century that has managed to reach across generations and still be read more than half a century after it was written.

References Cited Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (2002), “Ping Zhang Yinlin xiansheng Zhongguo shigang diyice 評張蔭林先生《中國史綱》第一冊 (A Review of Volume One of An Outline History of China),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 89–95. This was originally published in Sixiang yu shidai 思想與時代 18 (1 January 1943). Dirlik, Arif (1978), Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Diu Yin Ngor (1968), “Zhang Yinlin jiqi Zhongguo shigang 張蔭麟及其中國史綱 (Zhang Yinlin and An Outline History of China).” M.A. Thesis, University of Hong Kong. Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1931), Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史 (A History of Chinese Philosophy), volume 1. Shenzhou: Guoguang she. —— (1984), Sansongtang zixu 三松堂自序 (A Preface to the Hall of Three Pines). Beijing: Sanlian. Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (2003), Fu Sinian quanji 傅斯年全集 (The Collected Works of Fu Sinian), 7 volumes. Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1931a), “Yu Qian Xuantong xiansheng lun gushi shu 與錢玄同 先生論古史書 (Discussing Antiquity with Qian Xuantong),” in Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (ed.) (1931), Gushi bian 古史辨 (Disputing Antiquity), volume 1. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, facsimile reprint of the Pushe 樸社 edition, 59–66. —— (1931b), “Taolun gushi da Liu-Hu er xiangsheng 討論古史答劉胡二先生 (A Response to the views of Liu [Shanli] and Hu [ Jinren] on Antiquity),” in Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (ed.) (1931), Gushi bian 古史辨 (Disputing Antiquity), volume 1. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, facsimile reprint of the Pushe 樸社 edition, 105–150. —— (ed.) (1931c), Gushi bian 古史辨 (Disputing Antiquity), 7 volumes. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, facsimile reprint of the Pushe 樸社 edition. Guo Moruo 郭沫若 ([1930] 1932), Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu 中國古代社會研究 (Research on Ancient Chinese Society). Shanghai: Shanghai xiandai shuju. He Bingsong 何炳松 (1930), Tongshi xinyi 通史新義 (New Principles for Understanding History). Shanghai: Commercial Press. Hon Tze-ki (forthcoming), “The Hopes in Darkness: Historical Writings of Miao Fenglin and Zhang Yinlin during the Sino-Japanese War,” in Baptist University Historical Review. Hsu Cho-yun (1965), Ancient China in Transition: An Analysis of Social Mobility, 722–222 B.C. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hu Shi 胡適 (1926), “Jieshao jibu xinchu de shixue shu 介紹幾部新出的史學書 (Introducing Some New Historical Works),” in Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (ed.) (1931), Gu shi bian 古史辨 (Disputing Antiquity), volume 2. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, facsimile reprint of the Pushe 樸社 edition, 331–343. Israel, John (1998), Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langlois, C.V., and Seignobos, C. (1897), Introduction aux études historiques. Paris: Hacette, translated by G.C. Berry (1925), Introduction to the Study of History. New York. Li Hongyan 李洪岩 (1991a), “Lun Zhang Yinlin jiqi ‘xin shixue’ 論張蔭麟及其‘新 史學’ (Zhang Yinlin and his ‘New History’),” in Jindai shi yanjiu 近代史研究 3 (1991), 216–234. —— (1991b), “Ping Zhang Yinlin de yige shixue guandian 評張蔭麟的一箇史學觀點 (An Evaluation of Zhang Yinlin’s Approach to History),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 43–52. Originally published in Xueshu yanjiu 學術研究 5 (1991). —— (2005), “Zhang Yinlin xiansheng nianpu 張蔭麟先生年譜 (A Chronological Biography of Zhang Yinlin),” in Li Hongyan 李洪岩 (ed.) (2005), Suchi ji 素痴集 (A Collection of Suchi’s Writings). Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 258–284. —— (ed.) (2005), Suchi ji 素痴集 (A Collection of Suchi’s Writings) Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe. Li Huazhao 黎華趙 (2002), “Zhang Yinlin de shixue chengjiu 張蔭麟的史學成就 (The Historical Achievements of Zhang Yinlin),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 53–82. Li Yushu 李毓澍 (1977), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng wenji 張蔭麟先生文集 (The Collected Works of Zhang Yinlin). Taibei: Jiusi chubanshe.

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Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1941), Yinbingshi heji, wenji 飲冰室合集 (The Collected Works from the Ice Drinker’s Studio), 12 volumes. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju. Liu Yizheng 柳詒徵 (1932), Zhongguo wenhua shi 中國文化史 (A Cultural History of China). Nanjing: Zhongshan shuju. Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (1985 reprint), Shitong 史通 (Understanding History), Zhang Zhenpei 張振珮 annotator, 2 volumes. Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe. Owen, Stephen (1985), Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. —— (1986), Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Qian Mu 錢穆 (1940), Guoshi dagang 國史大綱 (An Outline of the Nation’s History). Hong Kong: Commercial Press. Siegnobos, C. (1901), La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales. Song Xi 宋晞 (1953), “Pingjia Zhongguo shanggu shigang 評介中國上古史綱 (A Review of An Outline History of China),” in Xueshu jikan 學術季刊 1 (1953) 4, 136–137, reprinted in Song Xi 宋晞 (1974), Zhongguo shixue lunji 中國史學論集 (A Collection of Essays on Chinese History). Taibei: Taiwan kaiming shudian, 269–272. Tang Chaohua 湯朝華 (2002), “Zhang Yinlin: Zhongguo shigang—yige waihangren de hua 張蔭麟:《中國史綱》—一個外行人的話 (Zhang Yinlin’s An Outline History of China: An Outsider’s Perspective),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 83–88. Originally published in Shuren yuekan 書人月刊 1, 1 ( January 1937). Wang Jiafan 王家范 (1999), ‘Daodu’ 導讀 (Reading Guide) in Zhang Yinlin 張蔭麟 (1999 reprint), Zhongguo shigang 中國史綱 (An Outline History of China). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1–29. Wang, Q. Edward (2001), Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press. Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 (1933), Zhongguo gudai shi 中國古代史 (A History of Early China). Shanghai: Commercial Press. Originally published as Zuixin zhongxue Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 最新中學中國歷史教科書 (The Most Recent Textbook on Chinese History for Secondary Schools), 3 volumes, 1904–6. Xu Guansan 許冠三 (1986), Xinshixue jiushinian 新史學九十年 (Ninety Years of New History). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Zhai Zongpei 翟宗沛 (2002), “Ping Zhang Yinlin xiansheng xinzhu ‘Zhongguo shigang’ diyice 評張蔭麟先生新著＜中國史綱＞第一冊 (A Review of Zhang Yinlin’s new work, Volume One of An Outline History of China),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays for Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 96–103. Originally published in (Chongqing) Wenshi zazhi 2, 2 (February, 1942). Zhang Qiyun 張其昀 (1967), “Jingdao Zhang Yinlin xianzheng 敬悼張蔭麟先生 (In Memory of Zhang Yinlin),” in Zhang Qiyun 張其昀 and Qian Mu 錢穆 (eds.) (1967), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian zhuankan 張蔭麟先生紀念專刊 (A Special Issue in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Hong Kong: Longmen shuju, 23–28. —— and Qian Mu 錢穆 (eds.) (1967), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian zhuankan 張蔭麟先 生紀念專刊 (A Special Issue in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Hong Kong: Longmen shuju. Originally published as a special issue of the journal Sixiang yu shidai 思想與 時代 18 (January 1943). Zhang Shuxue 張書學 (1998), Zhongguo xiandai shixue sixiang yanjiu 中國現代史學思想 研究 (A Study of Modern Chinese Historical Thought). Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe. Zhang Yinlin 張蔭麟 (1923), “Laozi shenghou Kongzi baiyunian zhi shuo zhiyi 老子生後孔子百餘年之說質疑 (Questioning the Claim that Laozi was Born more

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than One Hundred Years later than Confucius),” in Xueheng 學衡 21 (September 1923), 1–5. —— (1925), “Ping jinren Gu Jiegang duiyu Zhongguo gushi zhi taolun 評近人顧頡剛 對於中國古史之討論 (A Critique of the Modern Scholar Gu Jiegang’s Interpretations of Early Chinese History),” in Xueheng 學衡 40 (April, 1925), 1–18. —— (1928), “Lun lishixue zhi guoqu yu weilai 論曆史學之過去與未來 (On the Past and Future of Historical Studies),” in Xueheng 學衡 62 (March, 1928), 1–28. —— (1931), “Ping Feng Youlan Zhongguo zhexue shi shangjuan 評馮友蘭《中國哲 學史》上卷 (A Review of the First Volume of Feng Youlan’s A History of Chinese Philosophy),” in Da gong bao: wenxue fukan 大公報: 文學副刊 25 May 1931 and 1 June 1931. —— (1932a), “Ping Guo Moruo Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu 評郭沫若《中國古代社 會研究》(A Review of Guo Moruo’s Research on Ancient Chinese Society),” in Dagong bao, wenxue fukan 大公報, 文學副刊 (4 January 1932). —— (1932b), “Lishi de meixue jiazhi 曆史的美學价值 (The Aesthetic Value of History),” in Da gong bao: wenxue fukan 大公報: 文學副刊 25 July 1932. —— (1933), “Gong Zizhen ‘Hanchao rusheng xing’ benshi kao 龔自珍“漢朝儒生 行”本事考 (A Study of the Sources for Gong Zizhen’s ‘Scholars of the Han’),” in Yanjing xuebao 燕京學報 13 ( June, 1933), 203–208. —— (1934), “Guanyu lishi xuejia de dangqian zeren 關於歷史學家的責任 (On the Historian’s Duty),” in Da gong bao: shidi zhoukan 大公報: 史地周刊 28 September 1934. —— (1941), “Zhexue yu zhengzhi 哲學與政治 (Philosophy and Politics),” in Sixiang yu shidai 思想與時代 2 (1 September, 1941). —— (1942), Zhongguo shigang: diyice 中國史綱: 第一冊 (An Outline History of China: Volume One). Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue shidi jiaoyu chubanzshe. —— (1948), Zhongguo shigang (shanggu pian) 中國史綱 (上古篇) (An Outline History of China (The First Volume)). Taibei: Zhengzhong shuju. —— (1953), Zhongguo shigang (shanggu pian) 中國史綱–上古篇 (An Outline History of China—the First Volume). Taibei: Zhonghua wenhua. —— (1982), Zhongguo shanggu shigang 中國上古史綱 (Early China). Taibei: Liren shuju. —— (1998), Zhongguo shi gang 中國史綱 (An Outline History of China). Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe. —— (1999), Zhongguo shigang 中國史綱 (An Outline History of China). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. —— (2004), Zhongguo shigang 中國史綱 (An Outline History of China). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Zhou Chen 周忱 (2002a), “Zhang Yinlin xiansheng zhushu xinian 張蔭麟先生著述系年 (A Chronological Record of Zhang Yinlin’s Writings),” in Zhou Chen 周忱 (ed.) (2002), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 344–360. —— (ed.) (2002b), Zhang Yinlin xiansheng jinian wenji 張蔭麟先生紀念文集 (A Collection of Essays in Memory of Zhang Yinlin). (Dongguan: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe.

CONTENDING MEMORIES OF THE NATION: HISTORY EDUCATION IN WARTIME CHINA, 1937–1945 Wai-keung Chan

In 1929, a best-selling history textbook almost led to the bankruptcy of its publisher. In the early spring of that year, an obscure Shandong college president led a complaint with the Guomindang (GMD) government, requesting the banning of a high school history textbook penned by the celebrated historian Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 and published by the Commercial Press.1 According to the complainant, this best-selling book “disrespected the sages and broke the law” because it vehemently denied the existence of the virtuous ancestors of the Chinese races, the Three Emperors and Five Kings.2 Curiously, this pungent remark struck a deep chord in the leading GMD ideologue Dai Jiato 戴季陶, who took the occasion of the complaint to assert in public the indispensability of the memory of the Three Emperors and Five Kings to the survival of the Chinese nation. He proclaimed: “Only by having the common ancestors can the Chinese be unied.”3 Following Dai’s clamorous defense of the mystical progenitors, the government adopted a resolution to ban Gu’s textbook and levied a colossal ne—one million and six hundred thousand Chinese dollars—on its publisher. The general manager of the Commercial Press, Zhang Yuanji 張元濟, staggered by the vast ne which had brought the press to the brink of bankruptcy, hastened to Nanjing from Shanghai to ask Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉, a powerful doyen of the GMD, to persuade the government to revoke the resolution. Facing Wu’s unrivaled power of persuasion, the government granted the Commercial Press a waiver of the ne, but the history textbook remained banned. In May, an article, “The Ministry of Education of the Nationalist Government Forbidding the Publication of ‘Reactionary’ Educational Materials” appeared in the Beijing Morning Daily. Later, Dai Jitao mounted a savage attack on

1 2 3

Gu and Wang 1929. Gu 1980–81: 5, 391. Also see Gu 1936: 25. Ibid.

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Gu Jiegang by mobilizing other GMD ofcials to ridicule Gu’s iconoclastic approach to the study of ancient history.4 In 1980, recalling this bitter clash between the Commercial Press and the government, Gu, already an ailing octogenarian, still denounced it as a disgraceful “literary persecution in the history of China’s Republic.”5 This stormy incident, usually overlooked by students of modern Chinese intellectual and educational history, strikingly illustrates the extent to which the GMD government, like many modern Western states,6 used historical memory to shape national identity and racial harmony.7 In the hope of forging a single and unifying national identity, the GMD government vehemently and relentlessly controlled and censored history textbooks. So ascendant was it in command of history education that its sense of history gradually permeated the general public in the rst decade of its rule (1927 to 1937).8 However, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its tale of the nation was questioned and contested. The war was in some ways an intellectual battle between the two states—the Guomindang and the pro-Japanese regimes—which used different versions of the past to reconstruct their identities and legitimize their political goals. As one state sought to impose collective amnesia about certain historical gures and events, its rival endeavored to resurrect the memory of them in order to disqualify or delegitimize its opponent. The two states obviously believed that they must master the memory of the nation in order to win the war. As a result, a simple historical symbol could take on different meanings, evoking a wide range of political identities in different political contexts. Amidst this intellectual clash between the states, historians and writers further complicated the competition by offering their own different accounts of the past.

4 For an insightful analysis of the bitter clash between Gu and Dai over the myths of the Three Emperors and Five Kings, see Hon 1996. Also see Mary Mazur’s article in this book. 5 Gu 1980–81. 6 Harp 1998: chapter 5; Nora 1996–98: vol. 2, 125–211; FitzGerald, 1980. See also Fedyck 1980; Apple and Christian-Smith 1991. 7 Although the essential role of history education in Chinese nation-building has been recognized by some historians, no systematic and thorough study of it has ever been undertaken. Until today, only two articles and two unpublished master’s theses have been devoted to the history education in modern China. See Culp 2001; Hsiung, 2000; Wong 1987. 8 For an extensive study of the history textbooks of the period from 1911 to 1937, see Culp 2001.

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Based on recently discovered sources—educational decrees and regulations, correspondence of the Ministry of Education, school textbooks, teachers’ manuals, educational journals and memoirs—I will examine the diverse ways that historical memories were used to create new meanings of the nation during the Sino-Japanese War.9 This study has three main objectives. First, it will examine how the Guomindang and pro-Japanese regimes invented new memories of the nation by erasing the embarrassing past in school textbooks. Second, it will analyze the ways in which these different memories competed with each other in constructing new national identities. Finally, it will discuss how memories of the nation presented in textbooks were received and appropriated by teachers and students in different political environments.

Guomindang Education Policy during the War Before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek ( Jiang Jieshi), the leader of the GMD, constantly urged Chinese to save their country by strengthening education. Education, according to Chiang, was the nation’s most powerful weapon.10 However, the outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937 saw this potential weapon lose its effectiveness when schools were bombed, textbooks and equipment lost, and teachers and students forced to ee inland. As a result, the Nationalist government’s main task during the war was to reconstruct education facilities and simultaneously rectify certain preexisting defects in the education system and curriculum. In the spring of 1938, the Defense Advisory Meeting (Guofang canyi hui 國防參議會) was organized by the GMD to hear suggestions for handling the crisis.11 At the conference, Jiang Baili 蔣百里 and Wu Zhihui, two powerful GMD members, asked the government to encourage students to concentrate 9 This article will not deal with history education in the Communist-controlled areas because it was not until 1945 that the Communist forces started editing and publishing their own history school textbooks. In addition, during the Republican period, history professors usually assigned readings of different kinds to their students at universities. In view of the fact that very often there was no main text in a university course, this paper will only focus on history education in elementary and high schools. 10 Jiang Jieshi 1937. 11 The Second Defense Advisory Meeting (Guofang canyi hui) was organized by the GMD to hear suggestions from different segments of society in order to deal with the crisis after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. For details, see Chen Lifu 1973: 9. Also see Hu 1998: 44.

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on studies in order to contribute to the development of science and technology which was needed for a long war. Fu Sinian 傅斯年, a history professor at Beijing University, also suggested that there be no change in the educational system and curriculum.12 At a Lushan meeting on July 2, 1937, the celebrated academic Hu Shi 胡適 maintained that the focus of education during wartime was not special education, but ordinary education.13 In March 1938, the Nationalist government nally laid down its new educational policy at the Extraordinary Congress. According to the policy, the goals for education during the war were to build up the strength of national defense to defeat the Japanese and to foster human resources for the development of the nation. The defeat of the Japanese and the expansion of the nation, the policy stated, should go hand in hand.14 The GMD government asserted that the nation’s strength rested on education both in peacetime and wartime, and therefore “there is no difference between peacetime education and wartime education.”15 Chen Lifu 陳立夫, the Minister of Education, believed that it mattered little what human resources were needed in wartime; all depended on conventional school education, and therefore ordinary education should not be stopped.16 He went on to argue that, just as “farmers could not stop farming because of the war, education could not be terminated either.”17 Echoing Chiang Kai-shek’s belief in the centrality of education in strengthening the nation, Chen held that the purpose of wartime education was “to develop the economy so as to increase strength by education.”18 A year later, at the Third Education Conference in March 1939, Chiang Kai-shek declared that one should “consider peacetime as wartime and wartime as peacetime” ( pingshi yaodang zhanshi kan, zhanshi yaodang pingshi kan 平時要當戰時看, 戰時要當平時看).19

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Chen 1973: 9; Hu 1998: 44. Dagongbao, 21 July 1937, 4. Jiang Jieshi 1984: 1148–1149; Chen 1973: 9; Jiaoyu Bu 1953: 124–5. Becker et al., 1932: passim. Chen 1973: 10. Chen 1938. Chen 1976: 182–4. Chen 1938.

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More important, the Extraordinary Congress of 1938 identied the major problems of the educational system as its lack of correct guidance and discipline, which resulted in the “abuse of freedom” in writing and editing school textbooks, as well as “irrational worship” of western cultures and rejection of Chinese tradition.20 In the spring of 1939, Chiang Kai-shek argued that the most serious defect in China’s conventional education was the lack of a “common belief ” (gongtong xinyang 共同信仰) in education. He explained that the pressing problem facing the country was to make people believe in “one ideology” and one “national policy.”21 Thus, at the Extraordinary Congress of 1938, a motion was passed that all history, civic, and geography textbooks should be standardized to promote nationalism.22 In the same year, Chiang Kai-shek, while giving a speech at the graduation ceremony of the Central Training Corps (Zhongyang xunlian tuan 中央訓練團), stressed the importance of history and geography education and asserted that both subjects should be essential to wartime education.23 Following the speech, the Minister of Education formed a committee to reform history and geography education.24 Obviously, the Nationalist government, while facing a grave national crisis, attempted to control history, civic, and geography education. In 1940, the government spelled out the new goals of history teaching: 1. To underline the importance of national unity by narrating the evolution of the Chinese nation (minzu 民族) as well as the assimilation and interdependence among different ethnic groups (zu 族) in history. Both past glories and modern national humiliation brought about by foreign imperialism should be emphasized to strengthen students’ determination to revive the nation. 2. To narrate signicant historical events and cultural developments, and their contribution to world civilization, to enable students to appreciate the grandeur of their ancestors.

20

Hu 1987: 47. Jiang Jieshi 1984: vol. 2, 1058. 22 Jiaoyu bu 1981: 8. For a detailed analysis of the motions passed in the Extraordinary Congress of 1938, see Hu 1987, especially chapter 3. 23 Zeng Changhe 1941. 24 Zeng Changhe 1941. 21

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3. To broaden and enrich students’ global knowledge by describing the evolution of different races in the world and their cultural characteristics and interaction. The evolution of international politics and the role of their country in world affairs should be emphasized, so as to raise students’ awareness of their responsibility for defeating Japan and building up the nation. 4. To underline the historical origins and inevitability of the Three Principles of the People to ensure that students shared a single ideology.25 Apparently, these four goals of history education were formulated in response to Chiang Kai-shek’s complaint about the lack of a “common belief ” and the Extraordinary Congress’s accusation of worshipping Western culture in education. Thus, glorifying traditional Chinese history and culture and championing the cause of the Three Principles of the People became the most important tasks of history education in the GMD-controlled areas during the wartime period.

The Qingmuguan Conference Acutely aware of the signicance of history education in forging national identity, the Ministry of Education organized a conference on “history and geography education in high schools” at Qingmuguan 青木關 in 1941.26 Large numbers of historians, educators, and schoolteachers attended the conference. Their speeches were later published in the journal Educational Review ( Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌), providing us with rst-hand information on the mood of the time. Minister of Education Chen Lifu’s keynote speech, “Teaching and Writing History for the Sake of Making History,” was, naturally, the focal point of the conference.27 He argued that teaching and writing history should not be idle academic and educational exercises; rather, they should aid in the service of building the nation.28 Whether or not historical facts were accurately presented in school textbooks was not important to him. What was important was how effectively his-

25 26 27 28

Jiaoyu bu 1940a: 75–76. See also, Jiaoyu bu 1940b: 121–2. Qian 1983: 212. Chen 1941: 1. Chen 1941: 3.

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tory education was used to counter Japanese propaganda and instill the government’s view of the nation in young people.29 In particular, Chen disapproved of the prevalent skepticism toward the myths of the Three Emperors and Five Kings.30 For him, like Dai Jitao, the Three Emperors and Five Kings were the founding fathers of China, who started an unbroken genealogy of the Chinese race that included the Han, Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and Muslims. They were symbols of China’s existence as an ethically and culturally homogeneous nation for thousands of years. In retrospect, Chen’s speech marks a turning point in the development of history education in Republican China. For the rst time in the Nationalist period (1927–1949), the Minister of Education explicitly pointed out that history, unlike mathematics or science, was not a pure academic subject, but a tool for inculcating moral and national values to school children. Thus, history teaching was no longer to be regarded as a subject of liberal arts education, training students to be critical and independent thinkers. Rather, it was part of civil education, molding students to be loyal and submissive subjects to the state.31 The authenticity of the narrative in history textbooks was accordingly relegated to the background. Demystifying traditional national heroes (e.g., the Three Emperor and Five Kings) in history textbooks was also forbidden, because they symbolized the moral and national values the GMD could appropriate to neutralize Japanese propaganda. Narrow as it might be, the Nationalist government’s view was shared by historians and educators who attended the Qingmuguan conference. For example, Li Dongfang 黎東方, a French-trained historian, maintained that it was ridiculous to teach history for the sake of transmission of accurate historical knowledge.32 To him, this attitude toward teaching history, because contradictory to patriotism, would make students feel disoriented during national crisis.33 To unify the nation, he urged that all statements denying the existence of the Three Emperors and Five Kings, such as “Chinese history should start with the Shang dynasty,” “The Yin and Zhou are two different races,” and “Yu is only a mythical

29 30 31 32 33

Chen 1941: 3. Chen 1941: 3. Chen 1941: 3–4. Li Dongfang 1941: 6. Li Dongfang 1941: 6.

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gure in Chinese history,” should be deleted from history textbooks.34 Jiang Yingqing, an educator, also pointed out that the primary purpose of history education was to promote nationalism; therefore, the heroic spirit of the Han people, the expansion of Han territory, and the transformations of China’s great civilization should be emphasized in history textbooks.35 In addition, the relationship between the Three Principles of the People, nationalism and history education was also highlighted in the conference. Miao Fenglin 繆鳳林, a cultural historian based at Zhongyang University, asserted, “Because nationalism is the central part of the Three Principles of the People, and because history is the basis of nationalism, we have to develop nationalist history education.”36 “If they have a single belief,” he continued, “young people will be immune to the baneful inuences of other thoughts and ideologies.”37 To make certain that students would share a common belief, he suggested that teachers focus on three aspects of Chinese history: (1) the Chinese ability to create their own civilization and sophisticated cultural systems; (2) the Chinese perseverance in facing hardship; and (3) the outward and inward expansion of Chinese territory.38 Qian Mu 錢穆, another well-known historian attending the conference, also stressed the relationship between the Three Principles of the People and historical knowledge. In reference to Sun Yat-sen’s frequent use of Chinese history and culture in explaining the Three Principles of the People, Qian Mu pointed out that modern Chinese had collectively lost their memory of national history.39 To prove his point, he cited “Guandong san sheng” 關東三省 (three provinces in Guandong) as an example of collective forgetfulness. He pointed out that “Guandong san sheng” was originally a term coined by the Manchus to refer to Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces, where no Han Chinese were allowed to live. More recently, the Japanese had renamed the three provinces “Manchuria” in the hope of erasing the memory of the Han Chinese in these places. Without being aware of the Japanese hidden

34 35 36 37 38 39

Li Dongfang 1941: 6. Jiang Yingqun 1941. Miao 1941: 19. Miao 1941: 19. Miao 1941: 20. Qian 1941: 21–22.

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agenda, many Chinese also called “Guandong san sheng” Manchuria, and forgot that they were originally Chinese territories.40 An eloquent spokesman of cultural conservatism, Qian Mu may have exaggerated the extent of collective amnesia among the Chinese. But he was the only speaker at the conference emphasizing the fact that this amnesia would keep China from achieving victory in the cultural as well as the military war. He attributed the mass forgetfulness of national history to modern iconoclasm and foreign propaganda. According to him, modern Chinese iconoclasts, confronted with Western cultural and military threats, questioned the validity and adaptability of traditional Chinese culture and values. While this iconoclastic current went to an extreme in the New Culture Movement (1915–1923), it did show how the traditional Chinese cultural system had completely crumbled. Accordingly, the historical memory of national tradition had faded away in modern Chinese minds, and a cultural vacuum had emerged.41 As a result, modern Chinese were very vulnerable to foreign political propaganda. To ll the vacuum, Qian Mu urged that historical memory of national tradition should be reconstructed and disseminated through history education. Unlike Chen Lifu and other speakers, however, Qian Mu insisted that modern Chinese people should receive authentic and accurate historical knowledge. As a well-established professional historian, he stressed the important of presenting to the public an accurate picture of the past.42 Yet his speech was basically in line with the new goals of history education promulgated by the Ministry of Education in 1940. Thus, it is clear that the Qingmuguan conference had reached a consensus on wartime history education. That is, in the midst of the Japanese invasion, history education would foster a shared national identity among young people. This shared identity could be constructed by emphasizing traditional China’s glorious events and heroic gures in history textbooks.

40

Qian 1941: 22. Qian 1940: preface. 42 This speech was only a representation of Qian Mu’s construction and transmission of the historical memory of the nation to a lay audience. It should be pointed out that there was an inconsistency between the representation and practice of his historical thinking. In practice, he certainly invented many inaccurate facts in his popular historical writings to appeal to his lay audience in the midst of a national crisis. See Qian 1945. 41

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wai-keung chan Historians and Educators Excluded from the Conference

Some prominent historians and educators were excluded from the Qingmuguan conference, probably because of their ambivalence or opposition to GMD cultural and educational policy. Therefore, the questions are: Did these experts also voice their opinions on history education in the educational journals of GMD-controlled regions before or after the conference? What were their opinions on the GMD’s approach to history in the party’s educational policy? Did dissonant views on history education between these historians and educationalists and the GMD spokesmen emerge during this national crisis? Gu Jiegang was one of the historian-educators excluded from the conference. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gu was a leading iconoclastic historian who was vocal about history education and whose confrontation with the GMD over the issue of national myths in history textbooks was presented at the start of this article. Not surprisingly, although a well-known expert in history education, Gu was not invited to attend the conference. During the conference, implicit criticism was from time to time directed toward his skepticism about Chinese national myths. However, Gu did not respond to the criticism at all in the early 1940s. He was completely silent about the GMD’s history educational policy and no longer published any articles on history education in any educational journals or newspapers. In fact, in the wake of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Gu gradually became nationalistic and also perceived history as a powerful tool to counteract Japanese propaganda. During the war, Gu’s attitude toward history education, and the authenticity of narrative presented in history textbooks, shifted dramatically. In hopes of arousing Chinese nationalism in the war, he was also intent on rewriting ancient history through his popular writings, with the nancial assistance of the GMD. In his memoir, published in 1994, Chen Lifu mentioned Gu’s collaboration with the GMD in fabricating and transmitting the memory of Three Emperors and Five Kings in the 1940s.43 It is not too far-fetched to suggest that Gu was probably compelled to support the myths of the

43 Chen 1994: 271. After 1949, in his writings, Gu Jiegang occasionally recalled his bitter clash with the Guomindang in the 1920s. But he obviously played down and even concealed his close connections with Guomindang in the wartime period. For Gu’s recollection of his connection with the GMD during the War, see Gu 1980–81: 5, 391–392.

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Three Emperors and Five Kings for the sake of national survival. He might have realized that the invention of the myths, although contradictory to rigorous historical research, would still be one of the ways to reconstruct national identity among the lay audience. The marked alteration in Gu’s attitude toward the function of history was not an isolated example. Another celebrated historian, Fu Sinian experienced a similar change during this period. Both Gu and Fu were well known for their iconoclastic approach to history in the 1920s and 1930s. Fu’s positivistic and “objective” approach to history throughout the 1920s obviously contrasted with Chen Lifu’s view, emphasized in his speech at the conference, on the imaginative nature of history. Fu’s well-known positivist stance on historical research and history education may have discouraged the GMD from inviting him to the conference, although he was highly regarded by the GMD as a competent leader of the academic and educational community during the Nationalist period.44 However, shortly before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Fu published an article in an educational journal Jiaoyu xue 教育 學 (Pedagogy).45 In the article, Fu overtly expressed doubts about his earlier apolitical attitude toward historical research and history education. He vehemently opposed the traditional Western tendency to deem history as part of a liberal arts education. History, in his view, should be one kind of civic education instead.46 He went on to suggest ve areas of history that should receive special attention in history textbooks: (1) the Chinese contribution to world civilization; (2) the Chinese efforts to resist foreign invasion; (3) the humiliation and death of the common people as a result of the downfall of every dynasty in traditional China; (4) the valor of traditional national heroes; (5) the prosperous periods in traditional China.47 Thus, Fu’s views on history education were similar to those of Chen Lifu and the ofcial curriculum in early 1941. However, unlike Chen, Fu still called for a meticulous narrative

44

To a great extent, Fu Sinian was a pro-GMD historian. As a representative in the People’s Political Council, as well as the director of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, he exerted a certain inuence on the GMD’s political and educational policy. However, in the early 1940s, his ery criticism of governmental malpractice led him to a confrontation in the council with Jiang Jieshi’s protégés, namely T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung. For the details, see Wang 2000: 167–171. 45 Fu 1935: 53–55. 46 Fu 1935: 53. 47 Fu 1935: 55.

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of the historical facts.48 Like Qian Mu, Fu took seriously the historian’s professional ethics, and was reluctant to abandon the “objective” approach to history for the sake of national survival.49 Apart from Gu and Fu, some less-famous educators and history teachers who did not give speeches at the Qingmuguan conference also published articles on history education in the Educational Review before and after the conference.50 By and large, their views were congruent with those of the GMD. For example, Li Jigu 李季谷, a specialist in history education, contended that history education was a powerful tool to invigorate the national spirit.51 Like many speakers in the conference, he also agreed that the valor of national heroes and the loyalty of ofcials should be extolled.52 However, he opposed the idea that textbooks should conceal impropriety. In contrast to Chen Lifu’s contention at the conference, he advocated that traditional villains and traitors (hanjian 漢奸) should be vehemently denounced.53 He contended that the disreputable pasts of villains and traitors in traditional China could be used to attack the present.54 Although critical of historical erasure of villains and traitors in traditional China, he did not differ from Chen Lifu in the ultimate purpose of history education. Both of them believed that the primary purpose of history education was to instill political and social values to schoolchildren. Clearly, they only

48

Fu 1935: 55. Fu confessed in several letters to the respected linguist Zhao Yuanren that he was going to abandon his previous “objective” approach to historical studies. However, he never made this view public. His case was to a certain extent similar to Qian Mu’s. There was an obvious inconsistency in the representation and practice of Fu’s historical thinking during the wartime period. For instance, in the article on history textbooks, he advocated that the historical facts presented in textbooks should be “objective” and “accurate.” However, in practice, he, at the request of the Nationalist government, was also engaged in the task of exaggerating national grandeur through textbooks. See Wang 2000: 172. 50 In the early and mid 1930s, most of the articles on history education were published in three educational journals. They were the Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 (Educational Review), Jiaoyu xue 教育學 (Pedagogy) and Dagong bao: Shidi zhoukan 大公報: 史地周刊 (Dagong Bao Supplement: History and Geography). However, after the outbreak of the war, only the publisher of the Jiaoyu zazhi, the Commercial Press, could be eventually relocated to the GMD-controlled areas. It should be pointed out that the Commercial Press, in facing ofcial constraints, was still liberal and inclusive during the wartime period. This could explain why almost all of the articles by educators and historians excluded from the 1941 conference appeared in this journal. 51 Li Jigu 1941: 15. 52 Li Jigu 1941: 19–20. 53 Li Jigu 1941: 20. 54 Li Jigu 1941: 20. 49

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diverged on what and how historical memory should be transmitted to remold the youngsters’ moral and political values. Their views demonstrated that history became malleable in the hands of ofcials and educators. For Li and Chen, the past narrated in history textbooks had to be selected and reassessed in light of present political needs. Indeed, the present shaped the past. Rank-and-le teachers concurred with the party line. One high school history teacher maintained that history was a “national education” (guomin jiaoyu 國民教育); its sole purpose was to promote the national spirit and facilitate a national revival by narrating the valor of national heroes and the remarkable scientic inventions of traditional China.55 Other high school teachers also suggested that history education should meet the needs of the present and serve the nation. They suggested devoting more time in class to discussing the history of modern imperialism and the Sino-Japanese War, making certain that students were aware of China’s current plight.56 As shown above, the GMD and historians and educators in GMDcontrolled regions largely concurred in their views on history education. Even former critics of the GMD’s history education policy (such as Gu Jiegang) fell silent and approved the primary purpose of history education promulgated by the Nationalist government. The unanimity of views on history education was not necessarily caused by the GMD’s press censorship. On the contrary, confronted with the imminent extinction of the nation, historians and educators were aware that divergent interpretations of the purposes of history education would only weaken and stie the Chinese national identity which was indispensable in countering Japanese propaganda. To them, only a unied approach to national history narrated in textbooks was likely to instill national consciousness among young people.

History Education in GMD-Controlled Areas The consensus on history education reached inside and outside the Qingmuguan conference reected the state of mind of the Nationalist elites. In reality, however, the GMD’s attempt to reformulate history

55 56

Zhao 1941. Pan 1938: 28–29; Yao 1940: 13–15.

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education was crippled by a shortage of resources. In particular, the printing and publishing of school textbooks was badly affected in the second half of the 1930s. As early as September 1931, the Japanese air force bombed the main ofce of the Commercial Press in Shanghai. As Jean-Pierre Drège points out, the Shanghai Commercial Press was targeted precisely because it was a primary publisher of anti-Japanese textbooks in China.57 Furthermore, after the outbreak of the war, primary suppliers of school textbooks were not relocated into GMDcontrolled areas at once. Worse still, in 1938, all textbooks previously endorsed by the Nationalist government were banned in Japanese-occupied areas; therefore, publishing houses in both Beijing and Shanghai stopped printing and distributing them. Despite the restructuring of the curriculum by the Nationalist government to meet wartime needs in 1941, no private publisher in the GMD-controlled areas had the resources to prepare a new set of texts in line with the changes. As a result, the areas controlled by the GMD suffered from a severe lack of textbooks during this period.58 Because of the lack of new textbooks, according to Chen Lifu, most of the schools in these areas were compelled to use textbooks published in the early Republican period and the Nanjing decade. Some teachers in remote areas, which ran out of textbooks, were forced to distribute crude lecture notes among their students.59 Responding to the grave situation, provincial and municipal commissioners of education jointly petitioned the Ministry of Education for more resources. In response to the requests, the ministry decided that the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, under the ministry’s direction, would prepare a complete new series of history, geography, civic and language textbooks for elementary and secondary education. The printing of the new textbooks was then to be contracted to private publishers. However, in printing the textbooks, these publishers received government assistance of loans and special allotments of paper rations to meet the massive demands.60 At the same time, in view of the severe lack of new history textbooks, the Hong Kong Commercial Press published a series of cheap historical tales about national heroes

57 58 59 60

Drège 1978: 64. Chen 1973: 31. Chen 1973: 31. Chen 1973: 32. Also see Ou Tsuin-chen 1977: 115.

