Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Huaiyin Li

Published by University of Hawaii Press 2013

Reinventing Modern China

Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

Huaiyin Li

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824837266

Overview
Contents

About this book

This work offers the first systematic analysis of writings on modern Chinese history by historians in China from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces the construction of major interpretive schemes, the evolution of dominant historical narratives, and the unfolding of debates on the most controversial issues in different periods. Placing history-writing in the context of political rivalry and ideological contestation, Huaiyin Li explicates how the historians’ dedication to faithfully reconstructing the past was compromised by their commitment to an imagined trajectory of history that fit their present-day agenda and served their needs of political legitimation.

Beginning with an examination of the contrasting narratives of revolution and modernization in the Republican period, the book scrutinizes changes in the revolutionary historiography after 1949, including its disciplinization in the 1950s and early 1960s and radicalization in the rest of the Mao era. It further investigates the rise of the modernization paradigm in the reform era, the crises of master narratives since the late 1990s, and the latest development of the field. Central to the author’s analysis is the issue of truth and falsehood in historical representation. Li contends that both the revolutionary and modernization historiographies before 1949 reflected historians’ lived experiences and contained a degree of authenticity in mirroring the historical processes of their own times. In sharp contrast, both the revolutionary historiography of the Maoist era and the modernization historiography of the reform era were primarily products of historians’ ideological commitment, which distorted and concealed the past no less than revealed it.

In search of a more effective approach to rewriting modern Chinese history, Reinventing Modern China proposes a within-time, open-ended perspective, which allows for different directions in interpreting the events in modern China and views modern Chinese history as an unfinished process remaining to be defined as the country entered the twenty-first century.

Reviews

Li Huaiyin’s book, by showing the shift of two paradigms — modernization and revolution — in Chinese historiography since the 1930s, emphasizes the significance of motivations of teleology, specifically ideology, in all history writing.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1. Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Origins of the Modernization Narrative: Nationalist Historiography Before 1949 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. Origins of the Revolutionary Narrative: Marxist Historiography Before 1949 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
4. The Making of a New Orthodoxy: Marxist Historiography in the 1950s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
5. Between the Past and the Present: The Radicalization of Historiography Under Mao Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
6. Challenging the Revolutionary Orthodoxy: “New Enlightenment” Historiography in the 1980s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
7. From Revolution to Modernization: The Paradigmatic Transition in Reform Era Historiography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
8. Master Narratives in Crisis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
9. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333

Language: English
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 352

eBook

Published: October 31, 2012
ISBN: 9780824837266