Modernity And The Historical Interpretation Models In Twentieth-century China

This study aims to analyze the twentieth-century China's history thoughts in the point of the modernity ideology and therefore to find the epochal universality contained in the main models of the historical interpretation which ran through the twentieth-century China's historiography.Modernity is a thinking concept formed when the traditional society changed into the modern one, which in the direct terms of historical thinking mainly includes the historical ideas of evolution, national country and scientism. These historical ideas ran through the whole process of the twentieth-century China's historiography, viewing history in the point of evolution or scientism, or putting history into the narrative frame of the national country, and became the major patterns that the twentieth-century China's scholars used to interpret history. The twentieth-century China's historical practices caused by these historical interpretation modes propelled China's historiography to transform from the traditional model to the modern pattern, which was modernity's huge influence on the twentieth-century China's historiography. However, the defects of the theories which reflected the sense of modernity in some way restricted the developing process of China's historiography. To deeply analyze the positive actions and its restrictions that the patterns of the historical interpretation influenced by modernity produced to the development of the twentieth-century historiography is this dissertation's major job and aim.This dissertation chooses the historians and their historical practices that greatly influenced China's historiography in the twentieth century and studies them as different individual cases. It uses five chapters to discuss how the modernity thinking influenced the historical research, on the base of which the inner connections between modernity and the modern China's historiography will be explained.The first chapter is modernity and Liang Qichao's new historical model. Liang Qichao proposed the revolution in the historian circle under the influence of the modernity ideology and formed his ideas of"the new historiography", which mainly advocated the evolutionary historical views, aimed to find the laws or the relations of the historical causes and effects, emphasized the scientific spirit and method when studying history, proposed the historical concept of the national country, and stood for the historical monism. These historical ideas showed obvious difference from China's traditional historiography no matter in the historical understanding or in the historical method, therefore formed a new model of history study in China's historian circle of the early twentieth century and had great influence on China's historiography of the twentieth century. In the 1920's, Liang Qichao began to rethink about his previously-established historical thoughts of modernity. However, his self-examination was not complete. For example, when rethinking about the evolutionary history concept, he just reset a limit to its content, being unable to reconsider deeply the rationality of the evolutionary concept itself; besides, he did not pay enough attention to the limitation of the scientific history epistemology.The second chapter is modernity and Gushibian. The modernity nature in Gu Jiegang's Gushibian mainly showed in the following points: he took historical evolutionism as his theoretical basis, applied the scientific rationalism as his principle of judgment, employed the pattern of evolution originated from the historical evolutionism as his analysis instrument, and utilized assumption and evidencing as the main methods of research. This methodology indicated the transcendence of Gu Jiegang's scholarship in comparison to the traditional skeptical scholars of the Qing Dynasty. At the same time, when using his historical concepts and methods that contained the modernity ideology, he overused the method of"absent proof"because of his evolutionism hypothesis; when using method of the historical evolution, he was constrained by the one-center and one-direction evolutionary pattern and failed to strictly follow the principle of calling a spade a spade in his postulation and verification. All these weakened the effectiveness of Gushibian's theory and method in the study of the ancient history.The third chapter is modernity and Fu Sinian's historical contributions. With an evolutionist point of view, Fu Sinian held that the Chinese and Western social and cultures fell into similar tracks in their developments. Nevertheless, the Chinese and Western cultures represented two different categories of cultures. In dealing with the origin of Chinese culture, Fu Sinian insisted that the Chinese culture has multivariate origins, which was a break through of the one-origin theory of Chinese culture. He divided the Chinese history into different periods according to the transition of the Han nationality, which was an advance in comparison to the traditional dynasty-based period-dividing method and an impact to the traditional historical concept that regarded the dynasty as the center. Influenced by the views of natural science, Fu Sinian formed his idea of scientific historical knowledge, which held that"the essence of historiography is actually the science of historical materials". By emphasizing the kernel role of the historical materials in the historical study, this approach played an active role in guiding the scientific orientation of the Institute of History and Languages and in propelling the development of China's scholarship of history on the track of scientific positivism. Fu Sinian's major limitation of is that due to his strong will of changing history into a natural science he ignored the difference between history and natural science as well as the relative nature of the historical knowledge.The fourth chapter is modernity and Guo Moruo's social history concept. Guo Moruo's study on the Chinese ancient society was also influenced by the historical thinking of modernity, which was obviously reflected in his idea that the histories both at home and abroad developed forward along the same road without any exception. This single-line evolutionary history concept was the universal character in the trends of history thoughts of modern western society, but what Guo Moruo chose was the form of Marxism. According to the social characters of the different periods that Engels and other scholars summarized at the base of the western European history experiences, Guo Moruo gave judgment on nature of the ancient Chinese society and divided the Chinese history into different periods by finding evidences similar to the western history in the Chinese history. The main purpose of his study on the ancient Chinese history was to prove that the ancient Chinese historical experience was identical with the general social developing laws that Marx and Engels summed up. His conclusion that the ancient Chinese society experienced the primitive society, the slave society and the feudal society successively provided a very important reference to the later study of the ancient Chinese history and therefore had great significance. However, because he was influenced by the historical thinking of the single-line evolution, Guo Moruo overstressed the identical nature of the historical developing ways in different regions and ignored the particularity of the Chinese historical development, which frequently caused his conclusions to be inconsistent with the realities.The fifth chapter is modernity and China's historical study in the later twentieth century. After the 1950's, China's historical circle had a big discussion later called"five golden flowers". Due to the effect of the presupposition of the single-line evolutionary developing frame, the scholars could not reach an agreement when they tried to confirm the historical law summarized according to the western history by using the Chinese history. The differences were caused by the theoretical limit of the historical thinking of the single-line evolution. In the early 1980's, some scholars tried to reform the historical method with the help of the natural scientific theory and further brought the interpretation of the Chinese history into the thinking track of the natural science, which fell into the mire of the mechanistic history. In the late 1980's, in order to completely break through the single-line evolutionary historical concept, Luo Rongqu put forward"the one-center and multiple-line historical developing theory". Although it put emphasis on the particularity of the historical developing courses in different regions and broke through the theoretical dilemma caused by the single-line developing concept, this theory still had a sense of"grand narration"guided by the evolutionary historical thinking.The last chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the main manifestations of the twentieth-century China's modernity thinking and expounds that the ideological base of China's modernity historical thinking was the whole linguistic environment of modernity formed with the seeking of the social development towards the modernization between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical thinking of modernity played an active role in the constructions of the new historical cognitional frame and the scientific historical research method, the increasing of the historical research objects and the formation of China's research model of viewing the history as a whole in the developing process of the twentieth-century China's historiography. The limitations of China's modernity thinking are that it has the ideological tendency of the single-line evolution and the Western centralism and that it prefers to treat and study history as the natural science. The research method that regards the civilization as the historical cognitive category has important theoretical value in overcoming the tendency of the Western centralism and the scientism influenced by the modernity historical thinking and the limitations of studying history's evolution in the point of one single factor.