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as supplements to textbooks and distributed them in GMD-controlled areas. These books were widely adopted in history teaching at the elementary level. Clearly, in spite of the obstacles that limited their potential effect, history textbooks did have a major impact in translating the educational ideals of the GMD and Nationalist historians and educationalists into realities. According to A Bibliography of Publications in the Republican Period: Elementary and High School Teaching Materials (Minguo shiqi zong shumu: Zhongxiaoxue jiaocai 民國時期總書目: 中小學教材), altogether six sets of new history textbooks for elementary and secondary education were published in GMD-controlled areas during the period between 1937 and 1945.61 However, due to the lack of interest in preserving textbooks after 1949, only three sets of these textbooks survive. Of the three, two sets were published by private presses: the Commercial Press and the Zhonghua Press.62 The third set was published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, under the direction of the Ministry of Education, between 1941 and 1945.63 These three sets of history textbooks provide us with rst-hand information about how history education was used to promote national identity. Of the three surviving sets of textbooks, only the one published by the Commercial Press provided the names of its authors. They were Xu Yingchuan 徐映川 and Fu Weiping 傅緯平, whose backgrounds are unknown. But Wang Yunwu 王雲五, the editor in chief of the press, was listed as the editor. This fact is important because the Commercial Press, unlike the Zhonghua Press and others, was less nationalistic and pro-GMD under the leadership of Zhang Yuanji and Wang Yunwu in the 1920s. Therefore, it was vehemently criticized by GMD ideologue Dai Jitao for its liberal and iconoclastic slant in editing history books. However, in the aftermath of the bombing of its main ofce by the Japanese air force in Shanghai, the press dramatically changed its political stance. It became more nationalistic, publishing a number of writings to arouse nationalism.64 Besides, after 1941, in the hope of securing publishing contracts, the Commercial Press publicly sided

61

Minguo shiqi zong shumu 1995: 88–89, 219–222. Xu and Fu 1938; Zhengzhong bianshen 1942. Both sets of textbooks are preserved at the National Institute for Compilation and Translation in Taibei. 63 Jiaoyu bu 1943. 64 Drège 1978: 82. 62

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with the Nationalist government. Therefore, Wang Yuwu also became one of leading pro-GMD publishers in the 1940s. Thus, we could assume that the views of the Commercial Press writers (such as Xu and Fu) resonated with GMD educational ideals under the inuence of Wang Yuwu. As for the textbooks edited and published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation and the Zhengzhong Press, no specic author was identied. However, it was highly possible that the textbook writers at the National Institute for Compilation and Translation were working for the Nationalist government, closely following the GMD instructions in writing this set of textbooks. Compared to those at the Institute, the Zhengzhong Press writers were relatively free from government intervention. Nevertheless, their political stance was still pro-GMD. In the preface of the Zhengzhong textbook, we learn that the authors were mainly the teaching staff and students at Zhongyang University at Chongqing.65 Before its relocation to Chongqing, Zhongyang University had long been one of the pro-GMD universities in Nanjing. Miao Fenglin, the famous history professor at Zhongyang University, who gave a speech in support of GMD educational policy at the 1941 conference on history education, might have been one of the authors of this textbook. More important, the publisher, the Zhengzhong Press, although nominally private, had been established by Chen Lifu, who later became the Nationalist government’s Minister of Education.66 Because of the Nationalist government’s success in controlling the publication of new textbooks, the content of these textbooks demonstrates the extent to which the GMD’s goals in history education were being realized. The books clearly showed which historical events and heroes were selected and interpreted to construct the historical memory of the nation. Echoing the views of the GMD and Nationalist historians and educationalists, three themes in Chinese history were emphasized: (1) ancient myths, (2) race, and (3) national heroes.

65

Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 2. This practice still persisted in Taiwan after 1949. The National Institute for Compilation and Translation was the only institute entitled to write and edit school textbooks. The printing of textbooks also continued to be contracted to the Zhengzhong Press. 66

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Ancient Myths In support of the myths of the Three Emperors and Five Kings, all three sets of textbooks opened with a detailed discussion of ancient myths. However, the textbook writers emphasized that the mythical progenitors, the Three Emperors and Five Kings, were personications of stages of societal and cultural development. In contrast to those published in the prewar period, the textbooks published by both the National Institute for Compilation and Translation and the Zhengzhong Press never mentioned that the ancient legends about the Three Emperors and Five Kings were factually inaccurate. On the contrary, the mythical heroes were treated as authentic historical gures. For example, the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation traced ancient history back to such mythical gures as Fuxi and Shennong, Suiren, the Yellow Emperor, Yao, Shun, Yu, and others.67 The stories of these mythical gures were probably aimed at young schoolchildren, convincing them that they were descendents of these heroic ancestors. To make the legend more convincing, the authors stressed mythical gures’ contributions to the evolution of Chinese culture and technology, such as Shennong’s exploration of farming and medicine, Suiren’s discovery of re, Fuxi’s design of boats, and the Yellow Emperor’s invention of the compass.68 In particular, they lauded the invention of the compass by the Yellow Emperor as one of the three greatest inventions in Chinese history, marking the advanced level of Chinese technology in remote antiquity.69 They described the overthrow of the tyrannical kings of the Xia and Shang dynasties, and the virtuous abdications of Yao, Shun, and Yu as the origins of the Chinese democratic tradition.70 Through these examples, schoolchildren learned that the Chinese national spirit represented “creativity and perseverance in the face of hardship and challenges.”71 Most revealing was the story of the Yellow Emperor. As the founder of the Chinese nation, he was considered to be the most important historical gure of the distant past.72 However, discussion of the Yellow 67 68 69 70 71 72

Jiaoyu Jiaoyu Jiaoyu Jiaoyu Jiaoyu Jiaoyu

bu bu bu bu bu bu

1943: 1943: 1943: 1943: 1943: 1943:

vol. vol. vol. vol. vol. vol.

1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1,

7–16. 8–13. 10. 13–8. 2. 3.

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Emperor in this textbook was different from those in the prewar period. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Yellow Emperor was usually depicted as a founding father of Chinese civilization who invented the compass and unied the Chinese people. Emphasis was placed on his ingenuity and political wisdom. During wartime, however, the emphasis shifted to his military talents. He was portrayed as a military hero who led different Chinese tribes to expel the barbarian Chiyou 蚩尤 and founded the Chinese nation. Even after the establishment of the Chinese nation, the Yellow Emperor continued to show his military strength, suppressing uprisings in different tribes.73 As a result, the pictures of the Yellow Emperor placed in the elementary school books during these two periods were signicantly different. In the textbooks published in the prewar period, the Yellow Emperor looked benevolent and wise, usually wearing a scholar’s gown. By contrast, in the picture of the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, the Yellow Emperor was in full armor, holding a spear and a sword. The emphasis on the combative personality of the Yellow Emperor certainly helped promote militarism among schoolchildren in the wartime period. More importantly, a parallel was drawn between this progenitor’s efforts to fend off foreign invaders in remote antiquity and contemporary Chinese determination to resist Japanese invasion. In the Zhengzhong Press textbook intended for high school students and the general public, the Yellow Emperor was also depicted as a valorous warrior. Similar to the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, special attention was given to the Yellow Emperor’s war with the barbarian Chiyou as a turning point in the development of the Chinese race.74 More importantly, the Yellow Emperor was presented as an authentic historical gure who ascended the throne in 2698 BCE.75 The invention of the year 2698 BCE was important in establishing a sense of continuity between the generations. When the nation was depicted as an outgrowth of the

73

Jiaoyu bu 1943: vol. 1, 3–4. Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 7–8. 75 Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 2 & 8. In the late Qing period, the radical revolutionaries hailed the Yellow Emperor as the rst ancestor (shizu 始組) of the Han race and advocated the introduction of a calendar in which the foundation year corresponded to the birth of the Yellow Emperor. Liu Shipei, one of the radical revolutionaries, estimated that the Yellow Emperor had reigned from 2697 to 2597 BCE. Apparently the authors of the Zhengzhong Press textbook used Liu’s estimation as the basis of their temporal narrative. See Liu 1904: 1. 74

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Three Emperors and Five Kings, a lineal genealogy through linkages of names, dates, cultures, and symbols could be established, giving young students a strong sense of identity with the nation. In terms of style, the Zhengzhong Press textbook was sensational and stirring. In narrating ancient history, such sensational words as “our fatherland” and “our culture” were frequently used instead of “China” or “Chinese culture,” and the line between Chinese people and “barbarians” was clearly drawn.76 This description of ancient Chinese relations with other peoples indicated that the formation of Chinese national identity was determined by relations with outsiders—the others who were marked off by not sharing a distinctive Chinese character and culture. In this regard, the memories of the Three Emperors and the Five Kings played an important role in dening the Chinese identity, because they held up the values and heroes that modern Chinese should admire and revere. Clearly, compared to the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translations, the Zhengzhong Press textbook was much more intent on underlining the authenticity of the ages of the Three Emperors and Five Kings so as to establish the “true” Chinese identity. Compared to those published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation and the Zhengzhong Press, the Commercial Press textbook was more faithful in presenting modern historical and archeological ndings. In the rst chapter, the writers contended, “There are no reliable historical records about Chinese remote antiquity. . . . [But] spectacular archaeological discoveries [recently] support that our country and civilization has a long and glorious history.”77 In the text, the authors made good use of archaeological evidence to support a physical and cultural continuity from Neolithic times to contemporary China, thus offering an alternative view to the myths of the Three Emperors and Five Kings. However, in the textbook, they did not go on to elaborate in detail how the primitive society conceived by modern archeologists embodied the greatness of ancient Chinese civilization. Instead, their description of the relationship between modern archeological discoveries and Chinese greatness in the Neolithic period was followed by two unrelated chapters about the mythical gures in remote antiquity. These two chapters were very brief, just focusing on the Yellow Emperor and

76 77

Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 4–11. Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 1–2.

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Yu.78 The focus of the narrative of these two mythical gures in these chapters was similar to that of the textbooks published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation and the Zhengzhong Press. This inconsistency in the narrative of ancient China could have been a result of immense political pressure from the GMD in censoring school textbooks. In order to conform to the GMD’s emphasis on the importance of the myths of the Three Emperors and the Five Kings, and to have their textbook pass the Ministry of Education’s scrutiny, the authors may have been compelled to write two brief and unimportant chapters in their textbook. The exclusive nature of the GMD campaign of national building, based on the myths of ancient heroes, certainly left little room for the divergent readings of Chinese ancient history in the midst of the grave national crisis.

Race A single interpretation of ancient Chinese history, in the view of the GMD, was crucial to the unity of different Chinese races. As suggested above, the ofcial purpose of invoking the memory of the Three Emperors and the Five Kings was to convince the ve major races of China, namely the Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Muslims, and Han, that they shared the same progenitors, making China for thousands of years ethnically monistic and culturally homogeneous. This invention of the shared progenitors was a response to the establishment of Manchukuo in 1931 and Japanese attempts to incite southwest minorities to sever themselves from China. To this end, the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation explained the close relationship between the ancient myths and racial origins in a chapter entitled “The Origin of the Chinese Race”: As the oldest race (minzu 民族) in China, the Chinese race was the result of the assimilation of a number of common descent groups (zongzu 宗族). The major ones are the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans. The origin of the common descent groups can be traced back to the Yellow Emperor; all of the groups were his descendents. The different names of these common descent groups occurred merely because they scattered all over the country.79

78 79

Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 16–21. Jiaoyu bu 1943: vol. 1, 1.

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It should be pointed out that the authors of this textbook, unlike some modern Chinese Nationalist elites who tended to invest the representation of the Chinese founding father with lineal meaning, did not overemphasize the importance of lineage to the origin of the Chinese race.80 Rather, what bonded these different common descent groups into a race or nation was culture. Also noteworthy is the fact that this textbook, in contrast to those in the 1920s and 1930s, did not dwell on the details of the “racial conict” between the Han and the Five Barbarian Tribes (wuhu 五胡). It even avoided discussing the “cruelty” of the Five Barbarian Tribes during their invasion into Han territory. Only one chapter, of not more than 700 words, was devoted to the history of the invasion by the Five Barbarian Tribes.81 Even there, half of the chapter was about the ways in which the “barbarians” were culturally assimilated by the Han during the Northern Wei period.82 In view of the disunity of different population groups in wartime China, the Nationalist government may have instructed the textbook writers in the National Institute for Compilation and Translations to avoid explicitly denigrating non-Han peoples who would form one of the ve component races. Thus, the authors of the history textbook underlined the shared culture between the Han and other population groups, neglecting their bloody conicts. The Nationalist government may have believed that the reconstruction of the history of harmonious relations in traditional China helped counteract Japanese propaganda among the non-Han people about the racial and cultural difference between the Han Chinese and other “ethnic minorities” in modern China. This textbook was surely intended for other population groups, as well as the Han, during the national crisis. Unlike those working directly under the government, the Zhengzhong Press textbook writers, as university professors, were comparatively free from direct government intervention. Although pro-GMD, they tended to emphasize the conict between the Han and other population groups during the Jin dynasty. They did so by redening the conicts as “racial wars” (zhongzu zhanzheng 種族戰爭) in the textbook:

80 For an insightful analysis of the close relationship between lineage and race in modern China, see Dikötter 1992: chapter 3. 81 Jiaoyu bu 1943: vol. 2, 6–7. 82 Jiaoyu bu 1943: vol. 2, 7.

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wai-keung chan From the age of the Yellow Emperor to the Jin dynasty, the Han was the most powerful race in China, effectively ruling the country. However, since the Jin dynasty, China was constantly invaded by other races. The racial wars (zhongzu zhanzheng) between the Han and other races lasted for about three hundred years. . . . The war between the Yellow Emperor and Chiyou was the rst racial war in Chinese history. The conict between the Han and other races during the Jin dynasty was the second racial war in Chinese history.83

The reason for inventing the rst and second racial wars in Chinese history in the textbook was to create the continuity of the Han people’s heroic battle with other population groups, from remote antiquity to the Jin period. However, the textbook did not give a detailed summary of how the Han territory was invaded in the Jin period. It skipped the humiliating history of the Han, and went on to say that the only war during the period worthy of mention was the Battle of Feishui.84 Clearly, the focus of the narrative of the Jin period was on how the Han successfully fended off other population groups, rather than on how the Han suffered in the midst of foreign invasion. In other words, the history of the Jin period was mainly represented as the successful racial survival of the Han in traditional China. In order to delineate the racial survival of the Han, other population groups were inevitably represented as the cruel enemy of the Han race. With this representation of other population groups in traditional China, a parallel could be drawn, in history education, between the barbarians in traditional China and the Japanese race in the modern period. The message of the racial survival of the Han from the age of the Yellow Emperor to the Jin period created a precedent for the contemporary Chinese battle with the Japanese for the minds of schoolchildren, thus arousing Chinese nationalism during the Sino-Japanese War. However, the authors of the Zhengzhong Press textbook were obviously less aware of the possible repugnance of contemporary non-Han teachers and schoolchildren toward this representation of non-Han people in Chinese history. Their insensitivity to the response of non-Han readers was probably due to the inuence of the Han-centered perspectives of leading Zhongyang historians in treating Chinese history.85 Besides, the

83

Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 39–40. Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 42. 85 For a detailed analysis of the Han-centered perspectives of leading historians at Zhongyang University, see Ou Zhijian 2001: 222–243. 84

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authors of the textbook may have assumed that most of the readers of the textbooks were the Han. The question of Han relations with other population groups in forming a purely Han nation was certainly ticklish and protean in the writing of a history textbook in the wartime period. From the above analysis of the two ofcial textbooks, we see that, merely because of the different authorship and intended readership, as well as the varying degree of government intervention, two starkly different representations of Han relations with other population groups during the Jin period were presented to young people in the same political discourse: Han people’s heroic battle with other population groups vs. Han people culturally assimilating other population groups. More interesting, the purpose of these two different representations was actually the same, promoting nationalism in the midst of Japanese invasion. However, in the service of nationalism, the representations of Han relations with other population groups during the Jin period became double-edged. On the one hand, it could help unify other population groups with the Han in China to ght with Japan. On the other, it could help unify the Han but also greatly undermine the attachment of other population groups to the Han in wartime China. The authors of the textbook published by the Commercial Press, Xu and Fu, were probably wise enough to avoid promoting nationalism by appropriating the double-edged representations of Han relations with other population groups in Chinese history. Their textbook also contained several chapters about Han relations with population groups in Chinese history, but they were very brief and descriptive. For example, in the chapter about Jin history, a sketchy but balanced account of Han relations with the foreign invaders was given.86 Furthermore, the chapter touched on the bloody military conict between the Han and other population groups, but balanced it with an account of the cultural assimilation between the Han and other population groups, especially the cultural reform initiated by the Xiao Wen Emperor during the Northern Wei period.87 Compared to the textbook published by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, Xu and Fu’s narrative of cultural assimilation did not connote pronounced pan-Hanism; nor did it explicitly denigrate non-Han people in Chinese history. Xu

86 87

Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 27–8. Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 29–30.

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and Fu obviously avoided drawing a parallel between the ancestors of the other population groups in China and the contemporary Japanese race. Instead, they represented the Japanese race in premodern China as the enemy of the Chinese. Thus, Xu and Fu devoted a chapter to the history of the atrocities of Japanese pirates on the east coast of China during the Ming dynasty.88 At the beginning of the chapter, they pointed out that these Japanese pirates were called “dwarf pirates” (wokou 倭寇) in the Ming period because the Japanese were shorter than the Chinese.89 They went on to say: “These dwarf pirates caused great disturbances on the east coast of China in the early and middle Ming periods. Their looting inicted much suffering for the Chinese on the east coast. In response to the suffering of the Chinese in the East, the Ming government sent the well-known general Qi Jiguang 戚繼光 to suppress the disturbance. In Fujian, Qi successfully expelled the dwarf pirates, thus alleviating the hardship and suffering of the Chinese on the east coast.”90 In fact, the disturbance caused by Japanese pirates in the Ming period was relatively unimportant in Chinese history. Most of the textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s did not cover this historical incident. However, during the Sino-Japanese War, the history of Japanese pirates became useful to represent the Japanese as a primary enemy in premodern China. By appropriating the history of Japanese pirates, Xu and Fu could invent the historical origin of Japanese aggression against China. An invented continuity of Japanese invasion, from the premodern through modern period, could certainly make the image of the Japanese as a longstanding enemy much more conspicuous. By using the term “dwarf pirates” and underlining the difference in height between the Chinese and Japanese in the textbook, they could also reconstruct the physical difference between the Chinese and Japanese races. More important, Qi Jiguang could also be represented as the rst of the Chinese national heroes to successfully expel the Japanese from China, thus setting an example for contemporary Chinese battles against the Japanese.

88 89 90

Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 10–1. Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 10. Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 10.

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National Heroes Apart from Qi Jiguang, two Southern Song military personages, Yue Fei 岳飛 and Wen Tianxiang 文天祥, were given prominent attention in the three textbooks. According to the textbooks, Yue and Wen were Han patriotic generals who were determined to drive away other population groups, namely the Jin and Mongols, from Han territory, and nally died as martyrs while serving the nation. Yue Fei almost succeeded in driving out the Jin and recovering the Han territory in North China. Nevertheless, Yue Fei’s determination to launch military attacks on the Jin in North China was in conict with Premier Qin Hui’s pacism. For fear that Yue Fei would become a formidable warlord in the north and pose a challenge to the Southern Song, the emperor eventually decreed an end to the war with the Jin. Accordingly, Yue Fei was executed for disregarding the decrees from the central government.91 As for Wen Tianxiang, he was portrayed as a charismatic Southern Song statesman who recruited ten thousand Han soldiers and tirelessly checked the constant Mongolian invasion. However, owing to the small size of his army, Wen failed to fend off the Mongolian invaders. As a result, the Southern Song government was forced to retreat into Canton, and then crumbled. Wen was captured and jailed in Yangjing. According to the textbooks, the Mongols tried to persuade Wen to defect to them, but he refused.92 The Zhengzhong Press textbook concluded the narrative of Wen’s ill-fated resistance with this remark: “Wen Tianxiang was indeed a national hero. The memory of the martyrdom of his execution still lingers on in the minds of all patriotic Chinese people in the modern period.”93 In the eyes of the textbook writers, the cult of the heroic past became a powerful repository of distinctive national virtues in the face of the Japanese military menace. These military heroes were not included in the textbooks because of their intrinsic historical signicance. In fact, Yue Fei’s northern expedition, as well as his political confrontation with the emperor and Qin Hui, was not critical to the development of premodern Chinese political history. After all, the Southern Song was not

91 Jiaoyu bu 1943: 22–23; Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 71–72; Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 2, 4–5. 92 Jiaoyu bu 1943: 23–24; Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 75–76; Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 2, 6. 93 Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 76.

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conquered by the Jin, but by the Mongols. These heroes in the Southern Song period were of interest to the textbook writers because they, like the three Emperors and Five Kings, symbolized an age of heroism that could furnish a model for national resistance and regeneration. This age of heroism certainly served as a point of comparison with the present within the framework of an evolving national history. For example, in history lessons, the Southern Song general Yue Fei could be compared to the leader of the GMD Chiang Kai-shek.94 With this comparison, history teachers could assert that, in the evolution of the Chinese nation, both were indispensable heroes who endeavored to drive out foreign invaders. Given this function of the national heroes, the textbook writers relegated their historicity to the background. Instead, they focused on the lost splendor and virtue, such as Yue Fei’s exploits and valor in resisting the Jin and Wen Tianxiang’s unwavering loyalty to the Southern Song government, which would serve as a model for national revival in the modern period. Thus, the heroes who could, at any juncture, best conjure up the appropriate national vision and exert the greatest leverage on schoolchildren would be most sought after by these textbook writers. This criterion for selecting historical personages made the textbook writers ignore the modern professional historical studies of these military heroes. According to these professional studies, Yue Fei was a self-seeking warlord rather than a hero intent on defending his country. Furthermore, the achievement of Yue’s military expedition was mystied by popular novels, dramas, and village storytelling after the Ming period. In reality, Yue Fei’s army had been incapable of driving out the Jin and recovering the Han territory in the north.95 However, in order to reshape the moral direction of the national revival, textbook writers obviously chose to draw on the popular memory of Yue Fei to reconstruct the image of a national hero who exemplied distinctive Chinese martial virtues. In popular memory, the vices of the villains or enemies of the national heroes were equally important. For example, since the late Ming, the premier Qin Hui was denounced in traditional dramas and village storytelling as a traitor, and the emperor Gaozong was portrayed as an incompetent and credulous emperor. In addition, the cruelty of the Jin 94 During the Sino-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek often compared himself to Yue Fei in expelling foreign invaders. In 1945, shortly after the war was over, Chiang performed a special state-worship in a Yue Fei temple. 95 Guanyun 1906: 82–95.

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soldiers in ghting with the Han was underscored. However, in contrast to popular memory, the three textbooks devoted little space to villains or enemies of the national heroes. They avoided explicitly denigrating the Jin and Mongols of the Southern Song period who would later form one of the ve component races. More important, the textbooks’ writers did not denounce the emperor Gaozong as the major culprit in the tragic death of Yue Fei; nor did they portray Qin Hui as a traitor. By and large, the narrative of these “villains” was descriptive and brief.96 The treatment of these enemies of national heroes certainly resonated with the advocacy of “concealing impropriety and glorifying decency” by Minister of Education Chen Lifu. For fear that schoolchildren would worship these villains and follow in their footsteps in the future, the textbook writers had to be selective in the appropriation of popular memory to reinvent the history of national heroes and villains.

Pro-Japanese History Education In March 1938, Japan sponsored a Chinese regime called the Reformed Government in North China. It was staffed by a number of politicians from former northern warlord regimes.97 However, in March 1940, when the eminent GMD politician Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 indicated his interest in collaborating with Japan, Japan replaced the Reformed Government with the Wang Jingwei regime. Both of the collaborationist regimes unanimously regarded Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance as foolhardy, driving China toward extinction. From their perspectives, collaboration was the only realistic means of ensuring the survival of the nation; resistance threatened to bring about its annihilation. As Gu Cheng, the Minister of Education in the Reformed Government, contended in 1939: “If the people do not survive, where is the nation?”98 Obviously, the Reformed Government attributed the origins of present disaster to the previous regime’s insistence on waging a war that it could not win even at enormous costs. From the perspective of leading Chinese collaborators, the GMD regime threw untrained

96 Jiaoyu bu 1943: 21–24; Zhengzhong bianshen 1942: 71–76; Xu and Fu 1938: vol. 1, 5–6. 97 For details of the formation of the Reformed Government in the war, see Brook 2000. 98 Brook 2000: 116.

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people into battle as cannon fodder and then left the country in ruins and the people without a livelihood. Worse still, the regime ed into the interior, but it still claimed to be the government of the people it had abandoned. Defeat also drove the Guomindang to a scorched-earth policy and into “collaboration” with the Communists—a collaboration far worse than that called for by the Reformed Government.99 As a result of this misgovernment, the GMD regime had abandoned the territory it was charged with governing and failed the people. In order to underline the misgovernment, the Reformed Government even invoked the historical memory of traditional evil rulers in its founding manifesto of April 1938: To be sure, there has been no government as evil as the Nationalist government in the entire history of China. . . . Even the two archetypal evil rulers of the second millennium BCE, Jie and Zhou, would have been “unwilling” to act as the Nationalist government had done; and even the two rebel leaders who overthrew the Ming dynasty in 1644 would have regarded its conduct as “intolerable.” . . . Motivated by righteous anger, a group of colleagues wants to rescue the Nation from calamity. We hope to replace the old with the new and revive the fate of the Nation.100

The manifesto declared that the GMD had forfeited its right to represent the nation by indulging in corruption, gaining a stranglehold on power, and engaging in war. This misgovernment was construed as justifying their collaborationist nationalism, as well as the founding of the Reformed Government. As Timothy Brook has pointed out, those, like Gu, who collaborated with Japan invoked the rhetoric of national salvation to justify what they did, not the motives of opportunism and complicity with which the resistance branded them. What they did, in their eyes, was for the nation, not for Japan, despite the apparent loss of sovereignty that this arrangement entailed, because they conceived of that loss as temporary. Thus, both sides appealed to nationalism: one attempted to unify people to ght against Japan, and the other to mobilize them to work with it. More noteworthy is that the pro-Japanese regime’s relationship with Japan played an indispensable role in the construction of their collabo-

99

Brook 2000: 174. I have found no formal copy of a publicly released version of this manifesto in Chinese archives. However, a handwritten copy of it dated April 7, 1938 is preserved in the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing. There are neither title nor page numbers in it. See le 2001 (2), entry 1. 100

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rationist nationalism. The manifesto asserted that the Chinese would be united with the Japanese in reestablishing peace in East Asia.101 As a result, Japan’s relation to China was presented by the collaborationists in terms of race. The regime appealed to racial solidarity, rather than cultural or economic cooperation. This racial solidarity could be represented as a simple and more fundamental principle of national destiny, while being suitably vague in terms of the action it entailed. It could also suggest a more aggressive attitude toward the white race, although the manifesto intentionally softened this aggressiveness at the end by reafrming the existing diplomatic relationships with white-race nations.102 Obviously, the Reformed Government based the reconstruction of national identity on racial solidarity between China and Japan, as well as on repudiation of GMD policies. However, how could these new political ideologies reach out to the general public? In the eyes of collaborationist regimes, education was certainly one of the most effective means for promoting their conception of the nation. On April 14, 1938, a new educational policy was unveiled in the service of the new political ideology. In the policy, the government stated that: (1) The Three Principles of the People and anti-Japanese education were to be abandoned. (2) Normal educational institutions, from elementary to high schools, were to be restored. The permission of the government was to be necessary for the establishment of any new schools. (3) The general lines of the GMD educational systems were to be followed in elementary and high schools. (4) Traditional moral education was to be vitally important. (5) Coeducation in high schools was to be abolished. 101

Ibid. This attitude to the white-race nations was consistent with Japanese anticolonial ideology in 1938. In November 1938, the Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced a “New Order in East Asia.” This proclamation stressed the importance of East Asian liberation from Western oppression. In December 1938, he once again launched an attack on Western imperial hegemony in a speech on Japan’s international relations: “The age of total imperial hegemony that prevailed in the 19th century has already nished. The contrary spirit to rebuild the world that is alive today must work in the direction of liberating the nations of oppressed peoples and giving full play to the creative power of each. Once the West has realized that the old ideology of materialist individualism, along with its transformation, communism, has brought on the crisis in today’s world, the West must then learn from the ancient but also new Eastern way of emptying the mind.” See Usui 1996: vol. 5, 234. 102

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(6) Character training of girls was considered essential to the nation. Their responsibility was to care for the family and, therefore, their education was to be different from boys. (7) Textbooks had to be the revised editions. The Ministry of Education was to be responsible for editing and examining textbooks. (8) The public examination system was to be abolished. (9) Special training for middle and primary school teachers was to be provided to correct their ideas on history. This was to be done through lectures.103 In the statements of the new educational policy, the declared intention to return to traditional moral education was of considerable importance. It epitomized a larger policy of social control: the policy of undoing the modernization of Chinese education and social ideas of the Nationalist period. For example, the head of the Supreme Court, Dong Gang, reframed GMD legislation in such a way as to base concepts of law on the old Chinese, rather than the new Western, conception of the family. The traditional values were important because they emphasized the subordination of children to parents, of wives to husbands, and of all citizens to established authority. Thus, the government decided to set up an Ancient Classics Institute, as well as to restore traditional moral education in schools. In May 4, 1938, Song Qie, the head of the Cultural Bureau of the Society for New Citizenship (Xinmin hui 新民會), also stressed the importance of moral education in a radio lecture by saying that the purpose of moral education was to reestablish Eastern culture in both China and Japan, thus leading the youth and the general public to join in the anti-Communist front. Echoing Song’s lecture, Li Xiheng, the vice minister of education, openly afrmed on May 14, 1938 that the primary purpose of the new educational policy was to maintain peace and order in Eastern Asia, as well as to root out Communism and the Three Principles of the People. In the spring of 1938, the government embarked on implementing this new educational policy. Certainly, history, geography, and language textbooks were the most crucial medium that it could employ to

103 See Taylor 1939: 78–96. Regarding general Japanese cultural and educational policy in north China from 1931 to 1945, see Komagome 1996: chapters 5 & 6.

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enforce its policy.104 On January 16, 1938, the Ministry of Education decreed three principles regarding the editing and writing of history and geography textbooks: 1. Anything in textbooks referring to Japanese aggression, the Three Principles of the People, and Communism must be eliminated. 2. The Thought of Confucius should be taught through new textbooks to change anti-Japanese attitudes. 3. In the future, new history and geography textbooks should mainly be devoted to Japanese history and geography, instead of Chinese topics. Clearly, the Ministry of Education attempted to reshape national memory by determining what was to be included in and excluded from the textbooks. But it was some time before textbook revision came under the Ministry of Education. As early as August 1937, a group of people from the Social Affairs Bureau and some schoolteachers began to examine textbooks. Next, on September 16, 1937, a committee for textbook revision was set up under the Cultural Section of the Peace Maintenance Committee. On November 21, a Beijing and Tianjin Textbook Revision Committee was established, headed jointly by a Chinese and a Japanese scholar. It was not until March 1, 1938 that this committee was put under the Ministry of Education. Although a committee of some 120 people worked on the revision, the Japanese directed the project.105 As the Xinmin Daily (Xinmin Bao 新民報) put it on August 17, 1938, “After the arrival of the new Japanese President of the Revision Committee, the schools will have pro-Japanese textbooks next spring.”106 However, the slim resources of the Reformed Government crippled the editing and printing of new textbooks. In reality, from the winter of 1937 to the summer of 1938, old GMD textbooks were still used while 104 The policy about the writing and editing of textbooks in occupied China was different from that in Taiwan, although both of them were under Japanese control during the war. From 1923 to 1945, in order to annihilate the memory of Chinese culture in Taiwan, Japan denied Taiwanese schoolchildren any chance of learning Chinese history. Thus, only Japanese history textbooks edited by the Japanese colonial government were used in classrooms. However, throughout the war, Japan never imposed Japanese history textbooks on schoolchildren in north China, although they planned to do so in the future. For an analysis of Japanese policy about history education in Taiwan in the 1930s and early 1940s, see Cai 2000. Also see Ta 1993. 105 Komagome 1996: 302–4. 106 Xinmin bao 1938 (August 17), 3.

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new ones were being prepared. During the period, the Ministry of Education published a small booklet which instructed teachers how to rub out and change anti-Japanese remarks in textbooks when they taught. It was not until September 1938 that the rst batch of new textbooks was printed and adopted. Their printing and sale was monopolized by the Xinmin Publishing House, a government-sponsored publisher. Naturally, all anti-Japanese propaganda, the doctrine of the GMD, and pro-Communist statements were eliminated. Still, a large part of the content of the new textbooks was copied from the old. Moreover, the government may have been unable to recruit qualied people to rewrite the textbooks in such a short time, for the new volumes were very slim in comparison with the old ones. A second batch of textbooks, which was printed in Tokyo, Manchuria, Tianjin, and Beijing in November 1938, differed starkly from the rst batch in content. For example, in these later geography textbooks, Manchuria was marked clearly as an independent country. In history textbooks, the historical and racial connection between China and Japan was also emphasized. As a result of the publication of this batch of textbooks, all old textbooks were banned. On January 23, 1939, the Xinmin Daily reported that the Ministry of Education had ordered all elementary schools to adopt these new textbooks.107 More importantly, this set of textbooks became a model in both content and style in occupied China. Even the textbooks of the Wang Jingwei regime in the early 1940s were modeled on this material. History textbooks are a case in point. Throughout the wartime period, seven sets of history textbooks were probably published in Japanese-occupied areas. Five sets were published during the Reformed Government and two in the Wang Jingwei regime.108 Most of these texts have not survived in good condition. Nevertheless, during my eldwork in China, I unearthed two sets of textbooks of the Reformed Government and one of the Wang Jingwei regime.109 While investigating the content of these books, I discovered that the texts of the Wang Jingwei regime were almost the same as those of the Reformed Government in both content and style. This similarity demonstrates that there was continuity in the principles of writing and editing textbooks in these two regimes in the occupied areas. In

107 108 109

Xinmin bao 1939 ( January 23), 5. Minguo shiqi zong shumu 1995: 89 & 221. They are Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939; Guoding jiaokeshu 1943; Gaozhong benguoshi 1939.

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fact, most of the history textbooks that circulated in the Wang Jingwei regime were ideological products of the Reformed Government.110 As with the history textbooks produced under the Guomindang, issues of race and national heroism were central, but the portrayals of these topics in collaborationist textbooks were starkly different from those in unoccupied areas.

Race As suggested by government policy statements, the Reformed Government attempted to reinvent the Chinese relationship to Japan in terms of race. It reimagined a racial bond between these two countries to legitimize its collaboration with Japan. In the two sets of elementary school history textbooks published during the Reformed Government and the Wang Jingwei regime, East Asian races were also homogenized into a monolithic entity to respond to Western imperialism.111 In the eyes of the Chinese collaborationist regimes, the Chinese and the Japanese played the most essential role in the survival of the yellow race, because they took the lead in challenging Western hegemony in East Asia. The alliance between the Chinese and Japanese races thus became the most important theme in the textbooks. In the last chapter of the textbooks, the phrase “zhongyang xieshou” (the Chinese and Japanese stand shoulder to shoulder with each other) was repeated several times.112 The pictures on the books’ covers were also drawn to convey this theme, to counteract GMD propaganda in the war. During the late 1930s, GMD covers illustrated several Chinese children using toy bricks to construct a toy house. The children represented the Chinese people and the construction of the toy house may have been a metaphor for Chinese nation-building in the war. However, the image on the collaborationist textbooks’ covers was very different: two schoolchildren of the yellow races, sharing the same umbrella and standing shoulder to shoulder with each other, braving the heavy rain. This image served as a good metaphor for “zhongyang xieshou,” since the two schoolchildren were metaphors for the Chinese and Japanese nations. The heavy rain 110 The content of Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939 was the same as that of Guoding jiaokeshu 1943, although they were published in two different collaborationist regimes. 111 Xiuzheng jiaoke shi 1939: vol. 4, 46; Guoding jiaoke shu 1943: vol. 4, 40. 112 Xiuzheng jiaoke shu 1939: vol. 4, 46–28; Guoding jiao shu 1943: vol. 4, 40–42.

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may have been a metaphor for Western imperialism. The children’s interdependence through the rain symbolized the contemporary collaboration between China and Japan. Although the fate of Chinese and Japanese races was placed in the context of world civilizations, these two sets of textbooks did not cite any historical events to authenticate the historical bond between the Chinese and Japanese races. Nor did they elaborate on why Eastern culture would rise and make a signicant contribution to the world. Although some modern Japanese works invented a few historical events 113 to justify the contemporary Sino-Japanese alliance, the textbooks did not use them to support their points of view. Acutely aware of the fervent anti-Japanese sentiments in occupied China, the textbook writers avoided making overt reference to Japanese history in supporting historical and racial ties between the two countries. The palpable fact of Japan’s brutal military occupation of China precluded any possibility of Chinese people accepting any Japanese interpretation of Sino-Japanese ties as something that inspired hope. Because of this, the collaborationist textbook writers were certainly faced with the challenge of inventing a new racial memory. On the one hand, they had to construct historical and racial solidarity with the Japanese in order to have their books pass the Japanese government’s scrutiny. On the other, fearing that an explicitly pro-Japanese historical narrative would intensify Chinese nationalism, they had to avoid overtly borrowing Japanese interpretations of East Asia racial origins. In the hope of resolving this inherent tension in historical memory, the textbook writers jettisoned the elaboration of the racial bond between China and Japan in favor of the reconstruction of Chinese internal racial strife throughout history. By narrating the racial tension in traditional China, they believed that they could counteract the GMD memory of the nation. The underlying theme of this narrative was the struggle of different Chinese races to control affairs in their country. It began with a golden age, the conquest of the Miao people by the

113 As early as the 1890s, the Japanese leading scholar Kume Kunitake sought to invent racial ties between the Southeastern Chinese and the Japanese. See Kume 1889. Twenty years later, in order to invent Sino-Japanese cultural ties, Shiratori Kurakichi, a famous Sinologist, contended that Confucianism was a part of both China’s and Japan’s past. In the introduction to his discussion of ancient Confucianism, he used the rst-person possessive, referring to the Chinese classics as “our ancient texts” (waga koten). See Shiratori 1909. For modern Japanese scholarship on Sino-Japanese cultural relations, see Masuda 1979, 2000.

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Han, under the leadership of the Yellow Emperor, around 2700 BCE. However, in order to erase the GMD memory of national origin, these textbooks had to deconstruct the myth of the Yellow Emperor: The Yellow Emperor’s battle with other races was unreliable legend. Because modern Chinese people mistakenly regarded the Yellow Emperor as the founding father of the Chinese race, they attributed most of the cultural achievements of different Chinese races in remote antiquity to him.114

This deconstruction of the myth of the Yellow Emperor implied that there was not a single origin of the Chinese race. According to the textbooks, the pluralistic origins of the Chinese race contributed to the continued racial clash in the progression of the Chinese nation. As suggested before, some GMD textbooks also tended to underline the bloody conicts between the Han and other races in premodern China. However, unlike the GMD textbooks, the focus of the pro-Japanese books was not on the Han people’s struggle against foreigners for survival, but on the constant conicts between the Han and other Chinese races. The process of how “barbarians” were culturally assimilated by the Han in the past was also excluded from this narrative. To be sure, its purpose was not to invoke the memory of how heroic the Han or Chinese, a single race, were in fending off or assimilating the foreigners. Rather, it was aimed at pointing to two longstanding characteristics of the Chinese race(s): diversity and instability.115 The point was to displace any notion of China as a unied nation and to project instead a view of the East Asian continent as a eld where racial rivalries played out. In the midst of Western imperialism, these racial rivalries should be subsumed in the formation of a single and independent East Asian political entity. It also implied that because China was not a single nation, it had to collaborate with Japan, a more coherent and independent one, to unify the East Asian races. On the surface, this narrative of Chinese races invalidated the GMD notion that the Han had successfully assimilated other races and formed a single and independent nation. But it did not necessarily justify an alliance between China and Japan in the contemporary period. More important, some contradictions and unresolved questions were manifest in the narrative. For example, if the origin of Chinese people was

114 115

Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939: vol. 1, 3; Guoding jiaokeshu 1943: vol. 1, 3. Guoding jiaokeshi 1943: vol. 1, 3–4.

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pluralist or if China was a multiracial country, why did the collaborationists claim that Chinese and Japanese people were of the same stock, being purely the descendents of the Mongolian race? If the Yellow Emperor was not the progenitor of the Chinese race, who would replace him as the shared progenitor of the Chinese and Japanese? If indeed Chinese races were already so divided and unsettled, how could they unify with the Japanese, a race more foreign than the Chinese subgroups, to form a single East Asian political entity? These contradictions and unresolved questions certainly undermined the persuasive power of the collaborationist memory of the nation.

National Heroes Along with race, the representation of national heroes was a battleeld between the GMD and the collaborationist regimes in the construction of national memories. As suggested above, the GMD regime appropriated the representations of traditional military heroes, such as Yue Fei and Qi Jigang, to promote militarism and renew national virtues. In order to counteract these GMD memories of the nation, the collaborationists were compelled to undermine the glorious representations of military heroes in history textbooks. In the case of Yue Fei, the collaborationist textbook writers denounced him on the basis of some modern Chinese professional historical works. They claimed that he was a self-seeking and hawkish warlord who threw innocent Han people into the battleeld and left the people in Southern Song territory without a livelihood.116 A high school textbook even referred to the well-known historian Lü Siman’s 呂思勉 interpretation of Yue Fei: According to the modern historian Lü Siman, the achievement of Yue Fei’s military expedition was dramatized by the novels of the Ming and Qing periods. In reality, his army was incapable of expelling the Jin and recovering the Han territory in the north. Furthermore, Yue Fei launched the military expedition, not for the sake of the salvation of the nation, but for the sake of the fulllment of his personal ambition. His reckless disregard of the consequences of his military expedition eventually brought about his tragic death.117

116 117

Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939: vol. 2, 34–35; Guoding jiaokeshu 1943: vol. 2, 28–29. Gaozhong benguo shi 1939: vol. 2, 550.

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Drawing on modern professional historians’ writings in this way, the collaborationists could recongure a new memory of Yue Fei to counteract GMD propaganda. More important, this new memory could be appropriated to attack present enemies. With the encouragement of the collaborationist regimes, history teachers drew a comparison between Yue Fei and Chiang Kai-shek. Like Yue Fei, Chiang was depicted as a self-seeking warlord, who waged a war for which the country was not prepared and therefore could not win even at enormous costs. Schoolchildren were taught that Chiang’s recklessness and selessness put the nation on their brink of extinction and left the people without a living. While the military heroes were portrayed as culprits of national catastrophes, their opposites, the negotiators, were elevated instead as heroes who salvaged the nation. For example, the Southern Song champion of appeasement, Qin Hui, was lauded as a true patriot in the textbooks.118 This new memory of traditional peace negotiators was obviously aimed at justifying the contemporary collaborationist ideology. Like Qin Hui, the Reformed Government and the Wang Jingwei regime regarded the survival and livelihood of the Chinese people as most important to the nation. In order to serve the people whom the GMD abandoned in the north, the regimes had no choice but to negotiate with the Japanese government. As indicated above, the culturally conservative collaborationists believed that radical Westernized education, as well as the New Culture Movement, had poisoned the minds of young Chinese. Thus, a revival of traditional Confucian education was not only necessary but desirable during the war. However, it appears that the collaborationist textbook writers did not have enough time to represent Confucius as a new national symbol. In the two sets of elementary textbooks published during the Reformed Government and Wang Jingwei’s regime, only one chapter was devoted to Confucius. The chapter was short and descriptive, offering a factual account of Confucius’s biography.119 Nor was there a discussion of Confucianism’s development, such as the neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties. Only in the last chapter of the textbook did the writers briey touch on the relationship

118 119

Gaozhong benguo shi 1939: vol. 2, 551–2, 632. Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939: vol. 1, 16–17; Guoding jiaokeshi 1943: vol. 1, 16–17.

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between Confucianism and the modern Chinese nation, solely to pass muster with the Ministry of Education.120

Conclusion To a great extent, the shortage of time crippled the construction of the collaborationist memory of the nation through textbooks. Furthermore, acutely aware of the fervent anti-Japanese sentiments in Japanese-occupied areas, collaborationist textbook writers avoided directly using materials from Japanese scholars. Thus, their narrative of the nation contained many contradictions and unresolved questions, which certainly undermined its persuasive power and hampered its successful transmission to schoolchildren. As recollections of elementary education in Jinan during the early 1940s illustrate, students actually used two sets of textbooks in the Japanese-occupied areas. One was written and edited by the GMD in the mid 1930s, whereas another one was edited by the collaborationist regimes in the late 1930s. Teachers and students usually surreptitiously used GMD textbooks because the contents of collaborationist texts were supercial and inconsistent. Only when inspectors from the collaborationist government came to their classrooms did they use the collaborationist textbooks.121 Thus, in comparison, the GMD educators and textbook writers generated a more persuasive nationalist discourse during the war, which to a certain extent contributed to the failure of the collaborationist construction of collective memory. Furthermore, Japan’s brutal military occupation of China, as well as the inconsistent contents of textbooks, precluded any possibility that people would believe a changed past. Consequently, some anti-Japanese teachers and students, in the face of ofcial constraints, seem to have been able to dispute the collaborationist interpretation of the nation in occupied wartime China.

120 121

Xiuzheng jiaokeshu 1939: vol. 4, 47; Guoding jiaokeshu 1943: vol. 4, 41. Sun 2000: 438.

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Guanyun 觀雲 (1906), “Lun zhongguo ren chongbai Yue Fei zhi xinli 論中國人崇拜 岳飛之心理 (On the Chinese Worship of Yue Fei),” in Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 72 ( January 1906), 82–100. Guoding jiaokeshu: Gaoxiao lishi 國訂教科書: 高小歷史 (History Textbook for Senior High School) (1943), 4 volumes. Nanjing: Jiaoyubu. Harp, Stephen L. (1998), Learning to be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Hon, Tze-Ki (1996), “Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism: Gu Jiegang’s Vision of a New China in His Studies of Ancient History,” in Modern China 22, 3 ( July 1996), 315–39. Hsiung, Ping-chen (2000), “Moving the World According to a Shifted ‘I’: World History Texts in Republican China and Post-war Taiwan.” A paper delivered to the International Workshop on “Renegotiating the Scope of Chinese Studies,” University of California, Santa Barbara, March 13–15, 2000. Hu, Kuo-tai (1987), “Politics and Higher Education in China: The Control and Development Policies of the Guomindang, 1937–1945.” Ph.D. dissertation, Grifth University. —— (1998), “Dispute on the Question of Wartime Education and the Formation of an Educational Policy for the Guomindang in the War,” in Republican China, 14, 1 (November 1998). Jiang Jieshi 蔣介石 (Chiang Kai-shek) (1937), “Jiaoyu jiuguo yu jiuguo de jiaoyu 教育救國與救國的教育 (Education to save the nation and education for national salvation),” in Ye Jiangqing, (ed.) (1937), Jiuguo lunwenji 救國論文集 (An anthology of writings on saving the nation). Shanghai: Dafang shuju, 14–18. —— (1984), Xian zongtong Jianggong quanji 先總統蔣公全集 (The Complete Works of Jiang Jieshi). Taibei: Zhongguo wenhua daxue. Jiang Yingqun (1941), “Zhongxue lishi jiaoxue shikuang zhi fenxi yanjiu 中學歷史 教學實況之分析研究 (An Analysis of the Reality of History Teaching in High Schools),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 31, 11 (November 1941), 16. Jiaoyu bu 教育部 (ed.) (1940a), Xiuzheng chuji zhongxue lishi kecheng biaozhun 修正初級中 學歷史課程標準 (The Revised Standard of the Junior High School Curriculum). Chongqing: Jiaoyu bu. —— (1940b), Xiuzheng gaodeng zhongxue lishi kecheng biaozhun 修正高等中學歷史課程 標準 (The Revised Standard of the Senior High School Curriculum). Chongqing: Jiaoyu bu. —— (1943), Gaoji lishi keben 高級歷史課本 (History Textbook for Senior Elementary Schools), 4 vols. Chongqing: Guoding zhongxiaoxue jiaokeshu qijia lianhe gongyichu. —— (1953), Jiaoyu fangzhen yu zhengce ziliao 教育方針與政策資料 (Materials on Educational Principles and Policies). Taipei: Zhongyang wenwu gongyingshe. —— (1981 reprint), Dierci Zhongguo jiaoyu nianjian 第二次中國教育年鋻 (Education Yearbook, Volume 2). Taibei: Zhongqing. Komagome Takeshi (1996), Nihon shokuminchi no bunkatogo (Cultural Assimilation in Japanese Colonies). Tokyo, Iwanami shoten. Kume Kunitake (1889), “Nihon fukuin no enkakhu,” in Shigakkai zasshi 1 (December 1889), 15. Li Dongfang 黎東方 (1941), “Guanyu daxue Zhongguo tongshi kecheng de jige wenti 關於大學中國通史課程的幾個問題 (Several Questions about University Courses on General Chinese History),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 31, 11 (November 1941): 6. Li Jigu 李季谷 (1941), “Kangzhan jianguo zhong de lishi jiaoyu 抗戰建國中的教育 (History Education during the War of Resistance and Nation-Building),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 30, no. 8 (August 1941), 15–20. Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1904), “Huangdi jinian shuo 黃帝紀年說 (About a Calendar Based on the Yellow Emperor),” in Huangdi hun 黃帝魂 (The Soul of the Yellow Emperor). Taibei: Zhonghua minguo shiliao congbian, 1968 reprint.

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Masuda Wataru (1979), Seigakau tozen to Chugoku jijo, ‘zassho’ sakki (The Eastern Movement of Western Learning and Conditions in China: Notes on Various Books). Tokyo: Iwanaami shoten. —— (2000), Japan and China: Mutual Representations in the Modern Era. Surrey: Curzon. Miao Fenglin 繆鳳林 (1941), “Minzu zhuyi de lishi jiaoyu 民族主義歷史教育 (Nationalist History Education),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 31, 11 (November, 1941), 19–20. Minguo shiqi zong shumu: Zhongxiaoxue jiaocai 民國時期縂書目: 中小學教材 (A Bibliography of Publications in Republican Period: Elementary and High School Teaching Materials) (1995). Beijing: Shumu wenxian. Nora, Pierre (ed.) (1996–98), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Ou Tsuin-chen (1977), “Education in Wartime China,” in Paul K.T. Sih (ed.) (1977), Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War. New York: Exposition Press. Ou Zhijian 歐志堅 (Au Chi-kin) (2001), “Minguo shiqi nangao shixue, 1915–1931 民國時期南高史學 (Historical Research at Nangao College, 1915–1931).” Ph.D. dissertation: Hong Kong Baptist University. Pan Zhanzhuan (1938), “Kangzhan qijian de gaozhong shidi jiaoyu 抗戰期間的高中 史地 教育 (History and Geography Education in High Schools during the War of Resistance),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 28, 2 (February 1938), 28–29. Qian Mu 錢穆 (1940), Guoshi dagang 國史大綱 (An Outline of the History of the Nation). Chongqing: Shangwu yinshuguan. —— (1941), “Lishi jiaoyu jidian liuxing de wujie 歷史教育幾點流行的誤解 (Several Common Misinterpretations of History Education),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 31, 11 (November 1941), 21–22. —— (1945), Huangdi 黃帝 (The Yellow Emperor). Chengdu. —— (1983), Bashi yishuangqin shiyou zayi 八十憶雙親, 師友雜憶 (Reminiscences on my Parents at the age of Eighty, Memories of Teachers and Friends). Taibei: Dongdai shuju. Shiratori Kurakichi (1909), “Shina kodensetsu no kenkyu,” in Toyo jiho 131 (August 1909). Reprinted in Shiratori Kurakichi zenshu, vol. 8 (1969–1971), 382. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Sun Peiqing (ed.) (2000), Zhongguo jiaoyushi 中國教育史 (History of Chinese Education). Shanghai: Huadong University Press. Ta Kazuo (1993), “Komin Ka kyoiku to shokuminchi no kokushu kyola sho (National History Textbooks and Japanese Colonial Education),” in Iwanamia henza kindai nihon to shokumin chitogo to shinnai no ronri (Iwanamia Lecture: Modern Japanese Colonial Rule and Control). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Taylor, George E. (1939), Japanese Sponsored Regime in North China. New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacic Relations. Usui Katsumi (ed.) (1996), Nit-Chû senso (The Sino-Japanese War). Tokyo: Misuzu shobo. Wang, Fan-sen (2000), Fu Ssu-nien, A Life in Chinese History and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wong, Kam Cheong (1987), “Chinese History Textbook Writing in Late Ching China.” M.Phil Thesis, University of Hong Kong. Xinmin bao 新民報 (Xinmin Daily), 1938–1939. Xiuzheng jiaokeshu: Gaoxiao lishi 修正教科書: 高小歷史 (History Textbook for Senior High School) (1939), 4 volumes. Shanghai and Nanjing: Jiaoyu bu. Xu Yingchuan 徐映川 and Fu Weiping 傅緯平 (1938), Fuxing lishi jiaokeshu 復興歷史 教科書 (Revival Senior Elementary School History Textbook: History), 4 volumes. Changsha: Shangwu yinshuguan. Yao Zhuhua (1940), “Zhongxue lishi de jiaoxue 中學歷史的教學 (History Teaching in High Schools),” in Jiaoyu zazhi 教育雜誌 30, 6 ( June 1940), 13–15.

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“WEAK AND SMALL PEOPLES” IN A “EUROPEANIZING WORLD”: WORLD HISTORY TEXTBOOKS AND CHINESE INTELLECTUALS’ PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL MODERNITY Robert J. Culp*

During the late Qing and Republican periods, Chinese intellectuals sought to control the world, as they always had, by writing about it.1 Textbooks were one of the main sites of this textual production. Leading modern intellectuals, like He Bingsong 何炳松 (1890–1946) and Chen Hengzhe 陳衡哲 (1890–1976), and a host of newly professionalized editors working for Shanghai’s private publishing companies wrote world history textbooks that mapped out the modern world for students, charted trajectories of change, and established those intellectuals as authoritative arbiters of knowledge about global modernity. This essay explores how they congured the world, analyzes why they constituted it as they did, and unpacks some of the social and political implications of their writings. My goal is to track changes in both Chinese intellectuals’ metageographical perspectives2 and their narrativization of the process of becoming modern.3 What Chinese elites meant by “the world” varied * Previous versions of this article were presented at the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS), State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton, October 31, 1997; the Joint Conference on East Asian Perspectives on World Order in the 20th Century, May 8–9, 1998, SUNY, Buffalo; NYCAS, Bard College, October 29, 2004; and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, Shanghai, PRC, August 21, 2005. I thank Iona Man-Cheong, Thomas Kierstead, Eugenia Lean, and Tze-ki Hon for their insightful comments on those papers and participants at those conferences for stimulating questions. Initial funding for the research on which this essay is based was provided by the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China and the American Council of Learned Societies/Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Fellowship Selection Committee with funds provided by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. I also take this opportunity to thank Tze-ki Hon, my co-editor, for his dedicated efforts, without which this anthology would not have come to fruition. 1 See Bol 1992; Zito 1997. 2 For the concept of metageography and a critique of various metageographical constructs, see Lewis and Wigen 1997. 3 For a theoretical discussion of narrative and the discursive power of history, see White 1987. For accounts of the political implications of various strategies of

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with transformations in the socio-political environment and their own projects and goals. Rebecca Karl has demonstrated that the world was an inchoate space for late Qing Chinese thinkers, who sought to congure it in politically empowering ways. She illustrates how for a time at the turn of the century “Asia” emerged as a meaningful conguration of peoples resistant to the domination of European imperialism and that “Asia” constituted a space that spanned both empires and nationstates. Signicantly, this global imaginary included various non-EuroAmerican places and peoples.4 During the Republican period, world history textbooks reveal a changing conception of global space, which pivoted in different pitches around a dominant center of Euro-America. Early Republican textbooks presented a world primarily dichotomized between “the West” (xiyang 西洋) and “East Asia” (dongya 東亞), while textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s portrayed a diverse world that was also composed of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. However, as during the late Qing, narratives of political action were essential to organizing these spaces into meaningful congurations for both Chinese intellectuals and the students who read their books. Textbooks of the 1910s and 1920s primarily told a story of “Europeanization” (ouhua 歐化), following a master-narrative outlined by Liang Qichao at the turn of the century.5 In these narratives, European nation-states established normative trajectories of nation-state formation and then enacted their national destinies throughout the world, according to a Hegelian paradigm. In these accounts, non-European places, whether in “East Asia” or elsewhere, seemed bound to follow the course of European nation formation if they were to establish themselves within the ow of History. “Europeanization,” I argue, became an attractive narrative structure because it offered the possibility of national transformation and promised China’s literate elites political agency within the nation-making drama. At the same time, however, “Europeanization” threatened these heirs to the late imperial literati tradition with cultural disenfranchisement. World history textbooks of the Nanjing decade (1927–1937) contrasted Euro-American nationstate formation with a modern account of global anti-colonial revolution carried out by “weak and small peoples” (ruoxiao minzu 弱小民族) narrative encoding of global history in the 20th century, see Duara 1995; Tanaka 1993; Trouillot 1995. 4 Karl 2002. 5 Tang 1996: esp. chap. 1.

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throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Euro-American nations and the non-European world were placed in a relation of dynamic opposition. But in these textbooks, this self-authorizing anti-colonialism held ambiguous implications for the modern world: Did it signal a new spatial conguration of interconnected non-European peoples, or did it primarily expose new spaces to the “Europeanizing” process of nation-building? Through these textbooks, China’s literate elites also wrote themselves into world history in two ways. First, they cast intellectuals, ranging from Watt and Marx to Woodrow Wilson and Albert Einstein, as creators of the modern world. In this way, they carried out on a global scale the process that Tze-ki Hon describes elsewhere in this volume, as late Qing textbook authors wrote Chinese history textbooks that privileged the role of the literate elite in dynastic history. Moreover, by the very act of writing these textbooks for the mass audience of secondary students, they carved out a role for themselves as cultural interpreters, a clerisy of globally literate intellectuals who could make the world known to that key sector of Chinese society, the educated youth. Thus, at the personal level, narratives of “Europeanization” would have been attractive to these transitional intellectuals, for they privileged forms of cultural knowledge that they had mastered.

History in the Curriculum This essay focuses on close readings of secondary-level Western history (xiyangshi 西洋史), Eastern history (dongyashi 東亞史), and world history (shijieshi 世界史) textbooks published from the 1910s up to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. During this period, several major series of textbooks were published, all by private publishing companies employing transitional intellectuals. The rst series was produced by the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan) and Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju) in the early 1910s after the 1911 Revolution. The second major series was published in 1923–24 after the National Federation of Education Associations promulgated a new national curriculum.6 The formation of the Nationalist government in 1927 led to shifts in secondary curricula in 1928, 1932, and 1936. Each

6 Ji 1991: 301–2, 319–332; Zhang Jinglu 1954: vol. 1, 260–8; Peake 1932: 97–119.

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shift generated new series of textbooks, though most history textbooks published under the 1932 standards continued to be published and used until 1937.7 History played a consistent and important role in middle school education during this period. The 1912 curriculum, for instance, stipulated that students should have two hours of history instruction a week for all four years of secondary school, with the rst two years dedicated to Chinese history and the nal two years dedicated to world history.8 This “Western” (xiyangshi) and “East Asian” (dongyashi) history instruction focused somewhat more heavily on Western history and also stressed modern over pre-modern history.9 This emphasis in the curriculum standards was reected in the curricula of particular schools. In 1917 Jiangsu Provincial First Middle School’s history course, for instance, spent the last year and more of its history classes focused on Westerncentered world history, using Fu Yunsen’s Xiyangshi (Western history) as its primary history text.10 East Asian history (dongyashi) textbooks served as companion volumes to the Western history texts and, as we shall see, reproduced many of the latter’s themes. History continued to be a core class under the 1923 curriculum, which was drafted primarily by New Culture Movement intellectuals and Westernized educators in a series of nationwide meetings of provincial education associations.11 Starting in 1922, regular middle school became a six-year course of study that was divided into a three-year lower middle course and a three-year high school course. The new curriculum standards recommended that lower middle school students take eight credit hours of history, while the high school curriculum made nine hours of cultural history the norm.12 The lower middle school curriculum specically encouraged the integration of instruction in Western and Chinese history, with equal stress on each. Combining discussion of Western and Chinese history in this way tended to subsume Chinese history within a master-narrative of progressive world 7 For an overview of the Nanjing Decade curriculum revision process see Zhongxue kecheng biaozhun bianding weiyuanhui 1936: part 1, 1–9. 8 Zhu Youhuan 1991: part 3, vol. 1, 359. 9 Ibid.; Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 1, 2; Peake 1932: 101–2. 10 Zhu Youhuan 1991: part 3, vol. 1, 399, 406. 11 Li Huaxing 1997: part 1, chap. 6. 12 Quanguo jiaoyuhui lianhehui xinxuezhi kecheng biaozhun qicao weiyuanhui 1924: Xinxuezhi kecheng gangyao zong shuoming: 7; Gaoji zhongxue kecheng zonggang: 3, 19.

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change, European-style modernization, and imperialism.13 The minimum requirements for lower middle school graduation in the eld of history reveal how these classes focused on describing the processes of human evolution and nation-state formation. Students were expected to master the following material: “I. Know the circumstances of human cultural evolution; II. Know the general circumstances of this and other countries’ change in political form.”14 In this format, Chinese history was presented as one example of a uniform world process of political and cultural evolution. Signicantly, despite the stress on integrated history in the new school system standards, publishers continued to produce separate world history and Chinese history textbooks throughout the 1920s, thus resisting a complete assimilation of Chinese history into the homogenizing narrative of evolutionary history. While some schools, such as the model Southeast University Afliated Middle School in Nanjing, made efforts to teach “integrated” (hunhe 混合) history by making it a required course for second-year lower middle school students, even they continued to teach world and Chinese history separately in other courses.15 Many other schools continued to separate completely Chinese history from world history or Western history throughout the decade.16 After 1927, curricula formulated under the Nationalist government required twelve hours of history class over three years for lower middle school, while high school students studied twelve to fourteen hours per week over the course of the Nanjing decade (1927–1937).17 For lower middle schools under all Nanjing decade curriculum standards, class time was divided into four semesters of Chinese history versus two semesters of world history. For high schools, class time in Chinese and

13 Quanguo jiaoyuhui lianhehui xinxuezhi kecheng biaozhun qicao weiyuanhui 1924: Chuji zhongxue, 5–6. 14 Quanguo jiaoyuhui lianhehui xinxuezhi kecheng biaozhun qicao weiyuanhui 1924: Chuji zhongxue, 6–7. 15 Liao 1926: 157–60. 16 For example, see Zhongyang daxuequli Yangzhou zhongxue chuban weiyuanhui 1928: 42–8; Shanghai Minli zhongxuexiao yichou nian zhangcheng 1925: 44–53; Jiangsu shengli diyi shifan xuexiao 1926: 20, 22. 17 Jiaoyubu zhong xiao xue kecheng biaozhun qicao weiyuanhui 1929: vol. 2: 25–41; vol. 3: 41–63. Jiaoyubu zhong xiao xue kecheng biaozhun bianding weiyuanhui 1933: “Chuji zhongxue lishi kecheng biaozhun” and “Gaoji zhongxue lishi kecheng biaozhun.” Zhongxue kecheng biaozhun weiyuanhui 1936: Chuji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun, 95–111; Gaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun, 122–44.

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world history was evenly divided under the 1929 and 1936 curricula, while under the 1933 curriculum students studied eight hours of Chinese history and six hours of world history. The main thrust of the world history dimension of the curricula was to describe the trends of world evolution in politics, economics, society, and culture in order to explain the current world situation and to establish China’s place within it. Paralleling earlier curricula, the 1929 curriculum objectives stressed the need for China to adapt to standards of international competition and to adopt valuable parts of Euro-American science while at the same time cultivating a distinctive “national spirit” (minzu jingshen 民族 精神). The 1936 curricula likewise stressed a need to understand “world trends” and to develop knowledge of science and engineering with an emphasis on how students could play a part in helping China “catch up” culturally.18 However, Nanjing-decade world history curricula also emphasized imperialism and anti-colonialism as important areas of study. As stated in the 1929 curriculum standards, The development of modern capitalist imperialism produced a situation of oppression for weak and small peoples and workers. After the Great War, even though imperialism continued to develop, weak and small peoples arose and carried out opposition to imperialism, completing independence movements. China is one of the active and important members among this trend. So, at present, lecture and study about foreign history in China should focus on modern imperialism’s development and the general trends of the most recent nationalist movements in order to arouse the citizenry to cast off the fetters of imperialism, and [to have] courage and exert themselves to achieve liberation.19

Detailed discussions of imperialism and anti-colonial movements remained an important part of world history instruction through 1937. This stress on anti-colonialism worked to establish a global imaginary of peoples arrayed in opposition to global imperialism, generating a map of the modern world quite different from that of earlier generations of Republican textbooks. Throughout the Republican period, secondary textbooks were edited, printed, and distributed by private publishing companies, the most

18 Zhongxue kecheng biaozhun weiyuanhui 1936, Gaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun: 121–2. 19 Jiaoyubu zhong xiao xue kecheng biaozhun qicao weiyuanhui 1929: vol. 3, 53–4.

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prominent of which were Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company, and World Books (Shijie shuju). These companies sought to prot by publishing for the growing captive market of students in modern schools, and they competed aggressively to claim market share for their products.20 In their bid to expand sales, these companies adapted quickly to changing curricula, and they transmitted major intellectual trends in their books. New ideas found their way into textbooks because publishing companies formed a partnership with modernizing Chinese intellectuals to produce them. For intellectuals, textbooks provided a medium of cultural inuence and empowerment after the end of the examination system and the decanonization of the Confucian orthodoxy at the turn of the century.21 Modernizing intellectuals provided publishers with manuscripts aligned with contemporary intellectual trends that could be turned into cultural commodities. In turn, private publishing companies offered a powerful site of cultural production for intellectual elites striving for new ways to exert cultural power and establish their own social status. Textbook publishing, in all subject areas, offered a powerful mechanism of cultural inuence as well as an avenue for employment. When they edited world history textbooks, modern intellectuals also presented themselves as arbiters of cultural knowledge about global modernity. Two distinct tiers of intellectuals participated in textbook editing. One group was composed of leading intellectuals with Western academic training and a new sense of themselves as members of specialized academic guilds. The other group included professional editors, who worked in publishers’ editing departments to secure a living by their pens and to participate in the cultural dialogue of the Republican period. Biographies of two authors whose textbooks are discussed below, Chen Hengzhe and Jin Zhaozi 金兆梓 (1889–1975), suggest, respectively, the characteristics of these two groups. Chen Hengzhe was one of the leading female intellectuals of the Republican period and a well-known historian. Raised in an elite scholarly family, Chen studied in the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship between 1914 and 1920, earning a B.A. at Vassar College and an M.A. at the University of Chicago. In 1920 she took 20 21

See Culp 2003; Reed 2004. For a full discussion of the process of decanonization, see Elman 2000.

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a position teaching history at Beijing University and also married the renowned scientist Ren Hongjun 任鴻雋. The couple left Beida in 1922 to move to Shanghai, where Ren took a job at the Commercial Press. Chen subsequently taught at Nanjing’s National Southeast University in 1924–25, even as she wrote her famous Western history textbook (discussed below) for the Commercial Press.22 Chen’s and Ren’s uid movement between the academic and publishing worlds suggests that this generation of elite transitional intellectuals, with their highly specialized Western training, used both contexts as sites for gainful employment and exerting cultural inuence. Chen’s frank preface to her Western History reveals how writing textbooks offered leading intellectuals an opportunity to assume the role of cultural interpreters.23 Chen asserts that she had intended to write an outline of Western history to dispel the common post-World War I misconception that disorder and violence characterized the European experience. As an expert on European history, in other words, she had hoped to use a popular medium to introduce a Chinese reading public to what she saw to be the true face of Western history. In this way, she cast herself as a cultural interpreter. Signicantly, she originally had intended to write some form of popularly accessible history, but was approached by Commercial Press executive editor Wang Yunwu about writing a textbook instead. Chen explains that at rst she had been hesitant because of the limitations of the textbook medium, but eventually she had relented because Wang had been willing to compromise on issues of scope and form, while she had “realized the importance of textbooks’ educational status.”24 Chen seems to have realized that her efforts at cultural interpretation would reach the widest audience and have the greatest impact if she published in the textbook form. Although Chen does not say so explicitly, we can infer that Commercial Press’ savvy executive director Wang Yunwu, for his part, decided to compromise on matters of scope and organization in order to induce this major public intellectual and emerging cultural celebrity to write a textbook that he predicted would nd a ready market. The agreement between Wang and Chen encapsulates neatly the balance of interests between elite intellectuals and publishers in regard

22 23 24

Boorman and Howard 1970: vol. 1, 183–7. Chen 1926: “Xu,” 1–4. Chen 1926: “Xu,” 2–3.

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to producing textbooks. Publishers courted high-prole intellectuals to write textbooks to expand those books’ marketability, while intellectuals could use textbooks to represent their views to a broader public, thereby assuming the role of cultural mediators. Although they commanded high visibility and sometimes wrote books that received great popular acclaim, elite intellectuals like Chen Hengzhe were greatly outnumbered in the ranks of textbook authors by editing department professionals like Jin Zhaozi. Jin, too, wrote well-received history textbooks that claimed to present legitimate knowledge about the past and the modern world, but his life experience and career trajectory were quite different from Chen’s. Jin’s biography suggests how publishing provided a mechanism through which the lower-ranking late imperial literate elite could convert their literary talents and broad learning into cultural status and inuence in Republican China.25 Jin came from a scholarly family, whose oldest brother, Jin Zhaofeng, was a member of the last generation to enjoy the fruits of success in the examination system, serving as second-class compiler (bianxiu 編修) in the Hanlin Academy during the closing decade of the Qing. All Zhaofeng’s younger brothers, by contrast, had to nd other outlets for converting their academic talents into cultural capital in the modernizing society of the early 20th century. For instance, second brother Zhaoyan became a member of the Republican National Assembly and director of Beijing’s Theater School; third brother Zhaoluan studied in Japan and became a customs inspector and authority on international law. Zhaozi, after precociously placing rst on the county-level examination in 1901, presciently abandoned the examination track and entered the modern school system. He graduated from Hangzhou’s Prefectural Middle School in 1909, completed the preparatory course at Capital Normal University in 1912, and entered the Mining and Metallurgy Department of Tianjin’s Beiyang University in 1913. In pursuing scientic training, Jin followed his brothers in preparing for an alternative career path after the end of the examination system. When the death of his mother interrupted his studies, Jin had to enter the work force without a degree in science. But his prior literary training enabled him to nd career opportunities in two newly professionalizing elds: teaching and publishing. Between 1914 and 1922 Jin taught rst at Zhejiang Provincial Seventh Middle School

25

Yao 1981: 18–22.

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in Jinhua and then at Beijing Higher Normal School. Subsequently, in 1922 and again in 1929, Jin joined the editorial staff at Zhonghua Book Company at the invitation of Zhang Xiang (Xianzhi), his former literature and history teacher at Hangzhou Prefectural Middle School. Jin later would observe wryly that although he had been studying chemistry at Beiyang University, he spent most of his career writing history textbooks and supervising the Textbook Editing Department of Zhonghua’s Editorial Board.26 The further irony that Jin failed to note was that it was undoubtedly his solid foundation in classical learning and his secondary-level training in literature and history that enabled him to write authoritatively about history and literature, even though he had no formal advanced training in those areas. Jin had effectively converted the capital of late imperial cultural literacy into a career in modern publishing. Throughout the Republican period, publishers recruited refugees from the examination system, recent graduates of colleges and high schools, and/or primary and secondary school teachers—all categories into which Jin t squarely at different points in his life story—to serve in their editing departments.27 In doing so, they provided a valuable niche for many educated youths and lower tier intellectuals in the new economic and cultural environment of the early Republican period. A position in an editorial ofce granted transitional elites economic stability and no small measure of cultural inuence. For insofar as textbooks were seen as presenting students with authorized knowledge, textbook compilers like Jin assumed the voice of cultural authority, and it was through their pens that several generations of students came to know the modern world. Thus, textbooks in general, and world history texts in particular, were produced by three intersecting forces. Curriculum standards established by the state and/or leading intellectuals and educators provided a general narrative framework within whose boundaries editors and publishers had to operate. Publishing companies produced textbooks to try to take advantage of the ready market constituted by the students of modern schools. And transitional intellectuals, ranging from elite Westernized scholars like Chen Hengzhe to an emergent class of publishing professionals like Jin Zhaozi, wrote textbooks to both cir-

26 27

Jin 1981: 16–8. Wang Zhiyi 1991: 3, 7; Ji 1991: 330; Zhu Lianbao 1987.

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culate their views of the world and establish their position as cultural mediators. The interplay among these forces during the rst 25 years of the Republican period generated textbooks that changed signicantly in structure and content.

World History as National Histories World history textbooks of the 1910s and early 1920s divided the world between “the West” and “East Asia,” and they told a common dominant narrative of nation formation based on Euro-American history. European and American revolutions of national becoming were the primary stories told in the modern history portions of 1910s and 1920s Western history textbooks. Africa, the Middle East, and many other portions of the world were included only as open elds for European activities, allowing for extension of Euro-American national histories. East Asia was constituted as a potential space of parity and competition with the Euro-American West, but only if the non-colonized peoples of Asia could preemptively “Europeanize.” Western history textbooks published during the 1910s by the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company recounted a history of Euro-American national revolutions, after a brief discussion of absolutist states which focused heavily on epochal monarchs like Louis XIV and Peter the Great. They described the American and French revolutions as having provided the models for “new nations” that stood in opposition to the “old conservative powers” or absolutist states that had governed Europe.28 The conservative forces, which opposed the progress of freedom, were epitomized by the nations of the Holy Alliance which took part in the Conference of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars and stood arrayed against a whole range of revolutionary forces throughout the world.29 Textbook author Zhang Xiang 張相,30 who was also Jin Zhaozi’s mentor, identied all these revolutionary movements with the vague, 28

Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2; Zhang Xiang 1914: 34, 37. Zhang Xiang 1914: 48. 30 Zhang (1877–1945) was a native of Hangzhou and obtained the rank of xiucai under the Qing examination system. During the early 20th century he taught in turn in Hangzhou’s Anding School, the Prefectural Middle School, and the Chongwen School. Starting in 1914 he worked off and on at Zhonghua Book Company, editing language, history, and geography texts of some inuence. Xu 1991: 888. 29

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multivalent terms of “freedom” (ziyou 自由) and “independence” (duli 獨立). By doing so he conated the revolutionary movements of subjugated peoples seeking national autonomy (e.g., 19th-century Italy) with popular revolutionary movements seeking constitutional government and civic rights in their own countries (e.g., the July Revolution in France). But it was a conation to an end. For Zhang saw all these different revolutions moving proto-nations toward the teleological end of becoming autonomous and constitutionally self-governing modern nation-states, and he also viewed republican rule and civil rights as constitutive of the highest stage of development for any national state. Thus, Zhang presented the 19th century as a string of revolutions fought in the name of republican nation-state formation against old Europe’s conservatism. He showed the roots of national revolutions by describing the young nationalist parties in Germany and Italy in the early decades of the century. He recounted, in order, the national liberation movements in South and Central America during the 1810s, 20s, and 30s. Following this were discussions of the Greek and Belgian independence movements, Poland’s bid for autonomy from Russia, France’s 1848 Revolution, Italy’s and Germany’s movements for unication, a portrayal of the United States’ Civil War as a struggle for national unication, and a detailed account of the Balkan independence movements at the end of the 19th century.31 In short, Zhang presented much of modern world history as the story of Euro-American nationalities’ revolutions to become constitutionally self-governing nation-states. Embedded in such narratives of national revolution was the expectation that peoples with their own languages, religions, and cultures should also be able to form their own nation-states. The national state, in other words, was the telos of development for cohesive, pre-existing 32 “peoples.” Similarly, Fu Yunsen’s 傅運森 contemporary Commercial Press textbook discussed the movements for national independence in

31

Zhang Xiang 1914: 49–66. Cf. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 42–71. Fu Weiping (Yunsen) served as an editor at the Commercial Press at least from the time of Wang Yunwu’s reorganization of the Editing Department (Bianyisuo) in 1922, but probably from much earlier, since his Western History textbook dates from 1913. Fu was one of the lead editors for Commercial Press’ encyclopedia, he wrote the only secondary-level integrated history textbook published for the New School System during the mid 1920s, and he was editor or proofreader for many primary-level history readers during the 1910s. For Fu’s role in Wang Yunwu’s reorganized editing department, see Yang Yang 2000, 102, 122–4. For evidence of his earlier editing activities, see Beijing tushuguan and Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe tushuguan 1995: 85–8. 32

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Greece, Belgium, and Poland as efforts by those ethnic nationalities to embody a nascent national identity in the form of a national state. For instance, Fu described the Belgian movement for independence from Holland in the following terms. “The Conference of Vienna joined Belgium together with Holland as the kingdom of the Netherlands, but the two countries’ languages, religions, and means of livelihood were all different, [so that] at the time of [the Netherlands’] establishment, there was already the appearance of division.”33 Or, again, “[Holland] sought to make Belgium change to follow it: in religion, to denounce Catholicism and adopt Protestantism; linguistically to use Dutch for its administrative language, using it in schools and government ofces; and to make political rights unequal.”34 These differences of culture, language, and religion provided the implicit basis for Belgian claims for independence. Fu then proceeded to describe the Belgian people’s rebellion against Dutch rule and their formation of an independent nation governed by a constitutional state.35 Repeated accounts of national revolution, along the lines of Fu’s detailed discussion of the Belgian independence movement, establish a fundamental theme in these textbooks. Nascent national peoples were predisposed to form national states to express their distinctiveness and political autonomy. Further, the repetition of parallel accounts related the idea that historical time was structured by a series of prescribed, universal stages culminating in independent sovereignty, preferably under a republican form of constitutional government. Belgians, Greeks, and Poles were presented as pre-existing nationalities that sought to become constitutional nation-states, thereby fullling the teleology of modernity. Language such as “reviving the old country” (huifu jiubang 恢復舊邦), which Fu Yunsen used in reference to Poland, hinted at the presence of a nascent nationhood, even when there was no formal nation-state.36 For instance, in accounts of German and Italian independence, “Germany” and “Italy” were described as pre-existing ethno-nations that historical characters such as Bismark and Cavour had struggled to constitute as national states.37 Zhang’s language in the following passage is typical: “After the February Revolution, Italy united, Germany united, America,

33 34 35 36 37

Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 56. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 56. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 57. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 58. Zhang Xiang 1914: vol. 2, 58–63.

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although it had the North-South War, ultimately recovered its unity, and the Balkan countries became independent in quick succession.”38 Making nations the grammatical subjects of sentences served to cast them as the subjects of history. Further, the telos of nation-statehood within these textbooks attributed to proto-national peoples a sense of real subjectivity that preceded their national becoming. This story of nation formation in Europe and the Americas continued in the world history and integrated history textbooks of the 1920s.39

“Managing” the World: Narrating Imperialism Textbooks of the 1910s and 1920s did not ignore the rest of the world, such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. However, they incorporated those regions largely by integrating them into Eurocentric narratives of change and portraying them primarily as spaces for European action. Textbooks by Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company during the 1910s described a process by which European nation-states “managed” ( jingying 經營) colonies in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.40 European states and agents, like the British East India Company and Cecil Rhodes, were cast as the dynamic agents of history. The peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East barely appeared in these accounts, which characterized colonialism as the incorporation of new areas into the space of European domination. The noteworthy exceptions to these portrayals of Europeans as agents acting on a passive world came in descriptions of Egypt’s colonization and British imperial incorporation of Boer-held areas of southern Africa. For instance, Zhang’s and Fu’s textbooks described Arabi Pasha’s efforts to drive Europeans out of Egypt in 1881, as well as Kreuger’s mobilization of Boer settlers in Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1900.41 But in both accounts, resistance seemed futile in the face of the overwhelming power of British colonialism. Moreover, the Boers, at least, were displaced Europeans, acting out a European drama on the African stage.

38 39 40 41

Zhang Xiang 1914: vol. 2, 56. See Jin 1925: vol. 2, 78–86; Fu Yunsen 1924–25a; Fu Yunsen 1924–25b. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 128–132; Zhang Xiang 1914: vol. 2, 69–73. Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 129; Zhang Xiang 1914: vol. 2, 70–2.

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Textbooks of the 1920s paralleled this narrative of European dominance over and incorporation of the non-Euro-American world by portraying the world as structured by racial hierarchies and driven by the power of industrialization and global capitalism. For instance, Jin Zhaozi in his 1924 Zhonghua Book Company textbook borrowed one of Liang Qichao’s favorite distinctions, between historical and non-historical races, to hierarchize the relative positions of ethnicities in historical time.42 To quote Jin: “What is discussed here as a people (minzu 民族) is limited to those [peoples] who are related to world history, the so-called historical peoples; non-historical peoples are omitted. The so-called historical peoples can generally be divided into two: 1) the yellow race (renzhong 人種); and 2) the white race.”43 Having been omitted from the main narrative of historical becoming, the “non-historical peoples” entered the story of history only as objects of the activity of “historical peoples.” In a characteristic move of Enlightenment history, this hierarchy of groups along a scale of evolutionary development implicitly justied the domination of those cast as less advanced by those cast as more advanced. Unequal development led to differences in power that seemed to naturalize the domination of the strong over the weak. Jin’s textbook used a genealogical chart to illustrate how the white and yellow races of the “historical peoples” increased in differentiation over the ages, culminating in particular ethnic groups and, ultimately, distinct nationalities.44 The so-called “historical peoples” clustered in Euro-America and East Asia, marginalizing all other world spaces. European domination over the world was also explained in Jin’s text by reference to industrialization, which was cast as a universal force for historical transformation rooted in Europe. Signicantly, Jin rst portrayed Europe before the industrial revolution as a backward, feudal society, with little industry besides cottage manufacturing and very limited trade. Serfdom and apprenticeship, he explained, were tantamount to slavery, transportation was tortuous, and cities were dark and muddy. In Jin’s account, new technology and inventions in the 18th and 19th centuries transformed Europe’s industry and transportation, and in turn transformed the West’s economy and society.45 This economic change led to the geo-political emergence of modern colonialism. As 42 43 44 45

Tang 1996: 76–7; Chang 1971: 158–63. Jin Zhaozi 1925: 1. Jin 1925: 2–3. Jin 1925: 106–9.

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industrialized countries looked for outlets for their wealth and power, Jin asserted, they came to compete with each other for territory, resources, and comparative advantage, their struggles spreading rst throughout Europe and then encircling the whole world. “Each country in Europe’s territory is confused and sometimes interests are in conict. After the Industrial Revolution, production quickly ourished and economic power expanded so that they had to look outside for markets. Thus competitive desire developed into their world policy [of imperialism].”46 Jin’s account suggested that, having attained the new developmental stage of industrialization, Europe’s leading nation-states “naturally” turned to extending their power onto the world stage. Assuming that national industrial power marked the highest stage of development along the universal timeline of history and portraying expansionist policies as the spread of that power internationally led the period’s textbook authors to view imperialism equivocally. Within this meta-historical framework, imperialism appears as the face of progress. This tolerant view of imperialism marked, for instance, Fu Yunsen’s contemporary description of European colonialism in Africa. Fu’s portrayal followed Jin Zhaozi’s model of the “historical peoples” of Europe acting out history on the “non-historical peoples” of Africa. “Africa, with the exclusion of the northern coast, has always had the name of the dark continent. Since the European War when each country divided up to explore it, Africa’s territory became a place of colonial competition, and in a short time no place was untouched by the division of territory. Except for Abyssinia’s old kingdom in the east and the Liberian Republic on the west coast, there is simply no place untouched by foreign incursions.”47 Fu’s reference to the “dark continent” served to remind the reader of Africa’s non-historical status. Then his use of the single word “competition” evoked the whole narrative of national development and progressive historical change, whereby the advance of the “historical peoples” was predicated on the domination of “nonhistorical peoples.” British domination of Egypt and South Africa, the Belgian Congo, France’s possessions in West Africa, and German Southwest and Eastern Africa were recounted objectively in turn.48 Africans were granted no historical agency by the text, and Africa as

46 47 48

Jin 1925: 109. Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 78. Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 79–81.

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a space was considered an extension of Europe, subject to domination by the Europeans who had developed rst and farthest.

“East Asia” and “Europeanization” However objectively 1910s and 1920s world history textbooks described European expansion, in early 20th-century China it was not distant and abstract but rather an immediate and pressing concern. As Fu Yunsen put it in his 1913 textbook, “in the 20th century, international competition has spread to the Pacic, and our country bears the brunt of it. How should our citizens ( guomin 國民) unite together for selfprotection?”49 How, indeed, could China avoid becoming a blank space incorporated into a European colonial formation? World history textbook authors confronted colonialism in the Asian history portions of their textbooks, and they prescribed “Europeanization” as the answer to Euro-American geo-political dominance. Li Bingjun’s 1914 Zhonghua Book Company East Asian history textbook offers a prime example of how early Republican textbook authors confronted the specter of European expansion. Li drew a contrast between a series of Asian countries—such as India, Myanmar, and Annam—that were “annexed” (bing 併) and Japan, which escaped annexation by preemptively “Europeanizing” (ouhua 歐化).50 Li clearly offered Japan’s experience of “Europeanization” as a model for how Asia’s countries could progress through the stages of universal historical time and thus avoid annexation. The entire last part of Li’s textbook, or about a fth of the text, was dedicated to Japan’s modern history, tracing its changes from the late Tokugawa, when it was itself threatened by imperialism, to its colonization of Korea in the early 20th century. Li discussed in some detail the dismantling of Japan’s feudal system and its replacement by an administrative system based on European models. In Li’s narrative a pivotal moment in Japan’s self-transformation was its adoption of

49

Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 132. Li Bingjun 1914: 71–118. Note that Li’s textbook is titled an “East Asian” textbook but incorporated much material from what European and American scholars now consider South and Central Asia. This uidity in how the “East” was conceptualized reinforces Rebecca Karl’s point that for Chinese thinkers “Asia” was constructed by identifying afnities in world-historical experience across the world. 50

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constitutional monarchy as its new form of government, using European models that were consulted carefully before a constitution was promulgated. The Diet served as a forum for public discussion and was the architect of Japan’s modern achievements.51 Japan’s success was typied by its imperialist escapades, which led to the revision of the unequal treaties that had been forced upon the Tokugawa shogunate, thus signaling its emergence into full equality with the Western powers. Only when Eastern and Western history textbooks were read together did their implications for countries like China become fully clear. The universalization of world historical time that was structured by the prior historical experience of Euro-American nation-states suggested that proto-nations in other world regions had to conform to those Euro-American models in order to take full part in that modernity, as the example of Japan so clearly showed. In his 1924 world history textbook, Fu Yunsen similarly described Annam, Burma, and Korea being swallowed up by imperialist powers. These states’ weakness, Fu suggested, stemmed in part from their participation in the anachronistic tribute system (with China at its core) which was out of step with the new international order born of the competition between industrial powers.52 Fu made explicit reference to the dangers of lagging behind the progress of the international order in his discussion of Korea. “After the Opium War, each country in Europe and America belatedly set its sights on East Asia (dongya), searching for opportunities to open ports for trade. Japan had already received this inuence, but Korea, because it sustained feudal relations with an overlord, had no way of quickly taking that action.”53 Imperialism here was described as an “inuence” which had stimulated Japan to evolutionary development in step with world history. But Korea could not maintain pace with the evolutionary process of modern nationhood because it had been trapped in an old system of relations and loyalties with China. Fu made it clear that those nationalities that did not make the transition to modern nationhood and industrialization to maintain a status as historical peoples would be carried away on the tide of inter-national competition.

51 52 53

Li Bingjun 1919: 98–105. Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 55–7. Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 70.

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As with Li Bingjun’s history of East Asia, 1920s textbook authors contrasted accounts of non-historical peoples overwhelmed by international competition and the forces of imperialism with those of other non-European nations which had “Europeanized” (ouhua). The two sterling examples that the 1920s textbooks chose to represent this process were Thailand and Japan, which had compliantly imitated the West in forming modern, constitutional polities. Japan had also taken the further step of economic modernization and military imperialism against other countries in East Asia.54 Fu’s and Jin’s 1920s textbooks ultimately offered only two possible options: refuse to modernize or Europeanize and become objects of history like Korea and the peoples of Africa; or, mimic the Euro-American order, take one’s place as a “historical” nation, and become part of the international competition of imperialism. According to these textbooks, China’s course seemed to be clearly charted. Chinese people had to rewrite their historical narrative by turning toward the redemptive future of Europeanized nationhood to avoid being overwhelmed by imperialism and left behind by world progress.

The Mixed Legacy of Europeanization For Republican intellectuals, Europeanization was a fraught process. On one hand, the linear, universal conception of historical time held out to Chinese intellectuals the possibility of self-transformation through their own nationalist movement. As Xiaobing Tang has pointed out, if world history was the story of progress, then China too had the potential to change as part of that world.55 But at the same time, “Chinese nationalism, as well as the project of Chinese modernity, was bound to agonize constantly over a deep suspicion of inauthenticity because the vision was valid and acceptable only to the extent that it was also viewed as a contingent repetition of others’ history.”56 Moreover, the end of World War I, with its extreme destruction and betrayal of Chinese nationalist hopes, made the Euro-American model seem none

54 55 56

Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 59, 68–9. Tang 1996: 34–6. Tang 1996: 60.

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too attractive. Ambivalence about universal, progressive historical time came through clearly in these world history textbooks. The possibilities for change in the mode of Europeanization probably never seemed more obvious and feasible than during the late 1910s and early 1920s. For one, the aftermath of World War I offered countless examples of ethno-cultural communities realizing independent nation-statehood, a process which world history textbooks of the 1920s recounted in detail. Jin Zhaozi, for instance, explained the origins of the First World War, in part, by describing how the different peoples encompassed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire each sought independence from it.57 The 1920s textbooks then described the end of the war and the Paris Peace Conference that followed it as the culmination of this process of distinct ethnic groups striving for national autonomy. Woodrow Wilson’s principles of “national self-determination” (minzu zijue 民族自決) were echoed over and over in these texts. Jin’s and Fu’s textbooks viewed the breakup of empires and the formation of new nations as the natural outcome of this new 20th-century “ideology of freedom.” Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Finland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Egypt, and even Ireland were all described as “newly risen nations” (xin xing guo 新興國).58 For many of these new nations, the true mark of their national becoming was that they had become sovereign republics, forming constitutional states in the image of their Western European and American predecessors. Such national self-determination offered the hope that China too could form an autonomous, constitutional nationstate like these late-forming European nations. In fact, some history textbooks, like Fu Yunsen’s integrated history textbook of the 1920s, portrayed the 1911 Revolution as placing China in the mainstream of world historical development.59 Europeanization might have been an even more attractive option for Chinese scholarly elites, because it offered a privileged role for intellectuals in the process of modern transformation. World history textbooks of the 1910s and 1920s included detailed discussions of the arts and sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their accounts portrayed intellectual achievements as linked, sometimes directly and

57 58 59

Jin 1925: 110. Fu Yunsen 1924–25b: vol. 2 (1925), 104–6; Jin 1925: 119–20. Fu Yunsen 1924–25a: vol. 1 (1924), 118–145.

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sometimes more indirectly, to Europe’s modern development.60 Within these accounts, scientic discovery and invention were most closely connected to European progress, thus encouraging a view of the modern intellectual as highly specialized and grounded in technical knowledge. But these accounts, nonetheless, placed intellectuals at the pivot point of modern transformation. At the same time that they promoted Europeanization, several textbook authors of the 1910s and 1920s also clearly expressed ambivalence about it. For instance, Li Bingjun’s account of modern Japan ended with a discussion of its recent cultural developments that qualied his analysis of the political situation that called for all-out Europeanization. Li observed that Japanese culture had always come from outside, rst from China and most recently from the West. Early 19th century enthusiasm for Western learning that contributed to Japan’s fast development during the Meiji period (1868–1911) were presented as the natural result of that predilection for borrowing from abroad. However, Li also noted that, even though science advanced quickly during this period, moral cultivation was lacking and a contempt had developed for “Han learning” (漢學 J: kangaku; C: hanxue) and “national learning” (國學 J: kokugaku; C: guoxue). Li then described the rise of “national essence” (國粹 J: kokusui; C: guocui ) thought during the Meiji period as a reaction to the lack of moral cultivation that resulted from embracing Western thought. National essence thought, Li stated, emphasized maintaining one’s own strengths while adopting the strengths of others, causing people to realize “the need for preserving the nation’s basis” (weichi bangben zhi biyao 維持邦本之必要).61 Limited borrowing from abroad was one thing, but one could not threaten one’s national essence. Li’s discussion of Japanese culture pointed out problems with Europeanization that were elided in other history textbooks. Specically, Li raised the question of how to maintain some sense of national cultural distinctiveness even while moving with the homogenizing, progressive tide of universal time. Li’s answer, which he suggested when he lauded Japan’s national essence thinkers, of incorporating outside strengths while maintaining a core of indigenous culture, presaged how Nanjing-decade textbooks would attempt to resolve the same issue. Yet Li’s

60 E.g., Fu Yunsen 1913: vol. 2, 131; Zhang Xiang 1914: vol. 2, 75–7; Chen 1926: esp. vol. 2, 289–293; Wang Enjue 1927–28: vol. 2 (1928), 65–7. 61 Li Bingjun 1919: 117–8.

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discussion only hinted at the Orientalist dichotomization of “East” and “West” into, respectively, “spiritual” (or ethical) and “material” (or “scientic”) realms which required blending in order to generate a fully civilized world culture. In Li’s textbook, the discussion of culture and distinctiveness hung at the end of the text like a question mark. If Li Bingjun raised questions about Europeanization from the standpoint of cultural conservatism, Chen Hengzhe did so from the perspective of a cosmopolitan, “progressive” Westernizer who was a leading gure in the New Culture Movement. Like her counterparts writing during the 1920s, Chen Hengzhe also described European culture as the world’s most advanced, and portrayed the world since the 19th century as marked by a “globalization (shijiehua 世界化) of European culture.” Imperialism and greater ease of travel, she argued, had carried science and democracy throughout the world.62 Chen’s account clearly identied Europe as the center and vanguard of modern world history which set the standard for constantly evolving “civilization” that other regions and countries would have to follow. Earlier parts of her textbook had established just such a paradigm by describing Europe as the soil where the “seeds” of classical civilization had fully owered as a result of Germanic peoples’ imitation of the more advanced civilization they had inherited from Rome.63 Europe was the most advanced representative of world civilization in the modern period as Rome had been in the classical age, and world civilization spread through imitation of the leading culture by less advanced peoples. At the same time, Chen also raised serious doubts about the monolithic discourse of “Europeanization.” Initially, after a long description of the spread of European imperialism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Chen reected on the choices possible for Asian countries and seemed to come up with the same limited choices that were outlined implicitly in Jin’s and Fu’s textbooks. She suggested that the choice for Asian countries was either to imitate the European powers like Japan had, engaging in military preparations and imperialism, or to refuse to imitate Europe, like India had, and be overwhelmed by imperialism. But Chen went on to raise the possibility

62 63

Chen 1926: vol. 2, 286–7. Chen 1926: vol. 1, 146.

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of a third alternative, which, she asserted, China had the responsibility to invent and enact.64 What might that alternative look like? Chen did not explicitly prescribe a particular course for China, but throughout her textbook she made a series of value distinctions regarding different parts of European modernity that pointed toward the need for selective borrowing from it. Science, she asserted, had advanced learning and human welfare, and, without being restricted by any particularistic boundaries, had become the moving force of economics, politics, and society. Yet it had also led to the social problems that resulted from the Industrial Revolution and unbridled materialism, as well as producing the weapons that had created the terrible force of modern warfare. European politics had produced chauvinistic nationalism that focused on national power and promoted imperialism. But it had also generated democracy, rights discourse, and non-discriminatory internationalism, with each country making cultural contributions to world culture.65 Chen thus discriminated between “good” and “bad” dimensions of European culture, suggesting that China’s Europeanization could (and should) integrate the former without being complicit in the militarism and imperialism of the latter. This distinction allowed Chen to criticize these negative aspects of Western modernity, but it did so by preserving a “true” legacy of European civilization, which she still viewed as the leading edge of universal, progressive time and a model that should be universally followed. Chen’s narrative of progressive history implicitly supported the cosmopolitanism and rationalism embodied in the New Culture Movement. By identifying science, democracy, and internationalism as expressions of a universal historical process, Chen’s textbook, and other historical writings like it, naturalized their promotion in China. Furthermore, it fashioned a privileged position for the Westernized intellectuals who had mastered modern learning, making them the leaders of national self-transformation. If Europeanization was to be a cultural as much as an economic and political process, then cultural elites with Western learning, like Chen and the rest of our textbook authors, would be central gures in that process.

64 65

Chen 1926: vol. 2, 313–14. Chen 1926: vol. 2, 292–3, 315–25.

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The core narratives of Nanjing-decade world history textbooks followed the general outline of the texts of the previous two decades in describing the progressive development of a world “civilization,” its movement from one ethnicity and region to another, and the culmination of modern civilization in nation-states. The modern development of those nation-states was marked by constitutional government along with economic modernization and inter-state competition that fed into imperialism and World War I. Euro-American nation-states were again presented as the most advanced expressions of modern civilization. But the inuence of Sun Yat-sen’s anti-imperialist nationalism, and growing awareness of a world process of anti-colonialism that emerged after World War I, contributed to a new narrative of anti-colonial struggle within these textbooks. Textbooks of the Nanjing decade described a world polarized between imperialist oppressors and antiimperial resisters. The texts used Sun Yat-sen’s language of “weak and small peoples” to portray a non-European community bound together by the shared experience of imperialist domination and anti-colonial resistance.66 The texts described a post-War world with anti-imperialist movements emerging everywhere and with anti-colonial peoples connected by their shared experience of resistance. The following passage from Li Jigu’s 李季谷 textbook was characteristic: [A]fter the Great War, the atmosphere of each small and weak people resisting imperialism’s dismemberment and oppression is stronger by the day. Egypt’s independence movement, Palestine’s movement to oppose Britain, the Indian National Congress-led non-cooperation movement against Britain, Ireland’s liberation movement, Annam’s anti-French movement, Korea’s anti-Japanese and independence movements, and China’s May Thirtieth Movement to oppose all imperialists, have amed up without interruption! The sharper the imperialists’ claws and teeth of oppression are, the stronger the revival of the spirit of opposition in weak and small peoples. We should shout loudly: ‘Small and weak peoples unite!’ True liberation lies on the opposite shore of the blood bath with the imperialists! We should also shout: ‘Overthrow imperialism!’67

66 67

See, for instance, Wang Enjue 1927–28: vol. 2 (1928), 118–9. Li Jigu 1934–35: vol. 2 (1935), 170.

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The textbooks then recounted the situation of each anti-colonial struggle, sometimes in great detail.68 In their accounts, the textbook authors focused closely on the conditions for raising popular consciousness and creating a unied political subject for the anti-colonial struggle. Jin Zhaozi, for instance, noted that the various anti-imperialist movements in the Middle East used the common religion of Islam to unite people effectively, whereas in India the division between Hindus and Muslims worked against unication.69 Other authors like Zheng Chang70 鄭昶 detailed the roots of pre-colonial autonomy of each rebelling territory, tracing their historical pasts as a means of justifying their claims for independence.71 Zheng highlighted, for instance, each Middle Eastern colony’s precolonial status as either an independent kingdom or a province of the Turkish Empire, thus claiming subjectivity for colonial peoples counter to Orientalist discourses which described them as passive and “non-historical” in the face of the agency of imperialism. In describing the full parameters of these struggles of resistance, some textbook authors characterized in new ways the peoples of Africa, who previous textbooks had consigned to the “non-historical” category and discussed only as the victims of imperialism. Jin Zhaozi, for instance, sympathetically described Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement, calling it a “special wave rising in the tide of national self-determination.”72 As the preceding long quote from Li Jigu, with its explicit mention of the May Thirtieth Movement, shows, China’s anti-imperialist protest movement was numbered among the ongoing struggles.73 Through these anti-colonial narratives, Nanjing-decade world history textbooks portrayed a nascent alternative global spatial conguration and outlined a distinct new storyline in the narrative of modern world history. By illustrating how peoples in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were acting historically to resist imperialism, they incorporated those

68 Li Jigu 1934–35: vol. 2 (1935), 164–70; Wang Enjue 1927–28: vol. 2 (1928), 118–21; Jin 1932: 172–9; Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2, 55–67. 69 Jin 1932: 174–7. 70 Zheng Chang (Wuchang) (1894–1952) was a native of Sheng County, Zhejiang. He joined Zhonghua Book Company as a literature and history editor in 1921 and became direct or of the Art Department (meishubu) in 1924. He served concurrently as professor at a number of China’s top art academies. Xu 1991: 1474. 71 Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2, 56–61. 72 Jin 1932: 178–9. 73 Also see Wang Enjue 1927–28: vol. 2 (1928), 121.

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areas into a modern global imaginary as something more than just adjunct units of European states. Furthermore, the descriptions of antiimperialist movements suggested modes of community and potential modernities other than those premised on a model of Euro-American nation-statehood. For instance, by acknowledging how pan-African ideas of racial autonomy on a continent-wide scale or pan-Islamic consciousness motivated anti-colonial struggles, the textbooks pointed toward wider forms of community that could serve as alternatives to the modern nation-state. At the same time, using the designation “weak and small peoples” to delineate all the agents of anti-colonial struggles dened a non-Euro-American global community. Thus, embedded within Nanjing-decade textbooks was a nascent alternative metageography that connected disparate sites of anti-colonial struggle to form a unied political space that stood in contrast to the Euro-American world and did not coincide with any continental spatial conguration, such as “Asia.” But those textbooks described only one ultimate trajectory for anticolonial struggles: full autonomy for each ethnic group and self-governance as a nation-state with a constitutional polity. This teleology was fully established in the textbooks by reference to Mustapha Kemal’s independence movement in Turkey, which became the archetypal anticolonial struggle in this generation of textbooks. Turkey’s revolutionary movement had great symbolic value in these textbooks in part because of its historical parallels with China. Both China and Turkey had been large, long-standing empires that came under siege from Euro-American imperialist powers, experiencing slow dismemberment.74 Building on this historical parallel, each Nanjing-decade textbook had a detailed chapter discussing Turkey’s revolution, offering it as a normative example of a successful nationalist independence movement by a “weak and small people.”75 The success of Turkey’s anti-colonialism was marked by its formation of a nation-state on a Euro-American model and its implementation of a Westernized vision of modernity. For instance, in Li Jigu’s account, Turkey’s revolution culminated in the following acts: obtaining independence from Greece; declaring itself a Republic; electing Kemal president; establishing a constitution; trading the Islamic 74 See, for example, Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2 (1928), 31 for this kind of equation between Turkey and China. 75 E.g., Jin 1932: 172–4; Wang Enjue 1927–28: 2 (1928), 119–20; Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2, 55–6.

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calendar for the Western one; and recognizing the freedom of religion instead of using Islam as a national religion.76 The anti-colonial vision of the post-War history in these textbooks claimed a new and potent agency for the “weak and small peoples” who had previously only been described as passive objects in the face of the evolutionary juggernaut of global imperialism. But at the same time, Nanjing-decade textbooks described anti-colonial movements focused on achieving recognized, and recognizable, forms of the modern nationstate, adapting these anti-European struggles to the archetypal narratives of prior Euro-American histories. The anti-colonial movement was cast as a series of national revolutions that followed the general pattern of “Europeanization” established in earlier textbooks. Why did Sun Yat-sen’s conception of a world alliance of “weak and small peoples” against colonialism remain only a potential global imaginary in these textbooks? One reason was certainly that the two most prominent transnational revolutionary discourses of the 1930s—Sovietled communist internationalism and Japanese Pan-Asianism—both challenged constructions of a transnational world order that could be egalitarian and benecial to all participant peoples. Some textbooks explicitly considered and rejected these formulations of transnationalism. Doubts about Soviet internationalism came through clearly, for instance, in Jin Zhaozi’s discussion of post-Revolution Russian foreign policy in his lower-middle school textbook.77 He characterized “world revolution” as a “conspiracy” ( yinmou 陰謀) and portrayed Stalin’s Eastern Policy of supporting anti-colonial movements in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and India as aimed at undermining the USSR’s arch-rival, Great Britain, rather than primarily helping those peoples to achieve freedom from colonial oppression. Communist global revolution, in short, looked to Jin like co-optation of anti-colonial movements for the benet of Soviet foreign policy. Some intellectuals and Nationalist Party members, most notably Zhou Zuoren and Dai Jitao, certainly irted with Pan-Asianism and Sino-Japanese cooperation against Euro-American imperialism during the mid 1920s. But Japanese aggression starting with the Jinan Incident and continuing with the Mukden Incident in 1931 and the invasion of Shanghai in 1932 disabused even the most optimistic Japanophiles

76 77

Li Jigu 1934–35: 2 (1935), 168–9. Jin 1932: 155–7.

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of any hope that pan-Asian cooperation might be liberating.78 World history textbooks of the 1930s correspondingly portrayed Japan as an aggressive state, which competed with other imperialists for hegemony in the Pacic and sought to colonize China. For example, Zheng Chang, in his 1934 world history textbook, characterized Japan’s Pacic and continental foreign policy as a form of “Asian Monroe Doctrine,” signaling the imperialistic implications of Japanese actions and leaving no room for imagining pan-Asian cooperation.79 Further, even though global revolution might at times have provided an attractive universalizing rhetoric for the Nationalist Party, it was in the context of national struggle that the party-state could best justify its political primacy. If the main revolutionary goal was Chinese national independence, the Nationalist Party could present itself as the representative of the national political community, the head of the national body.80 But if the struggle was broader and more diffuse, the Nationalist Party’s role in the global anti-colonial drama was much less clear. Rather than make a cameo appearance on the world stage, Nationalist Party leaders and the intellectuals associated with them sought to play the lead at home in a conventional heroic drama of national self-determination.

World Civilization and National Culture Anti-imperialism organized around nation formation on a European model raised again the dilemma that Li Bingjun had confronted in his textbook during the 1910s. If the goal of anti-colonial struggle was forming a modernizing nation-state in the image of Euro-American states, how distinctive and authentic could Chinese nationalism really be? As we have seen, one way Chinese curricula and textbook authors maintained a sense of cultural autonomy apart from the homogenizing movement of a universal and progressive historical time was to separate Chinese history from world history, thus presenting China’s historical

78

Lu 2004: chaps. 5–6. Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2, 98–103. Cf. Li Jigu 1934–35: vol. 2 (1935), 183–91. 80 For the ways in which a party or a paramount leader can constitute themselves symbolically by acting as embodiment and/or representative of a social collective, see Bourdieu 1991. Cf. Lefort 1986. 79

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development as relatively organic, distinct, and autonomous.81 But in Nanjing-decade textbooks, the authors also explicitly attempted to reconcile the dilemma between the homogenizing tendency of evolutionary time and the cultural distinctiveness demanded by nationalist discourse.82 One way these textbooks confronted that dilemma was by envisioning a fusion of dichotomized notions of spiritual and material culture that were used to characterize, respectively, Chinese and Euro-American culture. The classical version of this resolution can be seen in Zheng Chang’s conclusion to his 1934 textbook. As Partha Chatterjee has noted in discussing the thought of the Bengali philosopher Bankimchandra, a split between spiritual and material culture acknowledges and reproduces Orientalist categories without granting them immutability, thus leaving the door open for an ideal fusion of the spiritual and material.83 However, the way Orientalist categories construct indigenous culture and identity as spiritual, static, and part of a pristine and glorious past dictate that any such appeals to cultural distinctiveness will be inherently conservative, oriented toward reviving an idealized, usually ancient, past. The dichotomies of Orientalism clearly limited the eld of nationalist discourse, for distinctiveness had to be sought in the supposedly “pure” and “traditional” culture that Orientalist categories help to produce. This radical dichotomization also foreclosed a global order conceived along the lines of the production of multiple spaces that were both modern and different that Liang Qichao formulated starting in the 1920s, for difference was only conceived according to two categories that were globally dened and xed.84 Like Bankimchandra, Zheng Chang imagined that a fusion of spiritual and material cultures could bridge the gap between the universalizing movement of modernization and some sense of distinctive Chinese identity.

81

For a full discussion of this separation and its implications, see Culp 2001. See Tang 1996: 7, 232–4 for a discussion of this dilemma and its implications. 83 Chatterjee 1986: 65–73. Chatterjee’s characterization of Bankimchandra’s views reveals close parallels to Zheng’s perspective: “The West has a superior culture, but only partially; spiritually, the East is superior. What is needed, now, is the creation of a cultural ideal in which the industries and sciences of the West can be learnt and emulated while retaining the spiritual greatness of Eastern culture” (p. 73). 84 Tang 1996: 193–205, 216–223. 82

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robert j. culp Chinese cultural development has tended toward the spiritual, while foreign cultural ourishing has tended toward the material. If one calls the current ourishing of Euro-American culture material civilization, then the culture that has been transmitted in China since ancient times can be called spiritual civilization. Material civilization must be connected to spiritual civilization to avoid cruelty and to approach humanity; spiritual civilization must also absorb material civilization as much as it can, for only then can it stand majestically in the midst of the struggle for survival and not decline and fail.85

Signicantly, Zheng saw this fusion of spiritual and material leading to a higher form of culture for both China and technologically advanced Euro-American countries. Zheng’s fusion, in other words, did not seek to preserve China’s autonomy in a world of “anthropological space,” which in a post-nationalist imaginary would have preserved and respected autonomous and contemporaneous cultural difference. Rather, Zheng here imagined China marking its distinctiveness through the nature of its contribution to a universal, homogenous, and evolving world civilization. In this way, he conformed to a framework of unitary evolutionary time, which structured his text and those of all his contemporaries. Within this universal temporal framework, simultaneous but different trajectories of social, economic, and political change were difcult to imagine. In Zheng’s vision, Chinese identity would be preserved by the fact that it contributed its distinctive sense of interpersonal ethics to a new universal world culture. This resolution was paralleled in many of the Chinese history textbooks of the period that took pride in what China had contributed, and could still contribute, to a world civilization.86 Thus, Zheng ultimately returned to an emphasis on universal progressive time, which was the starting point for Nanjing-decade world history textbooks. This stress on unied time made progressive change imaginable in the Chinese context. But it also meant subordinating oneself to following a set process of modernization based on scientic development, industrialization, and constitutional nation-state formation that had already been established by the historical trajectory of the West. Even though Liang Qichao’s potent critique of modernity and his afrmation of cultural difference in space were available to this 85 Zheng Chang 1934: vol. 2, 118–9. Emphasis in original. Cf. Li Jigu 1934–35: vol. 2 (1935), 195–212. 86 See, for instance, Fu Weiping 1933: vol. 4, 144–5; Lü Simian 1934–35: vol. 2 (1935), 256.

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generation of textbook writers, they opted instead for the progressive movement of unied historical time. Zheng’s efforts to mitigate the impact of this homogenizing process and reassert a sense of autonomous Chinese identity was limited by the historical paradigm in which he worked. For he located Chinese distinctiveness in a pure, archaic Chinese past that was constructed through the discourses of Orientalism as an opposite for a modern and materialist “Western” culture.

Conclusion Early Republican intellectuals composed for students a world where peoples became nation-states, encouraging the hope that China, too, could emerge as a state with full sovereignty in the modern world. In the rst Republican textbooks, histories of Euro-American states modeled China’s path, while post-World War I textbooks provided examples from numerous “newly formed nations” and post-colonial states. The dominant process of change presented in these textbooks was one of “Europeanization.” However, the anti-colonial rhetoric of the Nanjing decade fostered an alternative worldview, which textbooks made available to student-readers, even if it was not fully articulated and developed as a main theme of the texts. This nascent post-nationalist story described a world of “weak and small peoples” bound together into a transnational community of opposition through the process of anti-colonial struggle. Why did textbook writers and Nationalist Party leaders adopt a narrative of nation formation on the Euro-American pattern as the basic template for world history? This choice appears especially confusing once we understand how that model privileged the European and Europeanized powers against whom nationalistic Chinese intellectuals and party leaders struggled. Certainly this European-style, nationcentered narrative of world history was encouraged by the existing foreign models of Euro-centric, progressive, unilinear world history on a Hegelian model, as Prasenjit Duara and others have so persuasively argued.87 But other meta-narratives, such as communist accounts of world capitalism, Liang Qichao’s vision of spatially organized cultural difference, or trans-national visions of anti-colonial struggle, were

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Duara 1995.

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available at this time, and some found expression within Republican textbooks.88 Socially and politically contextualizing the authors and political authorities that shaped the textbooks’ content further helps us to understand their choices. For Chinese intellectuals, the narrative of national becoming provided a historical model premised on progressive change through popular agency, which opened up a window for dynamic social and political action by Chinese intellectuals, students, and other social groups. Narratives centered on Europeanization also privileged knowledge about the Euro-American world, empowering intellectuals like Chen Hengzhe and Jin Zhaozi who, in different degrees, had the requisite cosmopolitan learning. In interpreting the world for a new generation of Chinese youths, leading scholars and newly professionalized editorial department staff in private publishing houses composed for themselves a powerful role as cultural arbitrators. Nationalist Party leaders and afliated intellectuals favored nation-centered narratives of world-historical change, for through those accounts they claimed to represent and lead the national body. These groups scripted the drama of world history in such a way as to ensure they would have a leading role.

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Zhongyang daxuequli Yangzhou zhongxue chuban weiyuanhui (1928), Yinianlai zhi Yangzhong (Yangzhou Middle during the Last Year). [Yangzhou]: Zhongyang daxuequli Yangzhou zhongxue. Zhu Lianbao (1987), “Guanyu Shijie Shuju de huiyi” (My Recollections of World Book Company), in Chuban shiliao 1987, no. 2 (Overall no. 8). Zhu Youhuan et al. (eds.) (1992), Zhongguo jindai xuezhi shiliao (Historical materials for the Chinese modern school system), part 3, 2 vols. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe. Zito, Angela (1997), Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrice as Text/Performance in EighteenthCentury China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

PART THREE

NATIONAL HISTORY AND ITS CHALLENGES

ARCHIVES AT THE MARGINS: LUO ZHENYU’S QING DOCUMENTS AND NATIONALISM IN REPUBLICAN CHINA Shana J. Brown

Archives are places where secrets are created. As Foucault argued in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), they establish the boundaries of discourse. With their positive and (especially) negative spaces, with their systems of organization and denition, they do not simply store knowledge; they produce that which is knowable. While Foucault spoke of the archive as a disembodied cultural formation, his insights apply equally to brick-and-mortar facilities, particularly those established by the state with the purpose of selectively saving or discarding political documents. Indeed, the archive and state power are seemingly inseparable. In Archive Fever, Derrida argued that “the theory of the archive is a theory of this institutionalization, that is to say of the law, of the right which authorizes it.”1 Archives can be powerful tools in dening the discursive limits of the nation. At the same time, they restrict access and thus limit knowledge; anything they do not contain or make available is in a real sense unknowable. Yet “archive power” was contested by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his Silencing the Past, which narrates a Haitian slave revolt despite the colonial failure to preserve relevant sources.2 Archives are not perfect, nor are they without their own borderlands, those elusive spaces where knowledge both enters and escapes political denition. Because of their public, governmental functions, archives can be contrasted to that which is often private and individually owned—the private collection. While archives are agents of collective authority, collections express intimacy and particularity. This is not to say that the collection is somehow sheltered from questions of power. Far from it; collecting is indissolubly tied to social and material capital. But fundamentally different from the archive, the collection does not usually claim a public trust. Indeed, the exclusive quality of collections, with

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Derrida 1996: 4. Trouillot 1995.

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their lack of accountability, can be troubling; many people prefer statesupported facilities, for all their potential abuse of archive power. Then how do we regard a vast private collection of historical materials? Under what conditions, if any, could that collection fulll a public trust? Such is the problem we face in the work of Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940), the eminent turn-of-the-century historian and antiquarian who built a large personal collection of Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) government documents. These were rst purchased by him privately but were, towards the end of his life, characterized by him as a quasistate archive, the Grand Secretariat Archives Organizing Bureau (Neige daku zhengli chu 内閣大庫整理處), in collaboration with the Japanesesponsored regime in Manchuria (1932–1945). With help from his son Luo Fuyi 羅福颐 (1905–1981) and the Japanese scholar Matsuzaki Tsûruo 松崎鹤雄 (1867–1949), Luo Zhenyu published a series of Grand Secretariat documents, characterizing them as “historical materials” or shiliao 史料, a neologism of the early 20th century. For Luo Zhenyu’s contemporaries, as we shall see, shiliao carried connotations of nationalist historiography. So how did he use the term? And how did the private collector par excellence wind up an archivist, anyway? In fact, having proted from his private ownership of the materials for decades, he created an archive only in the context of the puppet emperor Puyi’s reign in Manchukuo. In this sense Luo Zhenyu’s case supports the contention that archives are viable only as state-supported institutions. Yet long before his Manchukuo “archive” was established, and even before Chinese research institutions committed themselves to housing or cataloging the materials, Luo Zhenyu maintained his condence in their value as a form of private property. Nevertheless, he insisted that his Qing documents constituted a public trust. Skeptical as he was of the republic, a public trust was therefore not necessarily the exclusive purlieu of the state; this was indeed a minority perspective among the intellectuals of his generation, yet it is also a valuable and refreshing alternative, particularly to those of us for whom the “power of the state” is not an unqualied good. It is the argument of this essay that Luo Zhenyu’s tussles with contemporary intellectuals over the proper dividing line between private and public ownership of the past helped dene Qing Dynasty historical materials and shiliao more generally: documents dened by proximity to state power and often made public (or not) through the grace of state power, and yet materials whose ultimate ownership, in the sense of their usefulness to the private intellectual as well as to the realm

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of governmentality (to adopt a Foucaultian phrase), remains somewhere in-between. This articulation of a liminal space for historical research—poised somewhere between the private individual and the collective power of the state—happened in dialog between Luo Zhenyu and other leading Republican intellectuals, most notably Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), whose conception of a more nationally-oriented denition of shiliao was expressed in lengthy writings on historiography. Thus this essay seeks to trace the path whereby Luo Zhenyu’s private collection both undermined and promoted the goals of what would emerge as modern Chinese historical archives. His collecting practices demonstrated that shiliao or historical data need not only be dened in the context of a nationalist historical project, but at the same time, that the institutional safeguards of the state archive can rarely be matched by private individuals, irrespective of their resources or commitment.

Private Individuals Must Take Responsibility: Luo Zhenyu and the Qing Archives Luo Zhenyu was a classically-trained scholar and Qing loyalist, who spent the last decade of his life in Lüshun 旅順, also knows as Port Author. The Japanese-controlled city, located in the southernmost part of the Liaoning Peninsula near Dalian, became part of “Manchukuo” in 1932, when the new nation was established under the titular leadership of the “last emperor” Puyi. Indeed, Luo Zhenyu even held an ofcial post in Puyi’s government, as head of the Inspection Department ( Jianchayuan 監察院).3 But ofcial duties notwithstanding, he remained a scholar, art collector, art dealer, and publisher—his primary professional roles since the Republican revolution. As Sang Bing 桑兵 reminds us, during the rst decades of the 20th-century Luo Zhenyu was one of the most well-known scholars in China, famous primarily for his research on ancient artifacts like inscribed oracle bones, of which he possessed a great many in his personal collection. No less a personage than Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) proclaimed his work some of the most signicant and relevant of his generation.4 Yet although his protégé Wang Guowei

3 4

Wang Guoyu 1993: 452–453. Sang 1998: 131.

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王國维 (1870–1927) claimed that “scholarship is his entire life,” Luo Zhenyu was no disinterested ivory-tower intellectual; on the contrary, his private business enterprise was founded largely on intellectual endeavors.5 He sold as many rare objects and texts, often to foreign collectors, as he kept for himself. While living in Tianjin from 1919 to 1928 he even sold the books he published, at a discount, out of the ground oor of his home; when he arrived in Lüshun in 1928 he invested in an antiques shop.6 His involvement with the Grand Secretariat materials began two decades before, well before his career as a book and antiques dealer. Until 1911, Luo Zhenyu was known primarily as a reformist educator, and he worked for several years in the capital for the newly created Ministry of Education. It was while Luo Zhenyu was working in the capital that one of the soon-to-be great intellectual scandals of the period had its origins, specically the scandal over the fate of the Qing Grand Secretariat archival documents, which were ordered destroyed by the court in 1909, but were eventually “rescued” by Luo Zhenyu. What were these documents? Reecting the clearinghouse function of the late-Qing Grand Secretariat, its warehouses would have stored memorials, edicts, and ofcial reports (both one-of-a-kind and duplicates).7 By contemporary denition, these would all be invaluable as records of the dynasty, although at the time they were not necessarily considered particularly noteworthy. This is not because the production of history was undervalued by the court—far from it. The Qing had an ofcial archive (dang’an 檔案) which regularly produced publications such as the Veritable Records (shilu 實錄) of deceased monarchs. But the production of history—or more properly, annals (shi 史)—was conducted at specic intervals, generally at the end of a reign or the end of a dynasty. In between, various court ofces routinely burned old les in order to make space for new ones. These discards were not considered “historical materials” since it served no political purpose for the court to consider them as such. Thus it was that in 1909, the court issued an arguably routine order for the Grand Secretariat to consolidate warehouse space by burning “useless” government materials. But Luo Zhenyu grasped the value of

5 6 7

Wang Guowei 1918: 22a. Luo Jizu 1999: 113–114. Qin 1994: 28–45.

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the Grand Secretariat les immediately. (Admittedly, he was shown rare Song and Yuan Dynasty texts mixed in with the archives. It could have been the books, and not the primary sources, he was initially concerned for).8 With support from the head of the ministry, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), Luo Zhenyu protested the incineration and lobbied for an overturning of the order. But a revised edict, unhappily, merely directed the Grand Secretariat not to destroy any written materials. Whereupon the literal-minded managers of the storehouses ordered the burning of “textless” holdings—for example, maps created during the early years of the dynasty. Finally, after more objections from Luo Zhenyu, and with further support from Zhang Zhidong, some 8,000 hemp sacks worth of Grand Secretariat materials were deposited in their workplace, the Ministry of Education. Later the materials were brought to the Imperial College (Guozijian 國子監), located adjacent to the Confucian Temple and now part of the Capital Library.9 In 1911, soon after the anti-Qing revolution, Luo Zhenyu moved to Japan; he repatriated in 1919 and settled in the French Concession of Tianjin, supporting himself as an art dealer and publisher. In 1921 the Grand Secretariat documents, having sat in the Confucian Temple for over a decade, were brought to the new Historical Museum. Up to this point, there seems to have been no attempt to catalog or study their contents systematically. Lu Xun, who was then working in Beijing for the Republican Ministry of Education, himself witnessed the pile of hemp sacks, which were occasionally sifted through by ministers or returned foreign students in search of rare editions; some of the more “useful” material was given to Beijing University, which already possessed a number of Qing Dynasty documents.10 Almost as soon as it was given the materials, however, the Historical Museum decided to raise cash by selling much of the collection as “paper with ruined text” to the Tongmaozeng 同懋增 pulp dealership for 4,000 yuan or dollars. The dealer must have recognized the value of the Grand Secretariat materials and resold them to some Peking book sellers. Visiting the capital in the winter of 1922, Luo Zhenyu found some of the documents in a book stall, and having seen similar materials a decade earlier, he understood immediately what they were. Tracing

8 9 10

Luo Zhenyu 1931: 34. See Wang Guowei 1924, 2000. Lu 1928: 562–563.

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the papers back to the paper dealer, he purchased the lot for 13,000 yuan.11 In an excited letter to Wang Guowei that March, he wrote of the “unimaginable” event of his discovery and his plans to catalog the materials within the next two years.12 A month or so later Luo Zhenyu was not as optimistic about the timeframe for publication—the materials would require ten years to catalog, he now judged. And after all, only one in a hundred items might prove signicant, Wang Guowei cautioned him that May. But the contents of the hemp sacks proved as valuable as Luo Zhenyu had hoped. Sifting through just the rst few bags, he discovered rare Yuan and Ming Dynasty texts in addition to signicant Qing historical materials. Later he commented on the presence of important non-Chinese language documents, including materials written in Manchu and Mongolian. By the end of April 1922, he was writing condently that this discovery was one of the four most important historical nds of recent years, as signicant as the discovery of the oracle bone inscriptions or the texts in the Dunhuang Caves.13 The expense of buying and housing the thousands of sacks—Luo Zhenyu had to borrow money to do so—was considerable.14 But Wang Guowei consoled him with the comment that “other than you, who could be responsible for this matter? If good people do a little organizing [of the materials] but not put in a cent, unfortunately that is not sufcient courage.” In other words, only Luo Zhenyu, not the Historical Museum, had been decisive enough to invest in preserving the materials. When public institutions are inadequate, then “private individuals” (sijia 私家) must take responsibility.15 Wang Guowei later noted the failures of institutions like the Metropolitan University Library and “so-called” Historical Museum in preserving the materials; it was only Luo Zhenyu’s intervention which saved them, not once, but twice.16 In the wake of Luo Zhenyu’s purchase, state-afliated intellectuals indulged in a round of nger-pointing, criticizing each other and the Historical Museum for not safeguarding the collection. According to the historian Deng Zhicheng 鄧之誠 (1887–1960), the only “organizing”

11 12 13 14 15 16

Wang Wang Wang Wang Wang Wang

Guowei 1924: 2a–2b; Jinliang 1923: 86. Qingxiang et al. 2000: 526. Qingxiang et al. 2000: 530. Qingxiang et al. 2000: 527. Qingxiang et al. 2000: 532. Guowei 1924: 1b–2a.

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done by the museum was to dump materials into more hemp sacks.17 Lu Xun, who was working for the Ministry of Education at the time of the sale, blamed the historians Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 (1865–1924) and Professor Hu Yujin 胡玉缙 (1859–1940), who should have safeguarded the materials better in the ‘teens and ‘twenties and not “confused texts with antiques.”18 Even the establishment scholar Cai Yuanpei criticized scholars in the ‘teens who ignored the research value of the archives, in particular the loyalist scholars then working on the Qingshi gao 清史稿 (Draft History of the Qing).19 Not surprisingly, Luo Zhenyu and his associates were sensitive to criticism that they proted by the state’s loss. Wang Guowei commented that in any case, much of the Grand Secretariat materials had disappeared long before Luo Zhenyu’s purchase, including rare books previously cataloged by his friend the bibliographer Miao Quansun 缪荃蓀 (1844–1910) and lost, either to re or theft, when the Metropolitan University Library was destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion.20 Coming to Luo Zhenyu’s defense was also his friend the bannerman Jinliang 金梁 (1878–1962), who in a 1923 article in Eastern Miscellany made it clear that not only was Luo Zhenyu to be praised for having rescued the materials from re and pulping, but that furthermore, he was not the only Chinese collector who proted by the Historical Museum’s lack of foresight.21 As late as the 1930s, scholars were still purchasing Grand Secretariat materials from paper merchants, as Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) did on behalf of his Yu Gong Study Society.22 Given the widely-recognized inadequacy of state repositories, it is all the more striking that Luo Zhenyu was still ambivalent about his purchase. His correspondence coveys doubts about privately owning such a large amount of historically valuable materials. In a letter to Wang Guowei a few months after purchasing the hemp sacks, he wrote, “The history of the Qing Dynasty will be a big question in the future, and private historians are in no position to set about writing it.” Yet in the same breath, he congratulated himself for his foresight and responsibility to future generations, commenting, “Regarding these

17 18 19 20 21 22

Zhou Xueheng 1994: 415. Lu 1928: 561, 567. Cai 1930: 1: 6–7. Wang Guowei 2000: 40–41. Jinliang 1923: 86. Gu 1936: 73.

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materials, what if I had not saved them from being burned? If I do not circulate them, then after I am alive, who will be accountable?”23 In several instances, he indicates that his ownership of the materials fullled a kind of public responsibility. Publication became the mechanism allowing Luo Zhenyu to own his collection privately while still making portions of it publicly accessible. He rst planned a monthly bulletin (never printed), and then in 1924 published Shiliao congkan chubian 史料叢刊初编 (Historical Materials Series, First Volume). The 10-volume thread-bound set contained various materials related to the rst Qing rulers and issues of local governance, among other materials. Wang Guowei’s introduction contextualizes the documents within Luo Zhenyu’s collection, which also included literally thousands of oracle bone inscriptions and other valuable artifacts; just as the scholar had published those materials, he was now about to make the Grand Secretariat documents publicly available as well.24 In the eyes of Wang Guowei and Luo Zhenyu, private individuals were taking their public responsibilities seriously by publishing; this was also protable, of course.

The Invention of “Historical Materials” Collectors regularly add to their collections; but they do not always invoke new terminology to describe their latest nds. Beginning in the late ‘teens, Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei began to use the term “materials” (cailiao 材料) to refer to archaeological artifacts, and eventually used “historical materials” (shiliao 史料) to describe the Grand Secretariat texts and other documents.25 Shiliao is an abbreviation of lishi cailiao 歷史材料, or “historical source materials.” Separately, both compounds are identied by Lydia Liu as “return graphic loanwords,” classical Chinese phrases given new meaning by late-Tokugawa and Meiji intellectuals looking to translate Western concepts.26 Yet the terms are not transparent; cailiao carries connotations of other kinds of raw materiel, like food or hardware. Its adoption underscores the emergence

23 24 25 26

Wang Qingxiang et al. 2000: 534. Luo Zhenyu 1924; Wang Guowei 1924. Wang Qingxiang et al. 2000: 272. Liu 1995: 319, 324.

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of history as an empirically-based, social science-oriented discipline in the rst decades of the century. As the etymology of the terms suggestions, the use of shiliao is most likely due to the inuence of German and (especially) Japanese historiography. Along with contemporaries like Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei and Luo Zhenyu visited Japan, lived there extensively, and were actively concerned to translate and publish Japanese historiography in China. Meiji intellectuals argued that historians should range into the natural and social sciences, philosophy, and other unorthodox elds in their search for materials.27 Their concept of shiryÔ (shiliao) developed out of this methodological emphasis on primary source materials in the study of history. For Liang Qichao, at least, Japanese historiography offered a blueprint for how scholarship could become a constructive tool of a national project. In his six-part essay “Xin shixue” 新史學 (New Historiography, 1902), he focused on the value of national histories in the modernizing West and Japan. Liang Qichao was critical of Chinese historiography for its adherence to textual criticism and the dictates of ofcial dynastic histories. His essay exhorted readers to develop a national history—“the mirror reecting the nation” and the “source of patriotism.” Historians, as national activists, should actively seek to “detect the phenomena, understand causality, and, by looking into the past examples, foretell the trends of the future.” Their research, in other words, must become a handmaiden to a national project, in order for it to have any kind of contemporary relevance.28 Liang Qichao’s concern for national strength never wavered, but over the next two decades his discussion of historical methodology became increasingly complex, in particular as he began to teach history to university students. By the early 1920s, he was condently expounding on the signicance of primary source materials in his university lectures. Historical studies had actually made progress in two ways since the turn of the century, Liang Qichao wrote: in the use of history to perceive the “life-form of humanity” (renlei huotai 人類活態), rather than focusing on individuals, and in its “objective organization of data” (ziliao 資料). In essays on shiliao and its discovery, Liang Qichao argued that the primary aw of historiography was the inability of historians

27 28

Tanaka 1993: 62–3. Tang 1996: 62–63.

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to locate appropriate materials. When it came to the preservation of Qing court materials, he complained specically that the Qing custom of burning “useless” ofcial documents deprived historians and ofcials of important information on international relations. His denition of shiliao includes the Veritable Records of the Qing, the activities of Shanghai commercial associations, archaeological discoveries like coins and weapons, and paintings.29 Liang Qichao draws a very wide net in his denition of history and historical materials, since the nation itself has grown to encompass virtually all aspects of public life. He does not seek the private realm of the collection; instead, he explicitly rallies to the creation of the anti-collection, i.e. the archive, whose contents can and should contain almost any kind of textual material. Indeed, ever since Liang Qichao learned of public libraries in the West in the 1890s he had lobbied for the creation of the Metropolitan University Library.30 (He was not the only one concerned with historical preservation; writers like Lu Xun’s brother Zhou Zuoren 周作人 [1885–1967] also expressed alarm that ancient art and architecture were not better preserved).31 In the 1920s, Liang Qichao remained frustrated that there were not more, and bigger Chinese libraries and archives. The customary reliance on private libraries (i.e. Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei) was inadequate, as the heyday of private gentry collections was rapidly ending. When it comes to private libraries, if sons and grandsons cannot preserve family property, or treat it carelessly, they will be lost, reduced to ashes instead of preserved to be read. [The great private libraries] Tianyige, Fengyunlou, Baisongchan . . . where are they today? In modern times our transportation system is developing, our country is emerging in the world, all kinds of culture is produced, but even though we ask our provinces and cities, still they do not establish one library, one museum, one art gallery. Without question, it is a disgrace and a humiliation for our people, and even more, when scholars want textual materials, what can they rely upon? For example, when I selected different types of historical materials for this essay, if I had to rely on one private person’s ability, how could that have been managed? I am constantly saying this, but it is like a pauper speaking of gold.32

29 30 31 32

Liang 2000: 38–48. Jing Liao 2004: 167–170. Zhou Zuoren 1913: 145–146. Liang 2000: 60.

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Not simply pointing to the usefulness of libraries, Liang Qichao was arguing specically that they could remedy the inadequacies of personal collections, namely their vulnerability to destruction or sale. Writing with China’s rich history of personal libraries in mind, Liang Qichao argued that no private collection could adequately serve the kind of public research purposes he had in mind. Not surprisingly, he himself negotiated the donation of his personal materials to the National Library, established in 1925, thus setting a personal example for how scholars could support the creation of archives through their own contributions.33 This was the kind of modern institution Liang Qichao admired. Was this viewpoint so dissimilar to that of Luo Zhenyu? In fact, as an ofcial at the Qing Ministry of Education two decades earlier, Luo Zhenyu also encouraged the establishment of modern libraries, museums, and research institutes in each province.34 Yet as the handling of the Grand Secretariat had shown, they had often proven themselves incapable of actually preserving the materials they were established to safeguard. Furthermore, as a professional art dealer and publisher, he had a nancial interest in actually owning his own artifacts. As many literati had learned to do after 1911, Luo Zhenyu found nancial success in writing and publishing, taking advantage of the new boom in commercial publication projects throughout urban China. This conict of values, between libraries and private collections, between shiliao and antiques, was resolved quite pragmatically. Living in Tianjin in the 1920s, he was in frequent contact with leading historians, archaeologists, and collectors of his generation, including Liang Qichao (then teaching at Nankai University); the famously pro-science Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 (V.K. Ting, 1887–1936); and the Tianjin businessman, former Qing ofcial, and bibliophile Li Shengduo 李盛鐸 (1859–1934).35 In this community, talk of shiliao would have taken place along with other kinds of activities, including publication projects and—for Luo Zhenyu, in any case—the discreet sale of antiquities. Thus his resolution of this ethical conict—both publicizing and proting from historical documents—was not cynicism; it was embodied in routine economic and scholarly practices.

33 34 35

Tang 2004: 175. Luo Zhenyu 1999: 31. Zhang 2004: 74–76.

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Yet although Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei were committed to the empirical value of shiliao, they were unwilling to conform to nationalist values implicit in the term’s use. Not surprisingly, their compromise dissatised many contemporaries, who were broadly critical of Luo Zhenyu’s projects and their commercialism. In a 1922 essay, Lu Xun observed that the “so-called national studies” movement was characterized by the republication of thread-bound books with an “old look and old fragrance” by loyalists, valuable not as scholarly materials but only as antiques. The antiquarian avor was strengthened by Luo Zhenyu’s persistence in using Qing reign years rather than Republican dating conventions.36 Lu Xun even called Luo Zhenyu’s publications “advertisements,” while his brother Zhou Zuoren noted that the “peddler’s avor” of the books made reading them like perusing an auction house catalog.37 When it came to his Grand Secretariat publications, Luo Zhenyu’s stylistic anachronisms negated the scientic aspects of the materials as shiliao, despite his explicit use of the term. Nationalist intellectuals tended to dene as shiliao precisely those materials which were integrated into nationalist historiography. Absent this integration, a document’s identity as shiliao was lessened; it became simply antiquarian.38

State Archives and the Road to Manchuria In the late 1920s and 1930s, these concerns over commercialism became subordinate to concerns over the sale of materials to Chinese or (especially) Japanese bibliophiles. Indeed, Luo Zhenyu did sell part of the materials to Li Shengduo, who later sold them to the Academia Sinica.39 But sales to Japanese collectors were far more worrying; it placed the materials out of Chinese hands. Jiang Yiqian 蔣彝潜, writing in Beixin 北新 (a journal co-founded by Lu Xun), urged his readers to protest this act of “cultural aggression.”40 In his typical contrarian style, Lu Xun appeared to demur, commenting that “this thing, the so-called ‘Grand Secretariat Archives,’ was stored inside the Grand Secretariat

36 37 38 39 40

Lu 1922: 388. Lu 1928: 561; Zhou Zuoren 1924: 625. Jiang 1927: 68–69. Peake 1932: 61–70; Wang Guowei 1925: 1923. Jiang 1927: 70.

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during the Qing Dynasty for over three hundred years, then inside the Confucian Temple for over ten years, and no-one made a sound. Only after the Historical Museum took this trash and sold it to a paper dealer, and the paper dealer sold it to Luo Zhenyu, and Luo Zhenyu sold it to some Japanese, was there an outcry, as if the national treasure was already lost, and along with it the blood of the nation.”41 Yet his mocking tone notwithstanding, it is clear that Lu Xun, as well, mourned the loss of the materials and felt keenly the inadequacy of the state and its institutions in keeping them out of Japanese hands. The suspected Japanese purchaser was none other than Matsuzaki Tsûruo (courtesy name Jûta 柔甫), who Luo Zhenyu would later identify as a colleague in Manchukuo. Matsuzaki, a friend of Naito Konan, was the author of works on Chinese antiquities and a scholarly study on the Book of Odes. Although at least one Mainland writer has identied him as a spy, he would not have been the only intellectual with close ties to the Japanese government—a description that applies equally to Luo Zhenyu.42 Matsuzaki was acquainted with many leading late-Qing and Republican intellectuals and studied in Changsha with Ye Dehui 葉德輝 (1864–1927), who was later executed by Communist-led militia. He moved to Dalian in 1920, well before the ofcial establishment of Manchukuo, to work at the Dalian Library. In 1931, after the Manchurian Incident, he appears to have moved to Peking to work for the North China Transportation Company.43 Although Jiang Yiqian called him a buyer of the Grand Secretariat materials, this seems unlikely in some respects. It seems unlikely that a journeyman scholar could have purchased the Grand Secretariat materials, but he might have aided Luo Zhenyu in nding other Japanese clients.44 Indeed, during the mid- and late-1920s, the question of where Qing materials should be placed was often under dispute, even among state institutions. Until 1924, when Puyi was evicted from the Forbidden City, most Qing materials languished inside the palace. When the National Palace Museum was created in 1925, it took charge of the remaining court archives.45 In 1928 some of the Grand Secretariat materials were brought back into the state fold by the newly-established

41 42 43 44 45

Lu 1928: 561. Wang Ruo et al. 1989: 42. Sugimura 1980: 290–291. Wang Ruo et al. 1989: 42. Zhou Xueheng 1994: 411.

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Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, which spent $18,000 purchasing the materials from Li Shengduo.46 The “chief work engaged in” by the Department of History became the “compilation of the numerous documents, political, military, and ceremonial, from the Imperial Archives,” which were valuable in ways that the records of “private individuals” could not be.47 By 1930, the Academia Sinica had begun publishing selections of Qing government materials, and by 1936 had published three volumes of its series, along with other materials related to the collection. Not entirely by coincidence, the Institute also attempted to duplicate Luo Zhenyu’s private collections in other areas, particularly oracle bone inscriptions, by launching massive archaeological excavations. Under Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950), the Institute of History and Philology made it clear that its research was intended to be modern, scientic, and Western—and the treatment of shiliao played a key role in establishing these credentials. In the Academia Sinica’s inaugural journal, Fu Sinian wrote that “modern historical studies are simply the studies of historical materials (shiliao).” Research could not be conducted “independently,” Fu Sinian emphasized, stressing that the Institute’s work would be done cooperatively and openly.48 In a lecture at Peking University, Fu Sinian underscored the importance of “organizing historical materials” even more, saying that The object of historical studies is shiliao, not discourse (wenci 文詞), not theory, not theology, and not sociology. The work of historical studies is to organize shiliao, not the construction of art, not to undertake to circulate [ideas], not to support or overturn this movement or that ‘ism.’ If people ask our method of organizing historical materials, we respond: rst, we compare different shiliao; two, we compare different shiliao; three, we again compare different shiliao.49

The idea was that historical truth emerges through comparison of different historical data; this constituted the scientic nature of Fu Sinian’s methodology. Along with his friend Gu Jiegang, this group of scholars self-consciously laid claim a Western tradition that was skeptical and empirically-based. Underlining their adherence to these values, one of

46 47 48 49

Zhongyang yanjiu yuan 1931: 92. Zhongyang yanjiu yuan 1929: 41; Cai 1930: 7. Fu 1928: 3, 10. Fu 2001: 145.

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their wartime publications (a two-part journal published in the Institute’s refuge in the caves of Nanxi, Sichuan Province) is entitled Shiliao yu shixue 史料與史學 (Historical Materials and Historical Studies). On the grass-ecked paper so heart-breakingly characteristic of wartime publications, the ink laid down so meagerly as to be virtually unreadable, Fu Sinian’s credo still rings out: “without shiliao, who would dare to make conjectures, comparisons or formulas?”50 While Fu Sinian was maintaining faith in historical science, Luo Zhenyu moved to Manchuria and set up shop—literally—in Port Arthur. His motivations in creating the Archives Management Bureau were probably a mixture of practical nancial need and political positioning. The Academia Sinica historian Xu Zhongshu 徐中舒 (1898–1991) gave Luo Zhenyu credit for having rescued the Grand Secretariat materials twice, but shrewdly noted that “the organization, dissemination and preservation, etc. of an archive this massive is simply not something a private person’s efforts are capable of.” Xu Zhongshu drew attention to the fact that even with the help of several assistants, in the near decade since Luo Zhenyu rst purchased Grand Secretariat materials, he had managed to publish only one set of ten slim volumes—paltry by the standards of his copious publications in other elds.51 Luo Zhenyu himself admitted that “the materials cannot be organized without suffering” when he sold half his collection to Li Shengduo, complaining of the burden imposed by archive-related expenses like freight, interest payments (possibly on the original loan to buy the collection), and a monthly storage fee.52 In contrast to his private efforts, the Archives Organizing Bureau made government funds available and allowed him to use publication to advance his loyalist political agenda. Luo Zhenyu was active in the politicking to persuade Puyi to leave Tianjin and move north, in preparation for his re-coronation. Although his inuence was waning (he was quite elderly and in bad health), by declaring his collection to be a kind of state archives he showed support for Puyi’s monarchical ambitions. In 1930 he praised the pre-1911 Qing court for its sponsorship of intellectual life, a patronage he credited for a range of intellectual accomplishments under the dynasty.53 Three

50 51 52 53

Fu 1943: 2. Xu 1930: 11–12. Zhang 2004: 75. Luo Zhenyu 1930: 1–10.

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years later, printing began on thread-bound, block-printed volumes of Grand Secretariat documents. Using Kangde 康德 reign years, the volumes expressed optimism in a new era of state patronage. Several family members, including his son and grandson, contributed to the three-year project, which was housed in two rooms in a building near the Lüshun Museum.54 The volumes were published under the imprint of the Manchuria-Japan Cultural Association (Man-Ri wenhua xiehui 满日文化協會), which was founded with the support of Naito Konan. As with the 1924 collection, the volumes referenced the concept of shiliao; they did so now, of course, with implicit statist valence.55 Simply the fact of publication gave a kind of reality to the idea that the Manchukuo state was functioning as a patron of Qing historiography. In fact, Luo Zhenyu’s Grand Secretariat documents were not the only Qing materials published by the Manchuria-Japan Cultural Association. In 1936, facsimile editions of the Veritable Records of thirteen Qing emperors were published, drawing upon materials found in Shenyang (a Qing capital) as well as materials brought north with Puyi’s entourage.56 An ofcial government representative, Sugimura Yûzô 杉村勇 造 (1900–1968), and the editor Ono Genmyô 小野玄妙 (1883–1939) worked closely with Luo Zhenyu and other members of Puyi’s court in these projects, which were highly political in their handling of materials pertaining to China-Japan relations. For example, they cleansed instances of the derogatory term “dwarf ” (wo 倭), commonly used in the Late Imperial period to describe Japan. Lengthier changes were also made in sections describing the 1894–95 war with Japan, softening descriptions of Japanese aggression. It has been suggested that these alterations were the guiding purpose in publishing the materials, which were under preparation when the status of Manchukuo as an independent nation was being debated before the League of Nations.57 At least in some respects, Manchukuo was styled as the legitimate successor to the Qing, and hence it was necessary for the former dynasty’s documents to reect the political realities of the new, Japan-sponsored state. Luo Zhenyu’s support for Manchukuo cultural activities was not limited to the Grand Secretariat project. He also published catalogs of

54 55 56 57

Wang Ruo et al. 1989: 43. Luo Fuyi 1934; Luo Jizu 1934, 1935; Luo Zhenyu 1933. Chen 1957: 41. Sun 1984: 110–112.

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stone inscriptions and other artifacts found in Manchuria, giving support to the new nation with his every use of the region as a geographical reality.58 And he was involved in a series of painting and calligraphy exhibits in the newly-named capital of Xinjing.59 In return, the elderly scholar’s “cultural capital” was recognized by Manchukuo intellectuals: his memoirs were published in the Southern Manchurian Railway Library journal Shokô 書香, introduced by librarian Shimada Yoshi 岛 田好, and after he died in 1940, his biography was written by the historian Chen Bangzhi 陳邦直, who later contributed to a posthumous collection of essays praising the collaborationist president Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883–1944). Fully absorbed into the Manchukuo cultural elite, Luo Zhenyu had nally found his political home. His previously private collection had been placed at the service of his new government; any regret he had once expressed about private ownership of state documents was negated by creating a new state archive, limited though it was in scope. Tellingly, the fate of Luo Zhenyu’s Grand Secretariat documents is not clear. After 1949, Luo Jizu donated most of the family’s collections to the Liaoning Provincial Library and the Dalian Library, but none of the Grand Secretariat materials seem to have been included.60 Just as Liang Qichao had warned, without public institutional safeguards, the passing of an elderly scholar meant the dissolution of his personal library. Meanwhile, the collections owned by Republican institutions were also divided after the Civil War, with the majority of the Qing archives materials remaining on the mainland, and about ve percent taken with the Nationalists to the new Palace Museum in Taibei. Today Qing archival materials are also available at the Peking University library and at scattered provincial archives throughout China.61 The resolution of the story of Luo Zhenyu and the archives may seem to represent the triumph of state power. Indeed, whether in the context of Japan-sponsored Manchukuo, or later the People’s Republic and Taiwan, Qing historical materials were ultimately integrated into a statist framework that, in part, basked in the political legitimacy offered by ownership of materials relating to the last Chinese dynasty.

58 59 60 61

Luo Fuyi 1927. Hou et al. 1993: 133–136. Wang Ruo et al. 1989: 2. Ye Wa et al. 1996.

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Yet Luo Zhenyu’s contributions to this saga demonstrate how critically important, and powerful, was the interlude of private ownership. Working outside government or academic institutions for most of his career, he nevertheless invoked values of public responsibility and empirically-based studies—values supposedly monopolized by state institutions and their intellectuals—and in so doing helped make these Qing documents worthwhile. It took several decades for the state, in its various incarnations, to catch up to the values dened by Luo Zhenyu as early as 1909. “What the nation and popular efforts could not do, was accomplished by an exile,” Wang Guowei wrote of Luo Zhenyu in the late ‘teens—virtually a life-long exile, indeed, from certain communities in the mainstream Republican intellectual world.62 Indeed, we might not have Qing archives had Luo Zhenyu not demonstrated precisely what shiliao could be worth, in both a scholarly and nancial sense. Furthermore, whatever his politics—and for many Chinese of his generation, they were execrable—Luo Zhenyu’s work as a collector and his non-nationalist use of the term shiliao offer an alternative to the almost overwhelming statist rhetoric which characterized contemporaries like Fu Sinian, forcing us not to take for granted the nationalist tone of much Republican-era historical scholarship. Yet the larger question of nationalism in Chinese historical writing is still a contentious one. Recent histories of Manchukuo have focused on state-building efforts, transnational modernity, and multiethnic political compromises to provide a counter-narrative to litanies of Japanese crimes on the continent.63 This scholarship is in keeping with “post-nationalist” trends in the broader historical eld, which collectively express unease with the often bloody consequences of ethnic nationalism. But in China a half-century of imperialism and invasion make it difcult to discredit nationalism’s positive effects, reecting a “desire for freedom, territorial integrity, international justice, and national autonomy,” as Ban Wang notes.64 As historians commenting on China’s turbulent 20th-century, we must be particularly cautious in how we judge Republican Period intellectuals and their pro- or nonnationalist choices. We may dislike nationalism when it gives rise to violence or provides an ideological cover for authoritarianism. But as

62 63 64

Wang Guowei 1923: 22a. Mitter 2000; Duara 2003. Ban Wang 2004: 19–20.

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Luo Zhenyu’s patronage by the Manchukuo state reveals, it is not clear, then or now, if a non-nationalist alternative to the archive is viable; after all, even with state patronage, his collection was largely lost after his death. Sooner or later, private collections are exceptionally vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters. Is it possible to have our archives, and yet critique them, too?

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Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (2000), Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa 中國歷史研究法 (Methods of Chinese Historical Research). Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe. Liu, Lydia H. (1995), Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lu Xun 魯迅 (1922), “Suowei guoxue 所謂國學 (So-called National Studies),” in Lu Xun 魯迅 (1981), Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 (Complete Works of Lu Xun), vol. 1. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 388–389. —— (1928), “Tan suowei neige dang’an 談所謂‘内閣檔案’ (On the so-called Grand Secretariat Archives),” in Lu Xun 魯迅 (1981), Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 (Complete Works of Lu Xun) volume 3. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 561–569. Originally published in Yusi 語絲 4: 7 ( Jan. 28, 1928). Luo Fuyi 羅福颐 (1927), Manzhou jinshi zhi 满洲金石志 (Gazette of Manchurian Epigraphy). Dalian: Man-Ri wenhua xiehui. —— (1934), Guochao shiliao lingshi 國朝史料零拾 (Supplementary Qing Historical Materials). Lushun: Kuji zhengli chu. Luo Jizu 羅繼祖 (1934), Daku shiliao mulu jiabian 大庫史料目錄甲编 (Catalog of the Grand Secretariat Archives, First Volume). Lushun: Kuji zhengli chu. —— (1935), Shiliao congbian er ji 史料叢编二集 (Historical Materials Series, Second Collection). Lushun: Kuji zhengli chu. —— (1999), Fu ji liu hen 蜉寄留痕 (Scars Left by Flying Ants). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Luo Kun 羅昆 and Zhang Yongshan 張永山 (1996), Luo Zhenyu pingzhuan 羅振玉評傳 (Critical Biography of Luo Zhenyu). Nanchang: Baihua zhouwenyi chubanshe. Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1924), Shiliao congkan chubian 史料叢刊初编 (Historical Materials Series, First Volume). Tianjin: Dongfang xuehui. —— (1930), Benchao xueshu gailue 本朝學術概略 (Introduction to Qing Dynasty Scholarship). Dalian: Zhong-Ri wenhua xiehui. —— (1931), Jiliaobian 集蓼编 (Amidst Bitter Experiences), in Huang Aimei 黄愛梅 (ed.) (1999), Xuetang zixu 雪堂自序 (Xuetang’s Self Introductions). Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1–60. —— (1933), Taizu gao huangdi shilu gaoben san zhong 太祖高皇帝實錄稿本三種 (Draft Veritable Records of Emperor Taizu, Three Kinds). Dalian: Shiliao zhengli chu. Mitter, Rana (2000), The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peake, Cyrus H. (1932), “Documents Available for Research on the Modern History of China,” in The American Historical Review 38 (Oct., 1932) 1, 61–70. Qin Guojing 秦國經 (1994), Zhonghua mingqing zhendang zhinan 中華明清珍檔指南 (Guide to Rare Ming-Qing Archives). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Sang Bing 桑兵 (1998), “Chen Yinke yu Qinghua yanjiuyuan 陳寅恪與清華研究院 (Chen Yinke and Qinghua Research Institute),” in Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 (1998) 4, 129–143. —— (2004), “Japan and Liang Qichao’s Research in the Field of National Learning,” in Joshua A. Fogel (ed.) (2004), The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, China Research Monograph 57, 177–202. Sugimura Eiji 杉村英治 (1980), “Jû chichi-ô tenbyô 柔父翁点描 (Sketch of the Venerable Jûta),”in Matsuzaki Tsûruo 松崎鹤雄 (1980), Gogetsu sofû: Chûgoku no kaisô 呉 月楚風:中国の回 (The Graceful Wind of Months in Wu: Recollections of China). Tokyo: Shuppan Kagaku Sôgô Kenkyûjo, 290–300. Sun Yuexian 孫月嫻 (1984), “Riben dui ‘Qing shilu’de cuangai he yingyin日本對清 實錄的篡改和影印 (The Japanese Distortion and Publication of the Qing Veritable Records),” in Shehui kexue jikan 社會科學輯刊 (Liaoning) 3 (1984), 110–112. Tanaka, Stefan (1993), Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Tang, Jinhong (2004), Educational Reform and the Emergence of Modern Libraries in China with Special Reference to the Metropolitan Library of Beijing, 1909–1937. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Western Sydney. Tang, Xiaobing (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995), Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Wang, Ban (2004), Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wang Guowei 王國維 (1902), “Ouluoba tongshi xu 歐羅巴通史序,” in Wang Guowei 王國維 (1968), Wang Guantang xiansheng quanji 王觀堂先生全集 (Complete Works of Mr. Wang Guantang), volume 5. Taibei: Wenhua chuban gongsi, 1913–1915. —— (1918), “Xuetang jiaokan qunshu xulu xu 雪堂校刊群書叙錄序 (Preface to Chronicle of Xuetang’s Various Publications),” in Wang Guowei (1923), Guantang jilin (Guantang’s Collected Works). Wucheng jiangshi miyun lou, 6:19:21a–22b. —— (1924), “Kushulou ji 庫書樓記 (Notes on the Archives Pavilion),” in Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1924), Shiliao congkan chubian 史料叢刊初编 (Historical Materials Series, First Volume). Tianjin: Dongfang xuehui, 1: 1a–3a. —— (1925), “Zui jin er sanshi nian zhong Zhongguo xin faxian zhi xuewen 最近二三 十年中中國新發現之學問 (Research based on new Chinese discoveries of the past twenty or thirty years),” in Wang Guowei 王國維 (1968), Wang Guantang xiansheng quanji 王觀堂先生全集 (Complete works of Mr. Wang Guantang), vol. 5. Taibei: Wenhua chuban gongsi, 1915–1924. —— (2000), “Neige daku zhi faxian 内閣大庫之發現 (The Discovery of the Grand Secretariat archives),” in Wang Guowei xueshu suibi 王國維學術隨筆 (Wang Guowei’s Scholarly Essays). Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 40–41. Wang Guoyu 王過玉 (1993), “Wei jianchayuan zhang Luo Zhenyu 偽檢察院長羅振 玉 (Luo Zhenyu, Director of the puppet Inspection Bureau),” in Sun Bang 孫邦, Yu Haiying 于海鷹, Li Shaobo 李少伯, and Huo Liaoyuan 霍燎原 (eds.) (1993), Wei Man ren wu 偽满人物 (Historical Figures from Puppet Manchuria). Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 445–453. Wang Qingxiang 王慶祥 and Xiao Wenli 簫文立 (eds.) (2000), Luo Zhenyu Wang Guowei wanglai shuxin 羅振玉王國維往來書信 (The Correspondence of Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei). Changchun: Dongfang chubanshe. Wang Ruo 王若 and Wang Shengli 王勝利 (1989), “Songqi yu Lushun kuji zhengli chu 松崎與旅順庫籍整理處,” Tushuguan xuekan 圖書館學刊 (Shenyang) 42 (1989) 11. 1, 41–43, 2. Xu Zhongshu 徐中舒 (1930), “Neige dang’an zhi youlai ji qi zhengli 内閣檔案之由 來及其整理 (The Origins and Organization of the Grand Secretariat Archives),” in Zhonghua shuju bianji bu 中華書局編輯部 (eds.) (1953 [1985]), Ming-Qing shiliao, wu bian 明清史料戊编 (Ming-Qing Historical Materials, Fifth Edition), volume 1. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 9–36. Ye Wa and Joseph W. Esherick (1996), Chinese Archives: An Introductory Guide. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, China Research Monograph 45. Zhang Xiaowei 張曉唯 (2004), “Luo Zhenyu yu Jin zaji 羅振玉寓津雜記 (Miscellaneous Notes on Luo Zhenyu’s Residence in Tianjin),” in Lishi jiaoxue 歷史教學 9 (2004) 490, 74–76. Zhongyang yanjiu yuan 中央研究院 (1929). Academia Sinica with its Research Institutes. Shanghai: The Science Press. Zhongyang yanjiu yuan 中央研究院 (1931). The Academia Sinica and its National Research Institutes. Nanjing: The Academia Sinica. Zhou Xueheng 周雪恒 (1994), Zhongguo dang’an shiye shi 中國檔案事業史 (History of Chinese Archives). Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe.

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HOW TO REMEMBER THE QING DYNASTY: THE CASE OF MENG SEN Madeleine Yue Dong

The historiographical fate of the Qing dynasty remained unclear long after its political doom in 1911. Instead of taking an easy and quick departure, the Qing lived on in a thick jungle of private and unofcial narratives on its rise and fall, on important events during its rule, on its court life, and on its famous male and female gures. These narratives, often called private and unofcial histories, primarily based on rumors, occasional notes, memoirs, and miscellaneous records, began to emerge in the late 19th century when the government’s control on books loosened, and reached their peak at the end of the dynasty and during the rst decades of the Republic.1 The anti-Manchu 1911 Revolution, in particular, made them effective tools for political mobilization. Besides these narratives, one could argue, there was no Qing history before 1911. During the Qing, private individuals were not allowed to write dynastic history. Only state institutions, for example the State History Commission (Guoshi guan 國史舘), could compile collections of archives for emperors, princes, and ministers, which were records of their actions, rather than historical studies. As the ofcial history of a dynasty could only be written by the new one replacing it, the ofcial Qing history awaited to be completed by the Republic, if China’s historical convention was to be followed in the 20th century. In 1914, the Republic under Yuan Shikai’s presidency in fact decided to compile such an ofcial dynastic history for the Qing. But the draft of this history, hurriedly printed while the Nationalist Army of Northern Expedition was marching north victoriously, was banned by the new Nanjing government in 1929. Qing history written by individual authors began to appear after 1911 and continued the style of radical revolutionary history that condemned the Manchus and the Qing. The situation began to change

1 For a discussion of the categories of private and unofcial histories, see “Part One. The Imperial Image and Its Sources” in Kahn 1971: 7–75.

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with Meng Sen 孟森, whose work is considered the highest achievement of the rst generation of Qing historians. It is commonly agreed among Chinese historians that Meng Sen was the one who established the eld of “jindai” 近代 (early modern) studies of Qing history.2 What is seen as distinguishing him from his contemporaries was his close attention to historical documents and the standards he established for using them—in other words, his insistence on writing facts-based, “objective” history. Instead of reviewing Meng’s work overall, this paper asks how his kind of professional, or academic, history related itself to ofcial (zhengshi 正史) and unofcial ( yeshi 野史) histories. I focus on Meng’s reactions to the ban on Qingshi gao 清史稿 (Draft History of the Qing), in particular how he argued for a zhengshi status for it, and his extensive work on yeshi through a method he named kaoshi 考實 (examination and correction). The time during which Meng lived and worked was evidently one of struggles, not only between different political systems and forces, but also between competing models of knowledge. Meng’s work speaks to the question of how historical knowledge was conceived and congured during this key period. How did he legitimize certain ways of knowing and de-legitimize others? How did he negotiate the different concepts of knowledge, and what methodology did he apply to this effort?

Meng Sen, the Person Meng belonged to the generation of scholars/intellectuals characterized in the introduction of this volume as “transitional intellectuals.” He was in his early forties when the Qing dynasty fell. Like most of his fellow rst-generation professionals in modern China, Meng did not receive any special training for his profession—he was in his sixties when he became an academic historian. He explored a political career, involved himself in the publishing industry, and studied Qing history on his own before joining the teaching staff at modern, Western-style educational institutions such as Beijing University. Born in Wujin, Jiangsu Province in 1868, Meng spent the rst half of his life amid the tumultuous years of the end of the Qing Dynasty. He

2

Bai 1996: vol. 10, 65–66.

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studied with a local teacher to prepare for the civil service examination. Inuenced by the currents of reforms, he went to study in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, which was later proven to be a better choice than investing in the civil service examination, for the system was to be abolished in 1905. Meng returned to China after having studied in Tokyo for three years and earning a law degree. In 1904, he began to work for Zheng Xiaoxu 鄭孝胥, who was at the time the defense minister in Guangxi (and later became the prime minister of Puyi’s puppet state Manzhouguo). Privileged by his access to documents, Meng wrote a book on Guangxi border defense, which bore a preface by Yan Fu 嚴復. Meng followed when Zheng left Guangxi for Shanghai later that year. In this booming city, Meng participated in the preparation for constitutional monarchy, writing about the system in newspapers and magazines. In the two years before the Qing fell, he was elected a senator of Jiangsu Province Consultant Bureau ( Jiangsusheng ziyiju 江蘇省咨議局), and devoted his time to traveling around the country to promote constitutional monarchy and urging the Qing court to speed up its political reform.3 When the Republic was established, Meng was treated as an insider. He had become a close friend with the entrepreneur and political reformer Zhang Jian 張謇, and their proposal to organize a bank and reform the salt industry was favored by Yuan Shikai. He was elected a congressman and a member of the committee in charge of drafting the constitution. Meng’s promising political career ended in 1914, however, when Yuan Shikai disbanded the congress and senate.4 Typical of his time, political and cultural activism were not separated for Meng Sen. In 1908, Meng accepted an invitation from the Commercial Press to be the chief editor for Dongfang zazhi, a magazine that was considered, if not radical, certainly progressive at the time. This experience might have helped him to publish Xingye zazhi from 1925 to 1927, a magazine he edited with his son Meng Xinru. The magazine focused on domestic and international developments in industry and commerce, and was an example of “saving the country through industry” (shiye jiuguo 實業救國). He was also widely published in Dongfang zazhi, Shenbao, and Tianjin Yishi bao.

3 Shang 1985. This article is also included in Ming Qing shi lunshu jikan, vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986). Also see Wang 1999. 4 Ibid.

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The years after Meng withdrew from politics witnessed the beginning of his major publications on Qing history. An article on Ming history published in 1913 might be the rst of his historical writings that caught broad attention. In 1914, he published a textbook, Gonghe guomin xinduben 共和國民新讀本 (New Readings for Republican Citizens) that was ofcially approved for elementary schools to teach students about republican citizenship.5 In the same year, he also published Xinshi shiliao 心史史料, a collection of essays that included his studies of Manchu history before the founding of the Qing.6 While Xinshi shiliao established him as a specialist of Qing history, the three volumes of Xinshi congkan 心史叢刊, published in 1916 to 1917, made him a well-known gure among the reading public. In general, Meng was impressively prolic during his lifetime. While the bulk of his work focused on the rise of the Manchus, the founding of the dynasty, and the early Qing, he is perhaps best known for his kaoshi studies of popular yeshi narratives, which are analyzed in detail below. Meng’s formal academic career was concentrated primarily in the 1930s. He became a professor of history at Nanjing Central University in 1929 and taught Qing history there for a year. In the following year, he moved to Beijing University to work as a history professor and the chair of the History Department. He taught courses on the Manchus and the founding of the Qing Dynasty, and published Mingyuan Qingxi tongji 明元清系通記, a monograph examining the history of the Manchus through Ming records. When the Japanese army occupied Beijing in 1937, Meng stayed behind, but his lectures on Ming and Qing history were published as textbooks for university students who were forced to relocate to the remote southwest by the Japanese invasion. He died that year in Beijing, while the city was under Japanese occupation.

Meng Sen and Qingshi Gao In 1914, less than two years after the Chinese Republic was founded, the State Council (Guowu yuan 國務院) announced the establishment of the Qingshi guan 清史舘 (Qing History Commission). The announce-

5

Meng 1914. Meng adopted “xinshi” 心史 as his courtesy name, which literally means “Heart in history.” 6

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ment cited previous dynasties as examples to stress the importance of compiling a history for the Qing—with constant changes in times and regimes, history could provide people with lessons from the previous dynasty’s experiences. In addition, the Qing dynasty deserved a history for its military and civil achievements and orderly rule. The announcement argued that the Qing earned the glory of conquering the northwest and expanding China’s territory; and more recently, it emphasized communications and commerce with the world as well as other reforms. Besides, the Empress Xiaodingjing (Longyu), being visionary and following examples of the ancient sage kings, abdicated the throne and handed the authority to the Republic. It had thus been decided that Yuan Shikai, president of the Republic, would invite eminent specialists to compile a history of the Qing. It was agreed that this Qing history would be the last addition to the previous twenty-four histories, and that the form of historiography in the future would be “another matter.”7 The Qingshi guan was established in March 1914 and led by Zhao Erxun, former governor of Manchuria. The Qing history project lasted for nearly fteen years, and involved more than one hundred people. The project was based at the former Qing State History Commission (Qing guoshi guan 清國史舘) and Huidian Commission (Huidian guan 會典舘) inside the Donghua Gate of the Forbidden City. The team of editors was composed of former Qing ofcials and state scholars.8 Management was not strict or systematic, and the ups and downs of the project followed changes in the political situation. After a short period of steady work from 1914 to 1916, the project was affected by a decade of political instability from 1917 to 1927. The Beiyang government, under Yuan Shikai, supported the project with funds, personnel needs, and collection of documents. When Yuan died in 1916, the funding decreased along with the increase of political instability. Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽 asked for support from warlords Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, and Zhang Zongchang and the project was sustained on such money.9 By fall of 1926, the draft was basically completed. The project’s overseer, Zhao Erxun, citing his advanced age, urged that the project be published as a draft, and raised more funds from warlords Zhang

7 8 9

Zhu 1971: 2. Zhu 1971: 51–64. Zhu 1971: 418–19.

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Zuolin and Zhang Zongchang for printing. Some staff members were against printing the history without proong it thoroughly. In early 1927, the few people who remained with the project started proofreading the draft, with a plan to nish the proong within three years. But after half a year, in mid-1927, Zhao Erxun suggested printing the whole draft, claiming that he was sick and could no longer wait. (In fact, Zhao died in September 1927.) The printing of Qingshi gao was sped up and the printing time was shortened to ten months, with the goal of nishing the printing before Nationalist forces reached Beijing. Part of the printing was nished in May 1928, when the Nationalists took over the palace; the rest was secretly nished by Jin Liang at his private residence.10 Out of the 1,100 sets printed, four hundred were shipped to Manchuria, which became to be known as the Guanwai (Outside the Shanhai Pass) edition. In the process of printing, Jin Liang made some changes in the Guanwai edition without consulting the rest of the editorial staff. The remaining seven hundred sets were known as the Guannei (Inside the Shanhai Pass) edition. The two editions differed in a few aspects, particularly in some of the biographies. When the Northern Expedition succeeded, a committee that was in charge of taking over the Palace Museum also resumed responsibility for the Qingshi guan and organized a checking of the Qingshi gao. On December 14, 1929, the committee petitioned the Executive Yuan (Xingzheng yuan) to ban the Qingshi gao “forever.” Following this suggestion, the Nationalist government listed it as banned book and forbade it to be printed or sold. Few ofcials received copies of the Guannei edition of Qingshi gao; researchers and universities were denied access. Meanwhile, private printing of the volumes ourished since four hundred copies had already been shipped to Manchuria.11 Smuggling Qingshi gao from Manchuria became a protable business, because they were sold for ve to six times their original price.12 A debate immediately started on the ban of Qingshi gao. Many scholars demanded that the ban be lifted. The debate reveals much about the contemporary understanding of history, as well as the nature of the Republic’s relationship to the Chinese past.

10 11 12

Zhu 1971: 283. Zhu 1971: 424–32. Zhu 1971: 427–29.

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A petition from the committee to Tan Yankai 譚延闓, the head of the Executive Yuan, stated the reasons for banning the history. First of all, the petition observed that the Qingshi gao had been sponsored by Yuan Shikai and supported by warlords like Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, and Zhang Zongchang. Moreover, the compilers were all Qing loyalists, led by “the most ignorant Qing ofcial Zhao Erxun.” The petition pointed out what it considered the most important problems with the book: it was antirevolutionary and anti-Republican; it insulted revolutionary martyrs; it had problems in formatting; and it contained many errors. The petition listed nineteen problems. Eight of these were political, and most of the rest were about its format and technical errors.13 One basis for claiming the Qingshi gao as antirevolutionary was that it called the 1911 Revolution “zuo luan” 作亂 (trouble making): Zhao Erxun and his kind, ordered to compile the history by the Republican government, dared to call the founding of the Republic “zuo luan.” What can be more obviously antirevolutionary than this? The speedy progress of the revolutionary army’s Northern Expedition was celebrated by all citizens, but the biography for Wang Guowei . . . calls it a “crisis.” What is the intention of this?14

To the committee, the Qingshi gao also insulted revolutionary martyrs. The biography of Xu Xilin did not mark him as a revolutionary, and the one for Qiu Jin used the words “mou luan” 謀亂 (scheming an upheaval). Regarding Peng Jiazhen’s assassination of Liangbi, the Qingshi gao did not referred to Peng’s name but only mentioned him as “someone.” Understanding this in the convention of Chinese history, the committee argued that not referring to a person by his name is meant to debase him.15 The Qingshi gao was also criticized for being anti-Republican. It adopted the ganzhi system (the twelve signs of the Chinese astrology), instead of the new calendar, in recording events that happened after the founding of the Republic. It recorded Pu Yi’s issuing posthumous titles after 1912, such as that for Wang Guowei, which should not be recognized. It praised the Qing loyalists’ memories of the Qing and their intention to restore the throne. The Qingshi gao was also seen as

13 “Gugong bowuyuan chengqing yanjin Qingshi gao faxing wen” in Zhu 1971: 418–24. 14 Zhu 1971: 419. 15 Zhu 1971: 419.

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anti-Han in some sections. “The Taiping Kingdom lasted for more than ten years and was a glory of the Han.” Yet in Zeng Guofan’s biography, “Hong Xiuquan is called a “Guangdong bandit” and “thief.”16 It also hid wrongs done by the Manchu Qing Dynasty: the censorship of the Qianlong period was rarely mentioned; and it ignored brutality by the Qing court. It also failed to praise the 1911 Revolution. The committee complained that if an old Qing ofcial died in the Republic, he should not be mentioned in Qingshi gao. But this version of Qing history mentioned Sheng Xuanhuai, Lu Runxiang, Lao Naixuan, Lin Shu, Yan Fu, Wang Kaiyun, Wang Xianqian, Wang Guowei, and others. “If they are included because they had Manchu Qing in their hearts, then why are Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, etc., who were Ming loyalists, included in the Qing history?” Liang Ji died in 1918; Jian Chunze in 1917; and Wang Guowei in 1927. Including them in the Zhongyi lu, the petition argued, was obviously showing the editors’ anti-Republican intention.17 In addition to political problems, the committee found the format problematic and pointed out many minor mistakes and inconsistencies in the draft. The committee thought that appointments and dismissals of ofcials above the ranks of Shangshu and Shilang should be included in Benji 本紀, but the Qingshi gao included some, while leaving out others. Names were inconsistent throughout the volumes, and some people were recorded in two biographies. The table of contents and the actual contents did not match, and there was conicting information among ji 紀, biao 表, zhuan 傳, and zhi 志. It recorded dates, but not months and lacked accurate dates for events. It was also marked by ignorance. For instance, it did not include a biography for Giuseppe Castiglione or explain where he was from, but only listed him in Yishu zhuan. The Qingshi gao only recorded the British ofcer Charles Gordon’s achievements in killing the Taiping rebels, but did not mention his involvement in the burning of the Summer Palace. There was also much pure negligence. For example, the Daoguang Emperor’s age was not recorded in his benji.18 The committee thus argued that the Qingshi gao should not be allowed to be published and circulated. The crime the compilers had

16 17 18

Zhu 1971: 420–21. Zhu 1971: 420–21. Zhu 1971: 421–3.

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committed—writing a history on behalf of the Republic that could be considered anti-Republican—would have led to severe punishment in the past. “Now the Republican government is already extremely generous by not charging them for their crime. The book should be banned forever.”19 The committee claimed that it had already invited specialists to organize Qing historical archives and to edit a Qingdai tongjian changbian (an annotated bibliography of Qing archives). Based on this work of organizing Qing archives, a new Qingshi guan would be opened.20 The promised volume was never compiled, and a new Qingshi guan was never opened. In 1934 and 1939, the case of the Qingshi gao was presented to the central government again, but neither time was any conclusion reached. Meng Sen represented the strongest voice of those who demanded the ban be lifted, and his opinions carried the heaviest weight. He meticulously examined, item by item, areas questioned by the committee and argued that none of these should have led to the ban. Meng’s argument can be summarized in the following terms: the Qing deserved to have a history; and the Qing shi gao should be given the status of zhengshi of the Qing. Meng argued that, according to Chinese historical convention, the Qing deserved to have a history. Every time a dynasty fell, the one following it would compile a history for its predecessor in order to preserve the documents, to explain its rise and fall, to clarify its achievements and failures, and to learn lessons from it. Meng asked, “When a dynasty falls, how do we determine whether it deserves to have a history?” His answer was: If it was able to unify the country, able to govern in an orderly manner, and able to last for ages, it should occupy a position in the dynastic zhengshi (meaning in the tradition of the twenty-four histories).21 Meng argued that the Qing dynasty had had impressive achievements in its military and civil affairs; it expanded its territory, and possessed many talents. Following historical convention, the Qing should be considered one of the greatest dynasties in Chinese history.22 Meng explained that the Qing had history built into its structure and that, in the Chinese historical system, the state’s motivation would 19 20 21 22

Zhu 1971: 423. Zhu 1971: 423–4. Meng 1960: 1. Meng 1960: 2.

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have already been entered into records before it took an action; its inscription by historians would not have waited until the action had occurred. According to Meng, When describing events that had already happened, no matter how fair one is, it is inevitable to be subjective. If an event is recorded at the very beginning, when an event is motivated by needs, and the plan is decided by the motivation, and the action is led to by decision, then every stage of the event would leave a trace. When such a system is followed, even if one wants to be unjust, he cannot make up facts. Except for those who forge facts for particular reasons, national affairs . . . cannot be hidden. The Manchus had no problem with this historical system and this kind of historical organization was not stopped when the Qing replaced the Ming. . . . The Qing practiced on a daily basis a system of “having a history 有史.” [This system included materials] from kechao (科钞) to shishu (史書), to rilu (日錄), to qijuzhu (起居注), to silunbbu (絲綸簿), and the Qing also had Junjichu archives (軍機處檔).23

Meng argued that “the Chinese historical system is meticulous and complete ( yanzheng wanmei 嚴正完美), superior to other countries.’” Unlike the Manchus when they replaced the Ming, the Republican revolution did not pay attention to this system of history.24 Meng Sen argued that the history that grew out of this structure was zhengshi. For a history to be recognized as zhengshi, the compilers must have the permission of the emperor. In ancient times, some histories were written by individual authors and later recognized by the state. From the Tang, writing history became the state’s monopoly. The emperor’s issuing a permit to compile a history was called “shezhuan” 赦撰. The history that resulted from “shezhuan” was not compiled by one person, but through the collaboration of many—no private effort would be enough to collect all the documents necessary for the history of a dynasty; and state archives were simply not accessible to private authors. In this sense, the Qingshi gao also qualied as a zhengshi.25 In Meng’s opinion, “All true historical materials were created by a dynasty itself. Rumors and anecdotes can be referenced, but they are not what those who compile zhengshi should rely on.”26 Qingshi gao took its materials from this “structure of history” and organized a large amount of historical material into a history of the Qing. To Meng, “It 23 24 25 26

Meng Meng Meng Meng

1960: 1960: 1957: 1960:

1–2. 2. 2. 1.

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is irrefutable that this history should be considered the zhengshi of the Qing.”27 He argued that Qingshi gao “has the outline of history” and future revisions should be based on it.28 The Republic, different from all previous regimes, broke this system. Meng pointed out that Qingshi gao was banned purely out of political reasons. He argued that if the 1911 Revolution was considered the demarcation of regime change, then Qingshi gao should be given the status of shi (history). “But although the Republic has stayed in the same name, the governments have changed. What was compiled by the earlier government is banned by the later government.”29 “Recently some ignorant men have inherited an attitude from the revolutionary period and talk about the Qing as the enemy. Since they treat the Qing as enemy, they do not feel any responsibility to compile a history for it.” This had not been China’s practice in the past, Meng pointed out. Although “people hated the Hu customs,” when the Ming replaced the Yuan and peace was achieved, “the Ming praised Yuan Shizu’s achievement, and lamented that his descendants did not follow his example. Future generations evaluate the political gains and losses of the past dynasty and use them as their own lessons; this is what is called history.”30 The Republic lacked an understanding of its relationship to China’s past, Meng argued, because “praising the Qing and offending the Republic are not the same.”31 The revolutionaries worried that if the Republic compiled a history for the Qing, they would be implying that the new regime was an heir to the previous one. Meng chided, “If one really respects the present, then one must not hate and despise the previous regime that it replaces, for only then can one be aware of one’s own origin.”32 The ban, thus, was purely a result of the Republic’s misconception of its relationship to the Chinese past and its own identity. Deemed the leading “zhengshi school historian,” Meng insisted on using ofcial documents for historical analysis. He was aware of the limitations of Qing historical records and the Qingshi gao, but he still

27 28 29 30 31 32

Meng 1960: 2. Meng 1960: 3. Meng 1960: 1. Meng 1960: 2. Zhu 1971: 397. Meng 1960: 2.

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argued for a scholarly attitude. The problems in Qingshi gao should be evaluated on scholarly basis, and should not be dealt with by political means.33 Against the point that Qingshi gao was anti-Republican, Meng argued, “Historical material is historical material. Even if there are conicts with the Republic, we should let people correct them [when reading them]; we should not erase such texts.”34 The use of race to fan hatred during the revolution was a military matter, not a scholarly one. The Qing should occupy one of the most important positions in China’s dynastic history. We should not intentionally debase the Qing Dynasty, compromising our scholarly attitude.35

Meng also provided a nationalist argument for lifting the ban of Qingshi gao. The Guanwai edition of the Qingshi gao had been shipped outside China and was beyond the reach of the ban. Because the constraint was placed only on the Chinese, “We are providing foreigners with materials to study our history, and Chinese scholars can only look up to foreign historians’ works. Everyone is aware of this shame, but there is nothing we can do about it.”36

Meng Sen and Yeshi The rst two published collections of Meng’s works, what he called kaoshi (考實 examination and correction), were both on yeshi. Xinshi congkan includes fteen of his kaoshi studies of some of the most popularly circulated stories of the Qing dynasty. Particularly interesting to the public were his articles on some famous women of the Qing Dynasty, such as Lady Hengbo 横波夫人, Kong Sizhen 孔四貞, Dong Xiaowan 董小 宛, and Gu Taiqing 顧太清. He continued this kaoshi form of inquiry in his Qingchu sanda yi’an kaoshi 清初三大疑案考實 (Examinations of the Three Big Mysteries of Early Qing), which focus on the three most popular yeshi stories about the Qing Dynasty: Empress Xiaozhuang’s 孝庄 rumored marriage to Dorgon; Qing Shizu’s entering a monastery; and Qing Shizong’s inheriting the throne. He later also wrote about the popular stories of Qianlong Emperor’s Muslim concubine Xiangfei

33 34 35 36

Zhu 1971: 397. Zhu 1971: 397–8. Meng 1960: 2. Meng 1960: 404.

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香妃 and of Qianlong as a son of a Han family, the Chens, in Haining. Evidently, Meng was highly familiar with the yeshi of Qing, and he took it seriously. As such, he was not the rst or the only historian paying attention to yeshi. Xiao Yishan 簫一山 repeated many of the yeshi stories in his Qing history and was later criticized for doing so.37 The difference was that, while Xiao uncritically copied the stories in his book, Meng Sen applied a historical methodology to yeshi, using ofcial historical archives to examine these unofcial accounts. Here we will use one of Meng Sen’s case studies as an example to see how his kaoshi method works on yeshi. The Empress Xiaozhuang’s rumored marriage to Dorgon might have been the most famous case Meng Sen studied. There is a long history of fascination with Xiaozhuang’s life. Frederic Wakeman’s The Great Enterprise mentions her briey: Empress Xiaozhuang (1613–1688), wife of Taizong and mother of the Shunzhi Emperor. A Mongol princess descended from Chinggis Khan, Xiaozhuang was a powerful gure in the rst three reigns of the Qing. Rumor had it that she had even married her brother-in-law Dorgon when he was regent, but this is unsubstantiated. The Kangxi Emperor was especially inuenced by Xiaozhuang, who saw to his early education.38

In 1644, when Fulin 福臨 (Shunzhi Emperor) moved to Beijing, she was elevated from Secondary Consort (Zhuang fei) to Empress Dowager. Her aunt, Empress Xiaoduan 孝端, ranked above her; but after the latter’s death in 1649, Xiaozhuang became the highest ranking and most powerful woman in the Qing court. Wakeman’s version of Xiaozhuang is very close to what is recorded in Qingshi gao, except that the rumored marriage is, of course, not mentioned there. After a very short paragraph that introduces Xiaozhuang’s Mongol origin, her connection to Empress Xiaoduan, her marriage to Huangtaiji 皇太極, and her relationship with Shunzhi, the next ve paragraphs describe how the Kangxi Emperor treated Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang with great lial piety and affection. He accompanied her to ancestral graves, hot springs, and would always dismount his horse to hold her carriage, even in the rain. She advised him on national affairs: not to let go of the Manchus’ prowess in martial affairs; as well as the importance of using good people and being diligent and

37 38

Bai 1996: 65. Wakeman 1985: vol. 2, 897.

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cautious. When the Kangxi Emperor won military victories, he would report to her. When traveling outside of Beijing, he would bring back local products to her as gifts. When he heard that she was ill, Kangxi rushed back to the capital from his summer resort and stayed at her sickbed during her last days. Before she passed away at the age 75, Xiaozhuang instructed Kangxi that Taizong had been buried at the Zhaoling 昭陵 near Shenyang long ago and should not be disturbed for her sake, and that she was still concerned with Kangxi and his father Shunzhi. She thus instructed him to bury her at Xiaoling in the Eastern Tombs near Beijing. Kangxi followed her instruction, and her tomb was named Zhaoxiling 昭西陵. Her biography in Qingshi gao also mentions that both the Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors bestowed more posthumous titles upon her. She had one son and three daughters.39 This seemingly clear record, however, has not prevented the elaboration of her life in yeshi. The rst half of the 20th century saw at least a dozen books, written specically on Empress Xiaozhuang or that included her stories, the majority of which appeared around the 1911 Revolution.40 The focus of Xiaozhuang’s life in these yeshi is her relationship and possible marriage to Dorgon, the so called “marriage of the Empress Dowager 太后下嫁,” which is considered one of the “three big unsolved mysteries of the early Qing” (Qingchu sandai yi’an 清初三大疑案). The story goes that Empress Xiaozhuang played major role in Qing’s conquering of Ming by persuading, with her beauty, Hong Chengchou to surrender, for which Huangtaiji awarded her the title Empress. She gave birth to Fulin, who was only six years old when

39 “Liezhuan 1; Hou Fei: Taizong Xiaozhuang wen huanghou” in Qingshi gao 1997: vol. 3, juan 214, 2299. 40 These include Qing mishi 清秘史 (The Secrete History of Qing) by Chen Qubing 陳 去病 nished in July to August in 1904, according to Xia 2004: 116; Man Qing waishi 满清外史 (An Unofcial History of the Manchu Qing) by Tiangu 天嘏 (1912). Man Qing waishi is based on Qing mishi and is included in Man Qing bishi 满清稗史 1912; also included in Man Qing yeshi 满清野史, 4th printing by Chengdu changfu gongsi 成都昌福 公司 in 1920; Shunzhi taihou weiji 顺治太后外纪 (An Unofcial Biography of Empress Dowager of Shunzhi) by Lu Shi’e 陸士谔 (1915); Qing bai lei chao 清稗类抄 by Xu Ke 徐珂 (Shangwu yinshuguan, 1917); Man Qing shisanchao gongwei mishi 满清十三朝 宫闈秘史 (Secrete History of Manchu Qing Court during Its Thirteen Reigns) by Yanbei laoren 燕北老人 (1919); Qingchao yeshi daguan 清朝野史大觀 Collection of Qing Yeshi (Zhonghua shuju, 1936); Qinggong shisanchao yanyi 清宫十三朝演義 (A Story of Qing Court) by Xu Xiaotian 許嘯天 (1937), and Qinggong shisanchao 清宫十 三朝 (Qing Court in the Thirteen Reigns) (also known as Qinggong mishi 名清宫秘史) by Wang Gaoyuan 王皓沅 (1948).

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Huangtaiji died. In order to protect her son’s emperorship, she married Dorgon, who was more widely respected than the child emperor. These stories about Empress Xiaozhuang presented various forms of evidence. In the late Qing, when censorship was loosened, the scholar Zhang Cangshui’s 張蒼水 poems were published, in which he mentioned the Empress Dowager’s marriage. Moreover, rumor had it that a court scholar, Ke Shaomin 柯劭忞, who later became a primary compiler of Qingshi gao, saw his ancestor’s exam at the Board of Rites during the Guangxu reign, which included eulogies to the Imperial Father Prince Regent (Huang fu shezheng wang 皇父攝政王). After the 1911 Revolution, the Ministry of Education publicized the documents of exams throughout the Qing. The phrase Imperial Father Prince Regent indeed appeared on many of the exams from the Shunzhi reign and many regarded this as more evidence for the marriage. It was also rumored that the Board of Rites compiled a six-volume collection of documents on Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang’s wedding, and that an eminent family had a copy of old Donghualu 東華錄 which recorded this event. Other commonly used evidence was the fact that Empress Xiaozhuang was not buried with Huangtaiji in Shenyang Zhaoling; her grave was instead in the Qing Dongling 東陵 (Eastern tombs), and was located outside of the fengshui walls. It was the only exception of the more than 150 royal gures buried there, and it was an anomaly in the Qing. Meng disputed all the evidences used in yeshi.41 He was aware of the popularity of the story: “People would not dare to talk about the taboos of the Qing court, yet the Empress Dowager of Shizu’s marrying the Shezheng wang is a story that no one could ignore, from north to south, from the old to the young, from men to women, everyone who likes to tell old stories.”42 Meng argued, however, that nothing turned up when one looked for written documents. He argued that Zhang’s poem was not sufcient evidence, since Zhang was an antiManchu scholar living in the south, far away from where the event he commented on supposedly had happened. As for Dorgon’s strange title, it was created following ancient examples for kings/emperors to address their ministers as shangfu 尚父 or zhongfu 仲父. So the title Imperial Father Prince Regent cannot be used as evidence either. Meng

41 42

“Taihou xiajia kaoshi,” in Meng 1960: 449–54. Meng 1960: 449.

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further argues that if Dorgon had wanted to openly use this title, then the court would have wanted everyone to know about the marriage, which contradicted the fact that there was no document left about the marriage. Meng cited Donghualu to argue that the title Imperial Father (Huangfu 皇父) was given to Dorgon for his contribution to the Qing, not a reection of incest. In documents recording the denouncement of Dorgon soon after his death, there was the sentence, “[He] went into the inner court of the Palace,” which many people interpreted as indicating an indecent relationship between Dorgon and Xiaozhuang. Meng argued that “the inner court” can mean many things and is not necessarily a reference to Xiaozhuang. As for the odd location of Xiaozhuang’s tomb, Meng cited Qingshi gao and argued that it was not uncommon for only one empress or an imperial concubine to be buried with an emperor. Since Xiaoduan was buried with Huangtaiji, it was not strange at all that Xiaozhuang was not buried with him in Shenyang Zhaoling. Meng was aware that there are counterarguments for all the evidence used in yeshi to prove the marriage, but there was no hard evidence to prove that the marriage did not happen. For this he utilized Korea’s Lichao shilu 李朝實錄: if there was no edict on the Empress Dowager’s marrying Dorgon, then it did not happen. He did not nd any record in Lichao shilu. Meng apparently believed that yeshi could be refuted with reliable historical records. He saw the proliferation of yeshi partly as a result of the lack of an ofcial history. After the Qing fell, there has not been a(n) [ofcial] history. Storytellers like to tell things about the Qing Dynasty. In addition, the Qing was very strict on banning [books], and the Qianlong court used the excuse of compiling the Four Treasures to burn and distort texts; their behavior was worse than the burning of books [in the Qin Dynasty]. When the bans were lifted, the reaction to them led to much worthless condemnatory talk. . . . I do not want to follow the stream, and would like to correct a few things for those who talk about Qing history. . . . There is nothing in this volume that is not based on evidence.43

But Meng’s methodology of kaoshi, in some ways, seems to be a mismatch for the study of yeshi. The key here is exactly that many yeshi, instead of aiming for the circulation of objective information, sought to comment on history with a hidden political agenda. The years right

43

“Xu” in Meng n.d.: 1.

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before the 1911 Revolution and the early Republican period witnessed a high tide of publication of Qing yeshi. These Qing yeshi served a clear political purpose: to denounce the Qing dynasty by painting the Manchus as morally loose and decadent. In his preface to Chen Qubing’s 陳去病 Qing mishi 清秘史, Liu Shipei 劉師培 wrote: “Qing mishi follows the ancient genre of bieshi (别史). Although it is not exhaustive in collecting old stories, it does expose the dirty life and actions of the barbarians’ court. Those who have worshipped the tribal heads as gods can reect on themselves by reading this book.”44 Liu Yazi 柳亞子 recalled reading this book in his memoir 40 years later: The rst volume (of Qing mishi) narrates the origin of the Manchu Qing and its crimes of invading China and oppressing the Han. The second volume is all anecdotes. For example, [it is asserted that] Huangtaiji’s wife used her beauty to seduce Hong Chengchou into surrendering. She irted with Dorgon, the younger brother of Huangtaiji, and married him in order to make him support the child emperor Fulin when Huangtaiji died and the imperial power was falling into Dorgon’s hands. The book recorded all this shameless behavior. It is a book that uses yeshi to advocate anti-Manchu actions.45

During the period around the 1911 Revolution, Manchus were commonly depicted as overtly sexual and violent. Xiaozhuang’s stories were used as effective means to “expose the dirt of the Qing court,” because many of the events in her life, as narrated in the yeshi, would be extremely offensive to the Han, such as her marrying two men; an aunt and niece marrying the same man; using her beauty to persuade Hong Chengchou to surrender; and an Empress Dowager marrying the emperor’s brother. Meng’s use of zhengshi methods to correct yeshi, however, often revealed the limitations of zhengshi as a historical medium. Hu Shi, for instance, found Meng Sen’s arguments unconvincing. In a letter to Meng, he rst expressed his admiration of Meng’s questioning the popular yeshi, but felt that the title of Huangfu was still not clearly explained. The argument of shangfu and zhongfu does not t in this case, and the evidence from the Lichao shilu is ambivalent. In a letter to Meng Sen, Hu Shi elaborated,

44 45

Xia 2004: 119. Xia 2004: 119.

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madeleine yue dong I do not think you have explained the reasons for the existence of the title Huangfu. Chaoxian shilu only says “I asked the ambassador,” and the ambassador of course had no choice but make a vague answer . . . This is still not the denitive evidence that the marriage did not happen. It can only prove that there are no texts on the Empress Dowager’s marriage extant in ofcial diplomatic documents. It is not that I want to believe lightly in rumors and legends, but I still feel that the title Huangfu cannot be interpreted as an example of shangfu and zhongfu. The story of the marriage indeed does have some limited evidence of support, but the title of Huangfu is a historical fact. Future historians can only say that according to the examinations and the Red Records and the Chaoxian shilu, Shezheng wang indeed adopted the title of Huangfu, and there was a story about the marriage of the Empress Dowager to Dorgon, but no conclusive evidence can be found.46

In fact, Meng might have known more clearly about the limitations of historical archives than anyone else. He repeatedly pointed out that the Qing “made sure that their ancestors did not do anything that appeared illegitimate, so they one by one erased them and covered them up, trying not to leave any trace in the Shilu. Changing the Shilu was like eating or daily life in the Qing.”47 Zhu Shizhe, in Qingshi shuwen 清史 述聞, explains that there was no reliable document for the compilation of the biographies of the empresses and concubines. The part of their lives related to their marriages to the emperors and the dates of their deaths were recorded in Qing shilu benji 清實錄本纪. The compilers took all the information about the empresses and concubines they could nd in the benji, and checked Neiwubu Zongrenfu 内務部宗人府 documents if the information was not enough for a biography.48 Zhu further explains, “In the Qing, there was not much to record about the empresses and concubines. Part of the reason is the differences and separation between Man and Han, and part of the reason is the strict control of the palace.”49 The explanation in yeshi for the lack of ofcial documents for this marriage is that the Qing ofcials omitted and erased these records to cover up an embarrassment for the Qing court, because the Manchus, having gradually adopted Han moral codes, considered this marriage a shame and did not record it in history. Meanwhile, it is

46

Meng 1960: 452. “Du Qing shilu shangque,” in Meng 1961: 619. 48 Cixi was in power for more than 40 years. Liang Qichao proposed that she should be recorded in benji, but the proposal was turned down. Zhu 1971: 196. 49 Zhu 1971: 267. 47

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curious that Meng did not apply his scrutiny of Qing archives to those he used to examine the yeshi story of Empress Xiaozhuang. It appears that academic history and yeshi often argue around the same gaps in zhengshi. If the gaps in ofcial history limited what the professional historian could do, they were exactly what provided yeshi room for imagination and elaboration. On the issue of Xiaozhuang’s burial site, the Qingshi gao’s explanation not only appeared to be unconvincing to the public, it in fact became a clue calling for further elaboration. Meng Sen did not explain why, while all of the more than 150 royals buried at Dongling were enclosed and protected inside the fengshui walls, Xiaozhuang’s tomb alone was left outside of the walls. Qing shilu recorded that Xiaozhuang’s cofn was left above ground in Dongling for 38 years before a permanent tomb was built for her and she was nally buried in 1725, during the Yongzheng reign. These are particularly difcult to explain, considering her high status in early Qing; and the yeshi interpretation of this delay is that Kangxi found the case too difcult to resolve and left it to his son Yongzheng to deal with. There is also no clear and convincing explanation in zhengshi for the dramatic fall of Dorgon’s status within a few months of his death. Dorgon (1612–1650) was the 14th son of Nurhaci, half brother of Huangtaiji. Although he led the white and the bordered white banners, he was not strong enough to inherit the throne. He instead supported 6 year old Shunzhi to take the throne; he adopted the role of Prince Regent and controlled the real power. Under Dorgon, the Manchus entered central China. The way Shunzhi addressed him changed from Uncle Prince Regent (Shufu shezheng wang 叔父摄政王) in 1644 to Imperial Uncle Prince Regent (Huang shufu shezheng wang 皇叔父摄政王) in 1645, and to Imperial Father Prince Regent (Huang fu shezheng wang 皇父摄政王) in 1649. Dorgon died in December 1650, after a hunting accident at the age of 39. On January 8, “Dorgon’s hearse was accorded full imperial honors when it neared the capital and was solemnly drawn through the Dongzhi Gate, along the Yuhe Bridge, past streets lined with ofcials, their wives dressed in white sackcloth standing in the gateways behind them.”50 He was posthumously named “Accomplished Ancestor, Emperor of Righteousness” on February 8.51 Three months later, however, Dorgon was charged with holding ambition for the imperial

50 51

Wakeman 1985: 893. Wakeman 1985: 896.

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throne and was publicly denounced. The Shunzhi Emperor stripped him of all his ranks and titles, ordered his properties conscated and his tomb destroyed, and even ordered that his body be mutilated. Different from zhengshi’s explanation of Dorgon’s fall with his imperial ambition, in stories of yeshi, his disgrace was explained as having been provoked by Shunzhi’s reaction to humiliation from Dorgon forcing Xiaozhuang into marriage. In Donghualu, one of Dorgon’s accused crimes is that he “entered the inner palace.” Again, this odd sentence in zhengshi was read in yeshi as referring to Dorgan’s illicit relationship with the Empress Dowager, and on this Meng Sen could only say that the sentence does not necessarily refer to Empress Xiaozhuang. Apparently yeshi utilized “common sense” to create meaning in history and make the stories convincing and coherent. The yeshi stories claimed that, according to Manchu custom, it was not wrong for a younger brother to marry his widowed sister-in-law, which was what Dorgon supposedly had done. And for Xiaozhuang, marrying Dorgon was one of the few things this young widow could do to protect her son’s emperorship from the ambitious Dorgon. The Qingshi gao has only 60 words discussing the relationship between Shunzhi and his mother, but 715 words describing Kangxi and his grandmother. This is read in yeshi as showing that the relationship between Shunzhi and his mother was distant. This distant relationship has been used to prove Xiaozhuang’s marriage to Dorgon, Shunzhi’s problems with his two empresses, and the rumor that he tried to become a monk. Meng Sen’s academic history, thus, share the same limitations with zhengshi, and it did not stop yeshi from growing. As Harold Kahn insightfully points out: The importance of this subspecies of historical inquiry lies beyond its capacity to entertain. It lies rather in the remarkable durability of its views. For it constitutes one of the major sources of the popular image of the past. Ofcial history adjusted the record to suit the needs of the court; unofcial history embroidered it to meet the tastes of a broader, less discriminating public. And it is this embroidered record which has formed the stable of much of China’s popular historical thought.52

If professional historians like Meng Sen prefer not to believe an event unless they could positively prove its occurrence, the yeshi writers would rather believe that it happened on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

52

Kahn 1971: 51.

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The historians would not draw conclusions without positive documentation, while yeshi lls up the gap and bridges the inconsistencies using “common sense.” What is limitation to professional historians is opportunity for elaboration in yeshi. Historical accuracy and caution, in this case, would not mean historical truth or justice to the audience of yeshi.

Conclusion Shang Hongkui 商鸿奎, a student of Meng Sen, explains why Meng has been considered the founder of jindai (early modern) but not xiandai (modern) study of Qing history. Shang separates Meng’s work into two categories: narratives of historical facts; and examinations of historical documents. Shang regards him as an “old-style” historian. His achievements are limited by his “position, point of views, and methodology.” He had strong feudal thoughts and ideology. He attributed the rise and fall of a dynasty, its order and disorder, to the emperors and kings and the few heads of the ruling class—whether they worked hard or led a decadent life. He did not see the power of the masses, and did not realize that the people are the masters of history. He was even hostile toward peasant rebellions. This is a result of his position and point of view. What he spent much energy to examine, correct, and study were not necessarily the key questions in history. In his discussion of history and examination of historical materials, he often only paid attention to fragmented, supercial, and isolated events, and failed to analyze them from the overall perspective and its essence, and to make things clear. But his attitude in examining history was serious, and he relied on facts as the basis of his work.53

In Shang’s view, the value of Meng’s work lies in his closely following primary sources, and his shortcoming is that he lacked a conceptual framework (and in particular, a Marxist one). Shang’s own work on Empress Xiaozhuang might be a good example of what he means. In his two articles about Empress Xiaozhuang, Shang intended to correct the bias against a “minority female stateswoman.” He argued that Empress Xiaozhuang experienced the Changde, Shunzhi, and Kangxi reigns, and brought up two boy emperors, Shunzhi and Kangxi. And

53

Shang Hongkui, “Bianji shuoming” in Meng 1959: 1–2.

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in her later years, she assisted the Kangxi Emperor in his success in “unifying the country,” contributing to the unity and prosperity of China in the 17th to 18th centuries. Regarding the story of her marriage to Dorgon, Shang argues, “If there had been such a marriage, we should treat it as a political device,” for the marriages of royalty were a political behavior, an opportunity to expand one’s own power. Empress Xiaozhuang should not be evaluated by “the biased moral criteria of the Han ruling class.”54 Shang’s work, compared to Meng’s, provides us an example of what is considered “modern” historiography of the Qing. Much of the literature on early 20th-century Chinese historiography has stressed its “modern” characteristics, such as linear national history and critical source analysis.55 The case of Meng Sen, however, demonstrates that the practice of history during that period cannot be categorized so simply or clearly. Meng’s insistence on “objective history,” and his challenge to yeshi by claiming the need for reliable primary materials, seems to align him closely with some of the new critical historians, but it is worth noticing that he was trying to achieve this objectivity through zhengshi. His methodology, as shown by the comparison with Shang’s study of Xiaozhuang, was different from the later generation of historians, and closer to the attitude of ofcial imperial historians. Consequently, the level of objectivity he could achieve was determined by the nature of his sources—imperial ofcial historical archives similar to zhengshi, such as Qingshi gao. On the other hand, when he applied to yeshi his insistence on objectivity through ofcial historical materials and method, he cut off a close relationship between yeshi and zhengshi and invalidated yeshi. This is a major departure from what had existed before him, when people utilized the different forms of historical inquiries to form opinions and evaluation of history. While “there was no room in the ofcial record for personal opinion, [o]bjectivity came to mean acquiescence in the imperial will or, more decorously, adherence to the ‘collective, impartial judgment of the empire.’ ”56 In these circumstances, “private compilations sometimes surpassed the ofcial record in completeness and reliability and came to represent the more ‘primary’ of the two sources,” or they “complemented the

54 55 56

Guo and He 1985. For example, Duara 1995; Schneider 1971. Kahn 1971: 13.

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ofcial record through the added dimension of personal experience of informed hindsight.”57 Furthermore, yeshi could provide “a deeper penetration into the personality.”58 Meng understood the importance of yeshi, and tried to discipline it with his framework of knowledge. If, during the imperial period, private history and unofcial history can be seen as a form of public historiography and opinion, then Meng’s new methodology would disqualify them as historical narrative. Meng’s work shows the extent to which Chinese historiography in the early 20th century was still animated by late imperial frameworks, and how the application of such old frameworks, under changed circumstances, would lead to new consequences.

References Cited Bai Shouyi 白壽彜 (1996), Zhongguo tongshi 中國通史. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Duara, Prasenjit (1995), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Guo Songyi and He Lingxiu (1985), “Daonian Shang Hongkui shi,” in Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan lishi yanjiusuo Qingshi yanjiu shi (ed.) (1985), Qingshi luncong, volume 6. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 5–6. Kahn, Harold L. (1971), Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch’ien-lung Reign. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Meng Sen 孟森 (n.d.), Xinshi congkan 心史叢刊, in Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan xubian 近代中國史料叢刊續編. Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe, vol. 94. —— (1914), Gonghe guomin xin duben 共和國民新讀本 (New Readings for Republican Citizens). Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan. —— (1957) Mingdai shi 明代史 (History of the Ming Dynasty). Taibei: Jicheng tushu gongsi. —— (1959), Ming Qing shi lunzhu jikan 明清史論著集刊. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. —— (1960), Qingdai shi 清代史 (History of the Qing Dynasty). Taibei: Jicheng tushi gongsi. —— (1961), Ming Qing shi lunzhu jikan 明清史論著集刊. Taibei: Shijie shuju. Qingshi gao 清史稿 (1997). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Schneider, Laurence (1971), Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shang Hongkui 商鸿奎 (1985), “Shu Meng Sen xiansheng,” in Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan lishi yanjiu suo Qingshi yanjiu shi (ed.) (1985), Qingshi luncong, volume 6. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, (1985), 10. Wakeman Jr., Frederic (1985), The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

57 58

Kahn 1971: 47–48. Kahn 1971: 51.

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Wang Zhenghan (1999), “Meng Sen de Ming Qing shi lunzhu jikan,” in Guangming ribao, 17 September, 1999. Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹 (2004), Wanqing nuxing yu jindai Zhongguo 晚清女性與近代中國. Beijing: Beijing University Press. Zhu Shizhe 朱師轍 (1971), Qing shi shu wen 清史述聞. Taibei: Yuetian chubanshe.

LIBERALISM AND NATIONALISM AT A CROSSROADS: THE GUOMINDANG’S EDUCATIONAL POLICIES, 1927–1930 Chiu-chun Lee Translated by Tze-ki Hon

In current scholarship, the founding of the Nationalist government in 1927 is considered a pivotal event in the development of modern Chinese education. Before 1927, education was the province of village gentry and local elites who used their control of schools to inuence local and national politics. It was, according to Marianne Bastid, a vehicle to preserve “local autonomy.”1 In the early 1920s, at the height of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, education was also a tool to liberate the Chinese from oppressive tradition and social customs. Its goal, in the words of Paul Bailey, was “to reform the people,” turning them into honest, hard-working, and public-minded citizens.2 After 1927, however, the focus of education changed. Instead of an arena where local leaders could assert their power, education became an extension of the Guomindang’s control over the country. Rather than developing citizens’ individual talents, it was a means to unify China, based on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People.3 Such a change, as Wen-hsin Yeh has pointed out, was part of the “partication of education” (danghua jiaoyu 黨化教育), through which the Guomindang sought to gain full control over school administration, curriculum, and textbooks.4 It was also, according to Hong-ming Liang, a result of the Guomindang’s efforts to “regulate revolution” in the wake of massive labor and student movements.5 Regardless of whether the Guomindang leaders were passive or proactive in educational reforms, it is clear that around 1927 the “liberal” phase of Chinese education gave way to

1 2 3 4 5

Bastid 1988: 53–65. See also Borthwick 1983: 87–103. Bailey 1990: 64–157. See also Schwintzer 1992: 55–270. Peake 1932: 72–158. Yeh 1990: 167–82. Liang 2003: 1–48.

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its “nationalistic” age, ushering in a new educational philosophy that stressed discipline, uniformity, and efciency.6 To some scholars, a prime example of this Manichaean view of modern Chinese education is the replacement in 1928 of Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1867–1940) with Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1890–1949) as the country’s top educational leader. A well-known educator in the late Qing and the early Republican periods, Cai was instrumental in building the modern school system in China after the 1911 Revolution. In the early 1920s, he established his liberal image by converting Beijing University from a preparation school for government ofcials into a research center for scholars of different political orientations.7 In 1927, months before the founding of the Nanjing government, he was asked to head the University Council (Daxue yuan 大學院), the new government’s highest authority in education. But after a year, he lost his job and the University Council was abolished. Replacing him was the political ideologue Dai Jitao, who reinterpreted the Three Principles of the People to unify China. Instead of scholars at the University Council, bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education ( Jiaoyu bu 教育部) made decisions on education. These rapid changes, all of which took place in less than a year, seem to conrm the dominant view that the Guomindang began a “partication of education” shortly after it had consolidated its power.8 They appear to reinforce the prevalent perception that in education, liberalism gave way to nationalism around 1927.9 But were the early twentieth-century Chinese educational reforms nothing but a struggle between liberalism and nationalism? Did the replacement of Cai Yuanpei with Dai Jitao represent a major shift in the Guomindang’s educational policies? Did the abolition of the University Council signify the beginning of the Guomindang’s “partication of education”? To answer these questions, I will examine the Guomindang educational debates from 1927 to 1930—the critical years when the Nationalist government established its control over the country. In particular, I will focus on the educational views of Cai and Dai. Often seen as diametrically opposite in their views on education,

6 Hong-ming Liang argues that this transition from the “liberal” to the “nationalist” phase of Chinese education led to a different understanding of “Enlightenment,” “citizenship,” and “education.” See Liang 2003: 175–214. 7 Duiker 1977. 8 For details of this view, see Chen 1976: 180–4; Linden 1968. 9 For details of this perception, see Chan and Dirlik 1991: 46.

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Cai and Dai actually had a lot in common in their quest to modernize the Chinese educational system. Despite Cai’s reputation as a “liberal,” in the late 1920s he focused his attention on strengthening the social and political order, and supported the Guomindang’s efforts to unify the country. Similarly, despite Dai’s reputation as a “nationalist,” in the late 1920s he saw the transformation of the individual as an essential part of Guomindang educational policies. As will be shown below, the rise and fall of the University Council was far more complicated than “the transition from liberalism to nationalism.” Instead of the end of liberalism, the demise of the University Council was a result of a host of factors, including the different visions of revolution among the Guomindang leaders, the different views of educators in using schools as a tool of social reform, and the different assessments of the worker and student protests in the mid 1920s.

The Dual Roles of the University Council On the surface, it appears that the appointment of Cai Yuanpei as the head of the University Council was the triumph of liberalism. Founded in June 7, 1927, the University Council was an independent agency with absolute power over education. As the highest educational authority, it had total control over matters related to scientic research, curriculum, school budgets, staff, and student life. No government department, including the top leaders of the Nationalist government, could inuence or reverse the decisions of the University Council. With complete nancial and administrative independence, the University Council symbolized the separation of politics and education that many educators had fought for after the 1911 Revolution. In many respects, with his longstanding commitment to the autonomy of education, Cai was the perfect person to lead the University Council. Back in the 1910s, in the midst of warlordism and partisan politics, Cai had written profusely to advocate the autonomy of education. In the article “On the Autonomy of Education” ( Jiaoyu duli yi 教育獨立議), for instance, he derided politicians and government ofcials for selshly intervening in the running of schools to gain political inuence.10 To give educators complete control of education, he suggested creating

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“Jiaoyu duli yi,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 177–8.

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university districts (daxue qu 大學區) throughout the country. In each university district, he planned to form a committee of university professors who would oversee activities in universities, secondary schools, and primary schools. For Cai, there would not be a stable, productive, and pluralistic society unless specialists were allowed to make decisions in their specialized elds. Indeed, if one compares Cai’s writings in the 1910s with the structure of the University Council in the late 1920s, it appears that the latter was an implementation of the former. Under Cai’s leadership, the University Council proposed to create four university districts that covered areas controlled by the Guomindang at the time: Guangdong, Hubei, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.11 In each university district, a major university would be identified as the administrative center of the district. To highlight their administrative role in the system, all four major universities would be called Zhongshan University after the nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen. Thus, Guangdong would be headed by Number One Zhongshan University, Hubei would be anchored by Number Two Zhongshan University, and so on.12 In each Zhongshan University, professors would be the ones making decisions on research agenda, school budget, curriculum, staff, and textbooks. Upon closer examination, the similarity between Cai’s early writings and the structure of the University Council was more apparent than real. The key difference between the two was the historical context. In the 1910s, as young revolutionaries, Cai and his cohorts were building a new republic distinct from a dynasty. With respect to education, they found the subservience of scholars to the imperial government during the Qing period utterly unacceptable. To change the cultural atmosphere, they strongly supported a liberal program for education, in which educators would freely develop students’ moral character and untapped potentials. Their demand for the autonomy of education can be described as “liberalism” in the sense of building a pluralistic society and developing students’ individual needs; but it should be understood as part of their quest for a dynamic and equal society where publicminded citizens would do their best to help one another. In the late 1920s, however, Cai and other liberals had doubts about the autonomy of education. After witnessing the upheavals caused by

11 12

Shen bao 235 ( June 10th, 1927): 195. Shen bao 235 ( June 12th, 1927): 266; 236 ( June 12th, 1927): 183.

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warlordism and massive student protests against foreign invasions, they worried that when educators and students were given too much freedom, some of them might misuse that freedom to disrupt the social order. A case in point is the well-known liberal thinker Hu Shi 胡適. In the wake of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, Hu was so disturbed by student protests in Shanghai and Guangzhou that he told students “to stay home to study, and not to be concerned with trivial matters” (bimen dushu, buguan xianshi 閉門讀書, 不管閑事).13 Hu’s admonition, of course, had little effect on student activists, who had seen the potential in mobilizing the masses. Even Hu’s own student Gu Jiegang, a wellknown iconoclast in historical studies, tried to persuade Hu to join the Guomingdang to work for the Nationalist revolution.14 The same was true of Cai Yuanpei. Having returned to China in 1926 after three years of self-imposed exile in Europe, Cai became politically active. In the span of three years, he had assumed a number of political duties, ranging from organizing “the movement to protect the Guomindang and to save the nation” (hudang jiuguo yuandong 護黨救國運動) to passing legislation to investigate Communist Party members for political insurrection.15 In this context, his appointment to lead the University Council was one of many political roles that he assumed in helping to found the Nationalist government. Although Cai did not explicitly discuss the purpose of his political activism, in a letter he wrote to Hu Shi inviting him to join the University Council, he indicated that he saw the University Council not as a separate agency from the Guomindang, but as an arm of the party in preaching Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People.16 In an article he contributed to Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao 中央日報) in 1928, he went so far as to declare that “there is no political party outside of the Guomindang, and the Guomindang includes all talents in the country” (dangwai wudang, nangkuo changcai 黨外無黨, 囊括長才).17 Clearly, after 1926, Cai saw the Guomindang as an antidote to the loss of social order owing to warlordism, the communist movement, and student protests. As the head of the University Council, he saw himself not just as an educator

13

“Li Xiangdong zhi Hu Shi,” in Hu 1983: vol. 1, 348. “Gu Jiegang zhi Hu Shi,” in Hu 1983: vol. 1, 428. 15 Xu 1979. See also Zhongguo Guomindang 1953: vol. 17, 3086; vol. 18, 3279, 3312. 16 “Fu Hu Shi han,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 162. 17 “Zhongyang ribao chuangkan ci,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 198. 14

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protecting the autonomy of education, but also as a leader of a political movement to restore political and social order.

New Liberalism At rst glance, it may seem contradictory that the University Council was both the highest authority in education and an arm of the Guomindang’s campaign to unify the country. But for Cai, the two roles of the University Council were complementary, because the autonomy of education was to serve the goal of national unication. This view, clearly expressed in Cai’s pronouncements on founding the University Council, showed a major shift in his position on education. In the 1910s, as a young revolutionary, he focused on the training of the individual. For example, in his 1912 article “My Views on New Education” (Duiyu xin jianyu de yijian 對于新教育的意見), he stressed three aspects of the new school system: military training, vocational training, and ethical and aesthetical training. He wrote: “The goal of military training is to condition the body; the goal of vocational training is to develop the mind; the goal of ethical and aesthetical training is to promote morality. What unites the three together is an understanding of the world.”18 At that time, Cai saw “new education” as both a continuation of the traditional Confucian education and an introduction of Western educational methods. The purpose of “new education” was to develop the latent potential of each individual, making certain that he would have a healthy body, an inquisitive mind, and strong moral tenets. Missing in Cai’s thinking were the notions of nation and citizenship that would link an individual to a bigger political and social body. Also missing was the teleological progression of a world order that would give China a denite role and a clear goal in the twentieth century. For young Cai, shaped by both Confucianism and a Western liberal arts education, “new education” was to help students discover and develop their potential to face problems of an ever-changing world. In the late 1920s, by contrast, Cai saw the role of education differently. In his “Publication Notes” to the “University Council Bulletin” (Daxueyuan gongbao 大學院公報) in January 1928, Cai spelled out the three major goals of the University Council: (1) promote scientic

18

“Duiyu xin jianyu de yijian,” in Cai 1988: vol. 2, 135.

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research and popularize scientic method; (2) cultivate a habit of physical labor; (3) spread interest in aesthetics.19 Despite the continuing emphasis on physical and aesthetical training, the three goals of the University Council were substantially different from his three aspects of “new education” of the 1910s. Rather than developing the latent ability of an individual, the University Council was to coordinate activities to mold a nation by setting the agenda for scientic research, creating a curriculum to teach scientic methods, and training citizens to be physically t and aesthetically cultivated. This emphasis on collectivity was particularly clear in Cai’s redenition of physical and aesthetical training. Instead of developing the body of an individual, he saw physical training as a means to break down social barriers between mental and menial labor. Instead of developing an individual’s cultural taste, he saw aesthetical training as a way of strengthening the bond among citizens and forging a collective identity among the nationals.20 In both cases, he regarded education as the foundation for a harmonious and supportive society. Cai’s change of view did not imply that he had given up on training the individual. In fact, in his pronouncement on the goals of the University Council, he continued to stress the need for helping individuals develop their potential. But in contrast to his writings in the 1910s, he no longer saw education as solely the training of the heart and mind of an individual; rather, he saw it as a bridge between self and society. This shift in emphasis led to Cai’s different understanding of the autonomy of education. In the spring of 1927, he replaced Zhang Jingjiang 張靜江 as chairman/director of the Guomindang Political Committee in Zhejiang. In his new capacity, he submitted a detailed plan for rebuilding the province. With respect to education, he called for the establishment of research centers, where the province’s best scientists would conduct research on the geological and material history of the province. In regard to higher education, he proposed closing traditional academies, private schools, and missionary schools, and replacing them with modern universities nanced and administered by the provincial government. He suggested converting teacher-training schools into tutoring centers, where teachers would learn new pedagogical skills and the Guomindang-approved curriculum. These measures,

19 20

“Daxueyuan gongbao fankan ci,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 194–5. “Duiyu xin jianyu de yijian,” in Cai 1988: vol. 2, 132.

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Cai contended, would give educators the power to shape educational policy, and at the same time, ensure that they would strictly follow the political agenda of the Guomindang.21 Similar to his discussion of physical and aesthetical education, Cai’s emphasis was on the relationship between self and society, part and whole. As with an individual who has to be a member of society, education cannot exist in isolation, but in harmony with the polity. Underlying Cai’s new understanding of the autonomy of education was his organic view of society. In an article he published before the opening of the First National Conference on Education in 1928, he expressed his support of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. There, he presented his own interpretation of the founding principles of the Guomindang. Instead of viewing the Three Principles of the People as three discrete political concepts—nation, political rights, and people’s livelihoods—he saw them as three interlocking realms linking an individual to society and nation. Although in sequence, the three principles began with nation and then extended to political rights and people’s livelihoods, Cai believed that they could also be understood in reverse order. “The ultimate goal [of the three principles],” he wrote, “lies in the improvement of people’s livelihoods.”22 With the enrichment in individuals’ material and cultural lives, he asserted, family ties and kinship would be strengthened. With the strengthening of family ties and kinship, village and provincial networks would be consolidated. With the consolidation of village and provincial networks, a national identity would be formed, distinguishing the Chinese from other peoples in the world. Above all, through this series of interlocking realms, an individual would nd his calling in groups, extending from what was near to what was far away, and from what was concrete to what had to be imagined. Certainly one may argue that Cai modied his view in order to t the Guomindang ideology. At the same time, one should also be mindful of Cai’s strong commitment to educational reforms. As shown by his noncooperation with the Beiyang government in the mid 1920s, he was willing to sacrice his career when he felt he was forced to go against his own view. When he felt pressed, he could go so far as to condemn

21

“Xin Zhejiang zhi di yi bu,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 126–7. “Xuexiao shi wei yanjiu xueshu er she,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 218. See also “Sanmin zhuyi yu guoyu,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 410–16. 22

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the government in public, as he once did in 1923.23 Thus, it may be more accurate to see Cai’s support of the early Nationalist government as a result of his change of perspective on the individual. Rather than viewing the individual as discrete and independent, he saw him as a complex social being with multiple identities, linking family to village, village to province, province to nation, and nation to world. As such, an individual was not merely responsible for himself; instead, he had different responsibilities in social groups, big and small.

The Abolition of the University Council Despite the support of top Guomindang leaders, the University Council was quickly in trouble. Six months after its establishment, the University Council was the target of criticism at the Guomindang Fourth Plenum. Held in January 1928, the Fourth Plenum departed from previous Guomindang meetings by focusing on education. This shift of attention was an indication that in the wake of student protests of 1925, the Guomindang leaders realized that education was an important tool of social control. In the public announcement after the meeting, the Guomindang declared that education “is indeed a life-and-death matter of Chinese citizens.”24 Its importance, the announcement continued, lay in the fact that students were susceptible to temptations and erroneous thoughts because they were “still developing their body and mind.” The announcement concluded that education must occupy the central position in the Guomindang’s war against “erroneous ideologies” such as communism.25 With so much attention paid to education at the Fourth Plenum, different branches of the Nanjing government and different cliques within the Guomindang competed for political capital by targeting the University Council. Their criticisms were directed at the dual roles of the University Council as the highest authority in scientic research and the administrative nexus of the national school system. On the one hand, some criticized it for being elitist in sponsoring cutting-edge research, rather than expanding primary and secondary education.26 23 24 25 26

Sun 1987: 710. Rong 1985: 512–3. Rong 1985: 512–3. Chen 1976: 144.

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On the other hand, some criticized it for being an excessively intrusive arm of the government.27 Yet these criticisms were more cosmetic than real, because they only challenged the seemingly conicting roles of the University Council, not its foundational ideas. Dai Jitao’s challenge was a different story. In the late 1920s, as the main political adviser of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Dai became the leading interpreter of the Three Principles of the People. More important, he developed a power base in Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, where he cultivated friendships with scholars and politicians from various parts of the country. In fact, some of the politicians who publicly criticized the University Council at the Fourth Plenum were Dai’s former colleagues at Zhongshan University. With his prestige as a political ideologue and his power in Zhongshan University, Dai directly challenged the University Council by refusing to change the name of the university. As discussed earlier, under Cai’s plan, each university district would be headed by a university, and the universities would be called Zhongshan University distinguished by number. In Guangdong, as the stronghold of Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang in the early 1920s, Cai planned to name Zhongshan University of the city as “Number One Zhongshan University” to honor its political legacy. Normally, Cai’s offer would be accepted with gratitude as a favor to Guangdong. But Dai saw it differently. He postponed the establishment of the Guangdong University District, and refused to change the name of the university on the grounds of faithfully honoring the revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen. As a result of Dai’s strong inuence in the Guomindang, the top leaders of the Nationalist government sided with Dai. On January 28, 1928, the Nationalist government decided to revise Cai’s plan for the University Council. The revision included putting an end to Cai’s plan for renaming universities, and designating Zhongshan University in Guangzhou as the only university in the country bearing that name to “forever commemorate the premier, Sun Yat-sen.”28 More devastating to Cai was Dai Jitao’s counterproposal to reform education. At the First National Conference on Education in May 1928, through his deputies, Dai circulated a new proposal for educational reforms known as “The Proposal from Guangdong and Guangxi” (Liangguang ti’an 兩廣提案). In the proposal, Dai raised several objec-

27 28

Chen 1976: 146–7. Guangzhou minguo ribao 24 (24 February 1928): 262. See also Chen 1976: 76.

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tions to Cai’s educational policies. One of them was aimed at the purported lack of focus in Cai’s educational plan. In the preamble to the proposal, Dai proclaimed that the purpose of education was “to unify millions of people into one person, and to center their attention on commonly shared goals.”29 Moving from abstract theoretical issues to concrete administrative blunders, he pointed out that the organizers of the First National Conference on Education failed to put forward a coherent agenda, causing unnecessary confusion during the conference.30 He equated the conference sessions with entries in an encyclopedia, offering general information but lacking a central theme and a clear focus. He complained that there were so many proposals that they neither provided clear guidance nor offered concrete suggestions to improve the school system.31

New Nationalism The historical facts show that Dai’s complaints were to the point. During the conference, altogether four hundred proposals were tabled, and twelve different sessions covered various aspects of the country’s education.32 Indeed, Cai’s intention was to make the conference as broad and inclusive as possible, so that it would, as one writer put it, “include everything under the sun with respect to education.”33 For Cai, the conference was to exemplify his notion of an organic society, at which different groups from various parts of the country would have the opportunity to express their views. In his mind, the purpose of the conference was not so much to formulate policies as to serve as a forum for national dialogue. For this reason, Cai did not see the lack of focus at the conference as a shortcoming; instead, he saw it as an important milestone in the history of modern Chinese education. To underscore the signicance of the conference, Cai wrote in the preface to “The Report of [the First] National Conference on Education”: “Invariably some proposals at the conference will not satisfy everyone, and our 29 “Queli jiaoyu fangzhen shixing sanmin chuyi de jiaoyu jianshe yili jiuguo daji an,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 437. 30 “Queli jiaoyu fangzhen shi genben jiuguo qishuo jiangci,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 457. 31 “Jiaoyu huiyi yu jiaoyu fang’an jiangci,” in Dai Jitao 1959: vol. 2, 510. 32 Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan n.d.: dian pian 丁編, 7. 33 Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan n.d.: dian pian, 7.

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fellow citizens will have different responses to this report. But undoubtedly the proposals have expressed the public’s views on education. For this reason, the University Council must accept and act on those proposals that express the public views cogently and rationally.”34 For Dai, however, such an attempt to include diverse views at a national conference was a waste of time. In his opinion, conference participants should not look for new perspectives; instead, they should seek guidance and advice in carrying out the educational policies of the government. Thus, when he organized the Second National Conference on Education in 1930, he completely changed the format of the conference. Rather than organizing a series of sessions discussing proposals raised by different groups, he allowed discussion of a small number of proposals. To control the agenda of the conference, only proposals that were approved by the Ministry of Education would be brought to the table. Conference attendees were expected to rene or revise the approved proposals, but they were not allowed to discuss matters unrelated to the proposals.35 These changes illustrate a fundamental difference between Cai and Dai in viewing society. Whereas Cai treasured diversity and pluralism as the foundations of a complex and harmonious society, Dai saw uniformity and efciency as the cornerstones of a cohesive and structured society. In many respects, the abolition of the University Council in 1928 was the result of the replacement of the former view by the latter as the guiding principle of the Guomindang’s educational policies. In addition, Dai Jitao criticized the University Council for its lack of effort in improving “mass education” ( jiceng jiaoyu 基層教育). By mass education, Dai meant both primary and secondary education and local educational administration. With respect to primary and secondary education, he saw the University Council as an elitist institution that stressed cutting-edge research, rather than reforming the curricula of primary and secondary schools. For him, such a bias went against the goals of the Nationalist Revolution. As a political ideologue of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang, he attempted to nd a path for the Guomindang in an increasingly hostile and volatile political environment.36 As he understood it, during the 1920s the Guomindang was challenged both 34

Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan n.d.: dian pian, 1. Wu 1971: 62–3. See also Liang 2003: 184–200. 36 “Guomin geming yu zhongguo guomin dang” in Dai 1967: vol. 2, 425–52; “Sanmin zhuyi zhi zhexue jichu” 三民主義之哲學基礎, in Dai 1967: vol. 2, 414–15. 35

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from the left and from the right. In pushing for a social revolution from the bottom, the leftists stressed class conicts and mass mobilization. In promoting individual rights and civil liberties, the rightists stressed the autonomy of the individual and the rule of law. As the leading revolutionary force, Dai argued, the Guomindang provided the middle ground between these two competing political agendas. On the one hand, the Guomindang was a political organization that was above class differences, but it was committed, like the leftists, to changing the social structure in China. As codied in Sun Yat-sen’s Third Principle of the People, it would improve the livelihoods of the poor, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised, but without resorting to political violence to alter the preexisting social structure. On the other hand, the Guomindang was a nationalist organization that would bring different individuals into a collectivity. As expressed in Sun’s First and Second Principles of the People, the Guomindang would protect the rights of the individual and the interests of special groups, as the rightists advocated, for the purpose of making the nation strong and unied. Underlying Dai’s view of the Guomindang revolution was his belief that national conicts, particularly the conicts among nation-states and between fellow citizens, were more important than class conicts and social clashes. Because of this, education played a crucial role in the Guomindang revolution. First, as a ladder of success, education promoted social mobility by leveling the playing eld for the poor, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised. It was part and parcel of the Guomindang’s social revolution. Second, being a mechanism of socialization and acculturation, education helped to nurture a sense of belonging among different individuals, turning them into responsible citizens and patriotic nationals. It was central to the Guomindang’s nationalist revolution. In both areas, Dai argued, the University Council had failed its mission by ignoring primary and secondary education.37 In particular, he pinpointed the lack of effort in providing a smooth transition from primary schools to secondary schools, which caused widespread frustration among students and led to large numbers of dropouts. To solve the problem, Dai called on educators to improve the educational system so that “primary schools will be the preparation for secondary schools, and secondary schools will be the preparation for

37 “Qingnian sixiang de quxiang yu jiaoyu fangzhen jianci” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 469–70.

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university.”38 He saw no way to fulll the social and nationalist goals of the Guomindang revolution without structured curricula in primary and secondary schools. For a similar reason, Dai argued, the Guomindang should not ignore the voices of local educators who were the foot soldiers of primary and secondary education. He found problems in the list of participants at the First National Conference on Education. In total, there were eighty-ve participants at the First National Conference. Of that number, only 19 percent were local ofcials, compared to 32 percent of university administrators and 38 percent of party representatives.39 For Dai, the low turnout of local educators was another indication of the elitism of the University Council. Rather than helping local ofcials improve their schools, the University Council focused its attention on higher education. To change the priority in education, Dai made extra efforts to increase the attendance of local educators at the Second National Conference on Education. At that conference, out of 114 attendants, 38 percent were local educators, almost double their representation at the previous conference.40 To achieve the social and nationalistic goals of the Guomindang revolution, Dai also criticized Cai for providing students with insufcient training in practical skills. Dai’s critique went beyond the elitism of the University Council and was aimed at Cai’s notion of the individual. As mentioned earlier, in Cai’s plan, the University Council would form university districts to give university professors full control over school budget, staff, and curriculum. The system gave university professors a high degree of autonomy as long as they were willing to follow the Guomindang educational policies. But because its emphasis was on research and higher education, Cai’s plan did not include the teaching of practical skills, such as agriculture, sports, and pedagogy. Dai saw this emphasis as a major pitfall in Cai’s plan, because it did not connect the classroom with the outside world. By separating academic life from daily life, he asserted, Cai’s plan not only diminished students’ interest in school, but also limited the role of education in promoting social

38 “Qingnian sixiang de quxiang yu jiaoyu fangzhen jianci,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 469–70. 39 For a list of participants at the First National Conference on Education, see Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan n.d.: vol. 1, 21–29. 40 For a list of participants at the Second National Conference on Education, see Wu 1971: vol. 1, 8–21.

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mobility and national unity.41 To make his point, he cited the example of “a horse for transporting goods” in a primary school textbook. To students in many areas in China, where horses were used for this purpose, the example might be an accurate depiction of daily life. But for students in Mongolia, where a horse was used for riding, sports, and herding, the example did not make any sense.42 Thus, Dai demanded a total revamping of the curricula of primary and secondary schools. These differences between Dai and Cai can also be seen in two government documents. Passed in 1929 after the First National Conference on Education, the “temporary curriculum” (Zhanxing kecheng biaozhun 暫行課程標準) reected Cai’s view on primary and secondary education. Designed by professional historians, such as Chen Xunci 陳訓慈 (1901–1991), Chen Hengzhe, Gu Jiegang, He Bingsong, and Lei Haizong 雷海宗 (1902–1962), the “temporary curriculum” stressed the training of critical thinking, empirical research, and global vision. Probably inuenced by Gu Jiegang’s historical view, the “temporary curriculum” did not trace the origin of Chinese history to the Yellow Emperor, and described pre-Zhou history as myth on the grounds that it lacked substantial historical evidence.43 Reecting the foreign training of the members of the curriculum committee (e.g., Chen Hengzhe, He Bingsong, and Lei Haizong), the “temporary curriculum” adopted the Western historical model of dividing history into three stages: ancient, medieval, and modern. To stress China’s links with the rest of the world, the “temporary curriculum” began the modern age with the mid Ming, when Europeans established trade routes to East Asia, and ended the period with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, when China became part of the global competition for power.44 To further emphasize China’s role in the world, the “temporary curriculum” adopted the Western calendar in narrating history, so that events in China could be compared to those happened elsewhere.45 In contrast, the “revised curriculum” (Chongxing xiuzheng kecheng biaozhun 重行修正課程標準) of 1940 reected Dai’s view on primary 41

“Queli jiaoyu fangzhen shi genben jiuguo qishuo jiangci,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2,

441. 42 “Qingnian sixiang de quxiang yu jiaoyu fangzhen jianci,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 469–70. 43 Zhongxiaoxue kecheng zanxing biaozhun 1930: vol. 3 “Gaoji zhongxue zhi bu,” 42. 44 Zhongxiaoxue kecheng zanxing biaozhun 1930: vol. 3 “Gaoji zhongxue zhi bu,” 45–50. 45 Zhongxiaoxue kecheng zanxing biaozhun 1930: vol. 2 “Chuoji zhongxue zhi bu,” 28.

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and secondary education.46 Passed during the Sino-Japanese War, the “revised curriculum” was full of nationalistic rhetoric and aimed at mass mobilization. It dened the goal of teaching history in primary and secondary schools as “describing the evolution of the Chinese race and the basis of the unity of the nation, with special attention on the harmonious integration and mutual dependence of ethnic groups.”47 To do so, the “revised curriculum” traced the origin of the Chinese race to the Yellow Emperor, and discussed in great detail the contributions of each dynasty in strengthening and expanding the Chinese race.48 This emphasis on the single source of the Chinese race was in line with Dai’s view of the Guomindang’s nationalist revolution. At the same time, in stressing the genealogy and the uniqueness of the Chinese race, the “revised curriculum” offered a view of the past that was strikingly narrow. It described China as an autochthonous entity and deemphasized its links with the rest of the world. In addition, probably shaped by the events of the time, the “revised curriculum” focused on the brutality of foreign aggressors and the Chinese resistance to foreign occupation. Contrary to the “temporary curriculum,” which dated the modern age from the mid-Ming to 1905, the “revised curriculum” limited it to the Qing period to highlight the theme of foreign aggression and occupation.49 It identied the 1911 Revolution as the starting point of the contemporary period (xiandai 現代) to underscore the importance of the founding of the Republic as the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.50

Similarities between New Nationalism and New Liberalism Their differences notwithstanding, Cai and Dai shared three common concerns. First, both of them were deeply suspicious of the student movement. Between the two, Cai was perhaps more receptive to the

46

Before 1940, two attempts were made to standardize the curriculum of primary and secondary school. One attempt was made in 1933 which produced a document known as the “Permanent Curriculum” (Zhenshi kecheng biaozhun 正式課程標準). Two years later, a meeting was called to revise the “Permanent Curriculum.” Unfortunately documents of these two earlier revisions are not available. 47 Xiuzheng chugaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun 1946: 102. 48 Xiuzheng chugaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun 1946: 103. 49 Xiuzheng chugaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun 1946: 104. 50 Xiuzheng chugaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun 1946: 105.

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student movement, at least in principle, as indicated by his early support of student protests during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Yet, in the 1920s, Cai clearly had second thoughts about the student movement. By the First National Conference on Education in 1928, he spoke out publicly against it. He said: “Certainly, there must be reasons for students to organize protests. But there are many ways to save the country. For students, their primary duty is to study hard and to perform well in school.”51 To turn the tide, he asked conference participants to think long and hard about “helping students forgo their old habits and return to the right path” (wanhui jixi, daoru zhenggui 挽回積習, 導入正軌).52 Similarly, Dai was deeply skeptical of student protests. Since his early days as a young political activist against the Qing government, Dai was adept at political mobilization, particularly in the student protest movement. Yet, after he became a powerful Guomindang leader in the 1920s, he became uneasy with student movements.53 To put a lid on spreading student unrest, he devoted a full section in the “Proposal from Guangdong and Guangxi” to discussing ways to “save today’s youth.” Some of his suggestions in that section were later incorporated in the “Legislations on Students’ Self Autonomy” (Xuesheng zizhi tiaoli 學生自治條例), passed by First National Conference on Education. Included in the legislations were rules that restricted student activities to campus and forbade students from intervening in provincial and national affairs.54 In Cai’s and Dai’s educational plans, their fear of student movements translated into institutional arrangements to limit the scope and the size of student activities. In Cai’s plan, the University Council was the highest authority in each University District. It controlled all aspects of education in the district, ranging from primary and secondary schools to universities and research centers. Its authority extended from controlling the budget and staff to approving curriculum and textbooks. This top-down approach was meant to give educators, particularly university professors, full control of schools and student activities. In the same vein, Dai’s system was intended to strengthen party/government control over schools, particularly primary and secondary schools. 51 52 53 54

“Quanguo jiaoyu huiyi kaihui ci,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 229. “Quanguo jiaoyu huiyi kaihui ci,” in Cai 1988: vol. 5, 229. “Zhi Huolin Xiaoxue Cheng Jichan xiansheng shu” in Dai 1959: vol. 2, 767. “Xuesheng zizhi tiaoli,” in Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan n.d.: 65–8.

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By emphasizing the “smooth transition” from primary to secondary schools, he wanted to keep young students focused on learning and to give them incentives to move through the school system. This bottomup approach was meant to give educators more resources to shape the minds and hearts of students. Another similarity between Cai and Dai was that both saw research as a key component of education. In Cai’s plan, the University Council was not merely an administrative agency, but also a research institution. It set long-term research agenda, approved research projects, and recruited scholars and scientists. Harking back to his early years, when he converted Beijing University into a world-class research center, he described the goal of the University Council as “changing the bureaucracy into an educational agency.”55 Similarly, Dai put a premium on research. As head of Zhongshan University, he recruited rst-rate scholars and scientists to campus, and focused attention on “completing high-level academic research” and “improving research facilities.”56 Chinese history in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had taught both men that China had to improve its store of knowledge in order to be successful in the global competition for wealth and power. The third similarity between Cai and Dai was their emphasis on building a centralized educational system. As mentioned previously, Cai’s University Council was a centralized apparatus controlling every aspect of education in the country. As the highest authority in education, the University Council promoted the autonomy of education by giving university professors the power to control educational policies. At the same time, the council limited education to a tool of national unity. Similarly, Dai wanted to improve the educational system to achieve the social and nationalistic goals of the Guomindang revolution. Much of his criticism of Cai, as we recall, was directed at what he saw as Cai’s failure in establishing a cohesive and centralized educational system. Dai further revealed his interest in building a centralized educational system in his attacks on the Jiangsu Education Association ( Jiangsu jiaoyu hui 江蘇教育會) and the Commercial Press. He criticized the former for developing a school system to serve local interests, particularly the interests of provincial leaders who wanted to expand their power. He criti-

55 56

Cai 1988: vol. 5, 138. “Qingnian zhilu” in Dai 1967: vol. 2, 548.

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cized the latter for using the school system to prot from its monopoly of the publication of primary and secondary school textbooks.57

Conclusion What these similarities show is that the failure of the University Council was not merely a transition from liberalism to nationalism. Even if we call Cai a liberal, his liberalism in the 1920s was no longer centered on protecting the rights of the individual. Rather, he focused attention on building a centralized educational system to link an individual to family, society, and nation. His “new liberalism” was a direct response to the collapse of social order in the late 1920s, and it remained a prominent view among the Guomindang leaders throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly, even if we call Dai a nationalist, his nationalism in the 1920s was not just concerned with the growth of the nation’s wealth and power. Rather, he focused attention on building a social network that would bring different groups together. His “new nationalism” represented a more nuanced understanding of a rapidly growing China, where people could remain different and still have a shared sense of collectivity. Its prominence in the late 1920s indicated the Guomindang leaders’ concern with the challenge of a complex and diverse society. If indeed both Cai and Dai were shaped by the social environment of their times, they differed in using education as a tool of social cohesion. For Cai, the goal of education remained, at its root, the development of an individual. No matter how grandiose his education plan was, its mission was to better the individual, making him a moral individual, a productive member of society, a responsible citizen, a patriotic national, and a conscientious global citizen. Under Cai’s plan, different forms of human community were connected together, but they were connected on the basis of an individual who was physically healthy and aesthetically cultivated. For Dai, in contrast, the goal of education was ultimately to serve the practical needs of a productive society. Developing the character of an individual was important, but it was secondary to the training of efcient workers, administrators, and government ofcers.

57

455.

“Queli jiaoyu fangzhen shi genben jiuguo qishuo jiangci,” in Dai 1959: vol. 2,

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chiu-chun lee

The problems of the University Council, in Dai’s view, were not its pedagogical goals or its administrative structure, but its impracticality and inefciency in disseminating knowledge in a fast-growing China.

References Cited Bailey, Paul J. (1990), Reform the People: Changing Attitudes towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bastid, Marianne (1988), Educational Reform in Early 20th-Century China, translated by Paul J. Bailey. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, the University of Michigan. Borthwick, Sally (1983), Education and Social Change in China: The Beginnings of the Modern Era. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1988), Cai Yuanpei quan ji 蔡元培全集 (Complete Work of Cai Yuanpei). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Chan, Ming K. and Arif Dirlik (1991), Schools into Fields and Factories. Durham: Duke University Press. Chen Zhesan 陳哲三 (1976), Zhonghua minguo daxue yuan zhi yanjiu 中華民國大學院之 研究. Taibei: Taiwan xiangwu yinshuguan. Dai Jitao 戴季陶 (1959), Dai Jitao xiansheng wencun 戴季陶先生文存 (Writings of Mr. Dai Jitao). Taibei: Zhongyang wenwu gongyingshe. —— (1967), Dai Jitao xiansheng wencun zai xubian 戴季陶先生文存再續編 (The Third Collection of the Writings of Mr. Dai Jitao). Taibei: Taiwan shangwu xinshuguan, 1967. Duiker, William J. (1977), Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei, Educator of Modern China. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Guangzhou minguo ribao 廣州民國日報 (Republic Daily of Guangzhou). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982 reprint. Hu Shi (1983), Hu Shi laiwang shuxin xuan 胡適來往書信選 (A Selection of Hu Shi’s Correspondences). Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju. Liang, Hong-ming (2003), “Regulating Revolution: Citizenship, Education, and the Politics of Chinese Nationalism, 1927–1937.” PhD dissertation, Washington University-St. Louis, Missouri. Linden, Allen B. (1968), “Politics and Education in Nationalist China: The Case of the University Council, 1927–1928,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, 4 (Aug., 1968): 763–776. Peake, Cyrus H. (1932), Nationalism and Education in Modern China. New York: Howard Fertig, 1970 reprint. Rong Mengyuan 榮孟源 (ed.) (1985), Zhongguo guomindang lici daibiao dahui ji zhongyang quanhui ziliao 中國國民黨歷次代表大會及中央全會資料 (Sources of National Conferences and Central Committee Meetings of Guomindang). Beijing: Guangming chubanshe. Schwintzer, Ernest Peter (1992), “Education to Save the Nation: Huang Yanpei and the Educational Reform Movement in Early Twentieth Century China.” PhD dissertation, University of Washington. Shen bao 申報. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1982–1987 reprint. Sun Changwei 孫常煒 (ed.) (1987), Cai Yuanpei xiansheng nianpu zhuanji 蔡元培先生年譜 傳記 (The Year-by-year biography of Mr. Cai Yuanpei). Taipei: Guoshiguan. Wu Yanyin 吳研因 (1971), Di er ci quanguo jiaoyu huiyi shimo ji 第二次全國教育會議始 末記 (A Report on the Second National Educational Conference). Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, minguo shiliao congkan di er zhong.

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Xiuzheng chugaoji zhongxue kecheng biaozhun 修正初高級中學課程標準 (Revised Standard Curricula for Lower and Upper Secondary School) (1946). Shanghai: Zhengzhong shuju. Xu Zhiwei 許智偉 (1979), “Cai Yuanpei yu guomin geming 蔡元培與國民革命 (Cai Yuanpei and National Revolution),” in Cai Yuanpei zhuanji ziliao 蔡元培傳記資料 (Cai Yuanpei’s Biographical Sources), volume 3. Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 520. Yeh, Wen-hsin (1990), The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republic China, 1919– 1937. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. Zhongguo Guomindang (1953–), Geming wenxian 革命文獻 (Revolutionary Documents). Taibei: Zhongguo Guomindang zhongyang weiyuanhui dangshi shiliao bianzuan weiyuanhuai. Zhonghua minguo daxueyuan 中華民國大學院 (ed.) (n.d.), Quanguo jiaoyu huiyi baogao 全國教育會議報告 (Reports of National Educational Conferences). Taibei: Wenhui chuban she, jindai zhongguo shiliao congkan xubian no. 429. Zhongxiaoxue kecheng zhanxing biaozhun 中小學課程暫行標準 (Temporary Curricula for Primary and Secondary School) (1930), Shanghai: Qingyun tushu congsi.

INDEX

1898 reform movement 47, 120 1911 Revolution 74, 272, 310 abolition of examination system 113 Acadamia Sinica 179n45, 260, 262–3 Advisory Meeting of Defense (Guofang canyi hui) 171, 172n12 Ancient Classic Institute 198 Anderson, Benedict 3 anti-colonial revolution/struggle movements 212, 234–8, 241 anti-Manchuism 24, 33n27, 43 archeological discoveries 124 archives 49–52, 257–9, 263, 265–6 Baks (cf. Han) Bankimchandra 239 Bastid, Marianne 84 Battle of Feishui 90 Beijing Higher Normal School 220 Beijing University 146, 172, 218, 272, 274, 296, 312 Beiyang University 219–20 Biographies 125 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 80 Boxer Indemnity Scholarship 217 Boxer Uprising 46–7 Brook, Timothy 196 Buddhism 129, 133, 139 Cai Yuanpei viii, 10, 296–302, 305–6, 309–13 Cantonese 55, 66, 68–74 Central Training Corps (of GMD) 173 Chatterjee, Partha 239 Chen Dengyuan 136 Chen Hengzhe 12–4, 211, 217–20, 232–3, 242, 309 Chen Lifu 172, 174, 177–82, 184, 194 Chen Qubing 287 Chen Xunci 309 Chiang Kai-shek ( Jiang Jieshi) ix, 171–4, 179n12, 178, 304, 306 Chinese cultural identity 109, 110, 113 Chinese national identity 64–7, 68–75, 109, 110, 136, 139, 175–6, 188–91, 193–5, 203–4

Ching, May-bo 83 Chiyou 186, 190 citizen 63 civil service examinations (see examination system) civil society 109, 117, 136 civilization 35–39, 42 Commercial Press viii–ix, 4, 8, 13–4, 22, 81, 90–1, 95–6, 126, 131, 135, 137, 169–70, 180n51, 183–4, 191, 217–8, 221–2, 224, 273, 312 Confucian academic bureaucratic system 113, 137 Confucius 160, 199, 205 Confucianism 202n114, 206 Constitutionalism 47 Culture (wenhua) 113, 114, 139 cultural heroes, as myths 134, 135 cultural history 122, 124, 136 cultural relationships 132–3 Dagong bao: Shidi zhoukan 180n51 Dai Jitao 10, 169, 175, 183, 237, 296–7, 304–13 Daoism, textbook treatment of 33–34 de Lacouperie, Terrien 97 Deng Shi 96 Deng Zhicheng 136 Ding Baoshu 35, 38, 42, 44–6, 48–50 Dong Gang 198 Dongfang zazhi 91, 273 Draft History of the Qing 10, 272, 275–82, 292 dynastic cycle 24, 27, 34, 40, 43, 44–5 dynastic history 8, 86 Duara, Prasenjit 5, 79, 241 Dunhuang caves 124 Early China (by Zhang Yinlin) 143–67 education reforms 21, 47, 79–84, 94 education regulations 21–22, 28–32, 56, 82–3 Educational Review (cf. Jiaoyu zazhi) Einstein, Albert 213 Esherick, Joseph 102 Europeanization 212–3, 227, 229–33, 237, 241–2

318

index

evolution, Darwinian 123, 138, 139 evolutionary process (change) 132, 133 examination system (civil service) 79–80, 82, 89, 99, 110, 113, 115, 137, 139 Extraordinary Congress (Nationalist government) 172–3 Fen Wenlan 136, 138 Feng Youlan 2, 146, 153, 146 First National Conference on Education 302, 304–5, 308–9, 311 Five Barbarian Tribes (wuhu) 189 Fogel, Joshua 110 Fu Guangnian 36, 39, 47 Fu Sinian 136, 150, 172, 179, 180, 262–3, 266 Fu Weiping 183–4, 191–2, 214, 222–3, 226–8, 230, 232 Fu Yunsen (cf. Fu Weiping) Fuxi (Taihao) 36–7, 185 Gazetteer 55–61, 63–67, 70, 74–75 general history (tongshi) 8–9, 86, 109, 111, 112, 114, 120, 122–125, 127–8, 133, 135–6, 138, 152 golden age 40, 42 Gong Zizhen 149 Grand Secretariat Archives 252–3, 255–6, 262–4 Gu Cheng 195–6 Gu Jiegang ix, 1–2, 12–3, 111, 131–6, 155, 167–70, 178, 181, 309 Guang Xu (Emperor) 116 Guangdong 55, 59, 65–71, 74–75 Guo Moruo 2–3 Guocui xuebao 73 Guofang canyi hui (cf. Advisory Meeting of Defense) Guojia qun (nation group) 115 Guomindang (cf. Nationalist Party) Guomindang Fourth Plenum 303 Guomindang Political Committee in Zhejiang 301 Guoxue baocunhui (Association for Preservation of National Learning) 8, 57, 64, 68, 70, 81, 90–1, 95–6 Gushi bian 155 Hakka 55, 67–75 Han (ethnic identity) 24, 27, 33, 35, 41, 45, 49, 64–65, 71, 175–6, 188–9, 191, 193–5, 203–4

Han culture 133 Han dynasty 24, 40, 41 Han Wudi 42 Hangzhou Prefectural Middle School 219–20 He Bingsong 14, 151, 211, 309 Hegalian 212, 241 Heilongjiang 176 History, purpose of 26, 30–2 (see also textbooks) historians, as scholars 137 historical geography 131–2 Ho Pingti 137 Hoklo 68–74 Hon, Tze-ki 126, 127n39, 144, 213 Hu Shi 6, 131, 146, 149, 172, 287–8, 299 Huang Jie 68–9, 73–4, 96 Huang Yanpei 84 Huang Zunxian 69 Huangdi (Yellow Emperor) 31, 33–39, 64, 73, 185–8, 190, 203–4, 310 (see also sage-kings) Huangshi (Yellow History) 73 hudang jiuguo yuandong 299 Huidian Commission (Huidian guan) 275 Hundred Day’s Reform (cf. 1898 reform movement) Imperialism 212, 226–9, 232–5, 237 Industrial Revolution 226, 233 industrialization 225–6, 240 Institute of History and Philology 179n45 invention of civilization 35–39 passim Japanese invasion 177, 192 Japanese textbooks 25–6, 49 Jian Bozan 136, 138 Jiang Baili 172 Jiang Jieshi (cf. Chiang Kai-shek) Jiang Yinqing 176 Jiangsu Education Association 312 Jiangsu Province Consultant Bureau 273 Jiangsu Provincial First Middle School 214 Jiaoyu bu (Ministry of Education of the Nationalist Government) 130, 135, 171, 174, 179n45, 194–5, 205, 296, 306 Jiaoyu xue (Pedagogy) 179, 180n51 Jiaoyu zazhi (Education Review) 174, 180n51

index Jie (evil king) 40 Jin Zhaofeng 219 Jin Zhaoluan 219 Jin Zhaoyan 219 Jin Zhaozi 14, 217, 219–21, 22–6, 230, 232, 235, 237, 242 Jinan Incident 237 Journal of National Essence 73 Kang Youwei 47, 115 Kangxi 45 kaoshi (examination and correction) 272, 286 kaozheng (evidential studies) 145 Karl, Rebecca 5–6, 79, 212 Ke Shaomin 285 knight-scholars (shi), 111 Kokubu Tanenori 97n61 Kuhn, Philip 84–5 Kume Kunitake 202n114 Kung, H.H. 179n45 Lamaism, Yellow 134 Lamprecht, Karl 117 Langlois, C.V. 151 “Legislations on Students’ Self-Autonomy” (1928) 311 legitimation 109, 112, 121, 125, 130, 131 Lei Haizong 309 Levenson, Joseph 110 Li Bingjun 227, 229, 231–2, 238 Li Bo (Li Bai) 161 Li Dongfang 175 Li Hongyan 145 Li Hongzhang 116 Li Huazhao 151 Li Jigu 180–1, 234–6 Li Tao 152 Li Xiheng 198 Li Zicheng 44–5 Liang Qichao 25–6, 50, 63, 90–1, 100, 111, 112, 114–8, 122–3, 128, 137, 145, 212, 225, 239–41, 251, 257–9, 265 (see also Qun, Xinmin shuo, Xin shixue) Liangguang ti’an (cf. Proposal from Guangdong and Guangxi) Liberalism 296–7, 310–3 Liu Shipei 12, 33, 81, 95–102, 110, 186n76, 287 Liu Yazi 287 Liu Yizheng 6, 81, 84–90, 99–100, 102, 110, 127, 136–7, 143 local self-government 83

319

Lu Xun 253, 255, 258, 260–1 Lü Simian 13, 204 Lufei Kui viii Luo Xianglin 75 Luo Zhenyu 10, 12, 14–5, 251–6, 259–60, 263–6 Lushan 172 Mackenzie, Robert (Ma kenxi) 111, 115, 117–20, 128 Manchuria (Manchukuo) 176–7, 188, 200, 260–5 Manchuria-Japan Cultural Association 264 Manchus 43–45, 48, 175–6, 188 Marco Polo Bridge Incident ( July 1937) 171, 172n12, 178 Marx, Karl 213 Matsuzaki Tsuruo 250, 261 May Fourth Movement (cf. New Culture Movement) May Thirtieth Movement 234–5, 299 Meiji Japan 81, 89–90, 102, 109, 127–9, 139, 231 Meng Sen 12–3, 272–93 metageography 211, 239 Miao Fenglin 176, 184 Miao Quansun 85, 91 Ming dynasty 24, 41, 44–5, 192, 194, 196, 205 Ministry of Education, of Late Qing (cf. Xuebu) Ministry of Education, of Nationalist Government (cf. Jiaoyu bu) Mission of history 123, 138 Mission, sense of 110 Mongols 34, 41, 43–4, 134, 175, 188, 193–5, 204 Morgan, Lewis H. 159 mozheng (silent evidence) 156 Mukden Incident 237 Muslims 175, 188 Naka Michiyo 85, 90, 92, 127–8 Nanjing Central University 274 narrativity and identity 32, 38, 50 (see also ‘schematic narrative template’) narrativity in history textbooks 23–9 passim 40, 49–50 nation 109, 113, 115, 121, 138–9 national education (guomin jiaoyu) 181 national history 5–11, 79, 83, 87, 89, 100 national identity 23–4, 32, 33–4, 35, 38, 42–4, 48–51, 63

320

index

National Institute for Compilation and Translation 182–9, 183n63, 191 national learning (guoxue) 29 nationalism 22n4, 24–5n7, 32, 42–4, 296–7, 305, 310–1 nationalism, state-based 43, 48 (see also national identity) Nationalist China 133 Nationalist government (Nanjing government) 213, 215, 271, 295–7, 299, 303 Nationalist Party (Guomindang) 237–8, 242, 296–300, 302–4, 306–8, 310–1, 313 Nationalist Republicans 135–6 Nationalist Revolution 299, 306, 310 native-place 55–75 native-place gazetteer 55–59, 61, 63–67, 70, 74 native-place history of 83 native-place textbook 55–57, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 74–75 New Culture Movement 147, 177, 205, 214, 232–3, 295, 311 ‘new historiography’ (cf. Liang Qichao) new history, of Mackenzie 115, 117–8, 120, 128 New Policy Reforms (cf. xinzheng) New Readings for Republican Citizens (by Meng Sen) 274 Neo-Confucianism 205 Neo-Confucian examination canon 113–115, 139 Nineteenth Century (by Mackenzie) 115, 117, 128 ofcial history (zhengshi) 272, 280–1, 287, 289–90 Opium War 46–7, 228 Origin of the Species (by Darwin) 127 Outline of Occidental New History (by Mackenzie) 117–20 Pan Gu 34 Pan-Hanism 191 Partication of education 295 patriotism 23, 25, 30–1, 32, 42, 48, 50 (see also nationalism) Pedagogy (cf. Jiaoyu zazhi) People’s Political Council 179n45 periodization, in history textbooks 39n50 private collection 249–50, 256, 258–9, 263

progress, concept of in history 24, 26, 36, 49–50 Proposal from Guangdong and Guangxi (Liangguang ti’an) 304, 311 Qi Jiguang 192–3, 204 Qian Jiaju 138 Qian Mu 3, 6, 136, 143, 166–7, 177n43, 180, 180n50 Qian Zonghan 34–5, 37 Qianlong 45 Qin dynasty 39n50, 40, 42, 48 Qin Hui 193–5, 205 Qin Shihuang 41, 42, 161 Qing dynasty Qing educational reform 21–2, 25, 28–32, 47, 56, 79–84, 94 Qing History Commission 274–6 Qing reform policies 48–49 (see also xinzheng) Qing State History Commission (Qing guoshi guan) 275 Qingmuguan 174, 177–8, 181 Qingshi gao (cf. Draft History of the Qing) Qingshi guan (cf. Qing History Commission) Qiu Fengjia 69, 72–3 Qun (grouping) 115, 117, 125 (see also Liang Qichao) race 55, 57–58, 61, 63–70, 72–74 racial theory 25, 33, 35, 42, 44–5, 48 Reformed Government in North China 195–7, 199–201, 205 Ren Hongjun 218 “Revised Curriculum” (1940) 309–10 Revolution of 1911 21 Reynold, Douglas 81, 90 Richard, Timothy 115–20 Russo-Japanese War (1905) 47, 309–10 sage-kings 27, 32–39 schematic narrative template 27, 32, 40, 45, 48, 50 Schneider, Laurence 131 schools (cf. education) Schwintzer, Ernest 84 Scope Monkey Trial 134 Second National Conference on Education 306, 308 Seignobos, C. 151 Shang dynasty 40, 175, 185 Shang Hongkui 291–2

321

index Shenbao 273 Shennong (Yandi) 36–7, 185 shicai (emphatic understanding of the past) 145 shigu (explain the past) 146 Shiji (Historical Records) 162 Shijie shuju (cf. World Books) Shijing (Book of Songs) 156 shiliao (historical materials) 250–1, 256–60, 262 Shirakawa JirÔ 97n61 Shiratori Kurakichi 202n114 Shujing (Book of Documents) 156 Shun (king) 36–8, 185 Sima Guang 9 Sima Qian 9, 123, 125 Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) 46, 47, 109, 116 Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) 170–1, 179, 181, 190, 192 Social Affairs Bureau 199 Social Darwinism 123 Society for New Citizenship (Ximin hui) 198 Society for Preserving National Learning (cf. Guoxue baocunhui) Society of the United Alliance 57 Song dynasty 24, 193–5, 204–5 Song Qie 198 Soong, T.V. 179n45 Southeast University 218 Southeast University Afliated Middle School 215 State History Commission (Guoshi guan) 271 Suiren 185 Sun Yat-sen ix–x, 176, 234, 237, 295, 298–9, 302, 304, 307 Sun Yue 123 Taiping Rebellion 46 Taiwan history textbooks x Taixi xinshi lanyao (cf. Outline of Occidental New History) Tan Sitong 91 Tan Yankai 277 Tang (king) 40 Tang Chaohua 153 Tang dynasty 41, 48 Tang Gaozong 42 Tang, Xiaobing 5–6, 79, 117, 229 Tang, Xiaofeng 131 Temporary Curriculum (1929) 309 Teng Ssu-yu 126

textbook censorship 28 Textbook Revision Committee (Beijing and Tianjin) 199 textbook treatments of Buddhism 33–34 textbook treatments of Confucianism 29–30, 33, 34, 50 textbook treatments of imperialism 48–9 textbook treatments of Qing dynasty 24, 27, 32, 34, 43–47, 48 textbooks 21–3 textbooks, Chinese reader 28 textbooks, geography 24 textbooks, histories of China 22–3, 33–51 passim textbooks, morality 28 textbooks, narrative strategies of 26–9 passim textbooks, native-place 55–57, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 74–75 textbooks, native-place geography 58–63 textbooks, native-place history 64–67, 68–75 textbooks, normative themes in 23, 25, 30–1, 40–1, 50–1 Third Education Conference (March 1939) 172–4 Three Big Mysteries of Early Qing 282–91 Three Kings and Five Emperors 130, 135, 169, 175, 178–9, 185, 187–8, 194 Three Principles of the People 174, 176, 197–9, 295, 299, 302, 307 Tianjian yishi bao 273 Tibetans 134, 175, 188 Tongmenghui 57 Tongshi (cf. general history) TÔyÔshi 81, 88n34 traitor (hanjian) 180 transitional intellectuals 11–16, 213, 272 tripartite periodization 85–93, 97, 100–1 University Council 296–7, 299–301, 303, 306–8, 311–2 University Council Bulletin 300 University District 298, 304, 311 unofcial history (yeshi) 272, 285–91 Von Ranke

117

322

index

Wakeman, Frederic 283–4 Wang, David Der-wei 79 Wang, Fan-sen 6 Wang Guowei 146, 251, 254–8, 260, 266, 277 Wang Jingwei 195, 200–1, 205 Wang, Q. Edward 6, 79 Wang Yunwu 183–4, 218, 222n32 Wen Tianxiang 193–4 Wertsch, James 27, 27n11 ‘Western origins’ of Han Chinese 33, 35 White Lotus uprising 46–7 Wilson, Woodrow 213, 230 World Books (Shijie shuju) 4, 217 World War I 229–30, 234, 241 Wu Han 6, 138 Wu Sangui 45 Wu Zhihui 169, 172 Xia dynasty 39–40, 48, 185 Xia Zengyou 6, 90–5, 99–102, 110, 111, 126–31, 135, 137–8 Xiao Yishan 283 Xilai shuo (Western origin of Chinese civilization) 97 Ximin Daily (Ximin Bao) 199–200 Xin shixue (by Liang Qichao) 25–7, 33, 115, 120, 121, 126 xingu (inherited account of the past) 146 Xinmin congbao 91 Xinmin Publishing House 200 Xinmin shuo (by Liang Qichao) 63 Xinshi congkan (by Meng Sen) 274 Xinshi shiliao (by Meng Sen) 274 xinzheng (New Policy Reforms) 3, 21, 47, 58, 69, 81, 84 Xiongnu 42, 43, 48 Xu Yingchuan 183–4, 191–2 Xue yuan (academies) 127, 137 Xuebu (Ministry of Education of Late Qing) viii, 15, 25, 28, 50, 85 Xueheng (Critical Review) 147 Xunzi 161 Yan Fu 273 Yao (king) 36–8, 185 Yao Zuyi 34, 35, 39, 47, 50 Yellow Emperor (cf. Huangdi) Yellow History (Huangshi) 73

yigu (doubting the validity of historical accounts) 146 yiji (traces of the past) 148 Yongzheng 45 Yu (king) 37, 39–40, 48, 155, 175, 185, 188 Yü Yingshi 79 Yuan dynasty 34, 41, 43 Yuan Shikai 273, 275 Yuan Shu, and jishi benmo 123 Yue Fei 193–5, 204–5 Zarrow, Peter 126n39 Zhang Binglin (cf. Zhang Taiyan) Zhang Chang 235, 238–41 Zhang Jian 84, 273 Zhang Jingjiang 301 Zhang Qian 160 Zhang Shuxue 146 Zhang Taiyan 33, 95, 111–2, 114, 122, 124–6, 129, 131, 137 Zhang Xiang 220 Zhang Xuecheng 9, 122, 129 Zhang Yinlin 6, 12, 14, 122, 136, 138, 143–67 Zhang Yuanji 169, 172 Zhang Zhidong 2, 85, 91, 116 Zhang Zongchang 276 Zhang Zuolin 276 Zhao Erxun 275–6 Zhao Yuanren 180n50 Zhao Zhenduo 35, 37, 39, 40, 45–7 Zhejiang Provincial Seventh Middle School 219 Zheng Chenggong 45 Zheng Xiaoxu 273 Zhengzhong Press 184–7, 184n67, 189–90, 193 Zhongguo shanggu shigang (cf. Early China) Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju) viii, 4, 182, 217, 220–1, 224–5, 230n70 Zhongshan University 298, 304, 312 Zhongyang University 176, 184, 190 Zhou dynasty 40–2 Zhou Gucheng 136 Zhou Zuoren 237, 258, 260 Zhu Yuanzhang 44 Zhuan shi (specialized history) 123 Zou Lu 69–73

Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography ISSN 1574-4493 1. Schmidt-Glintzer, H., Mittag, A. and J. Rüsen (eds.). Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective. 2005. ISBN 978 90 04 14237 4 2. Hon, T. and R.J. Culp (eds.). The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16023 1