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Reconstructing World History in the People's Republic of Chi

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    Journal of World History


Volume 18, Number 3, September 2007

    Reconstructing World History in the People's Republic of China since the 1980s
    Luo Xu

    StateUniversity of New York College at Cortland
    Abstract
    Thisarticle offers a critical review of the efforts made by Chinese historianssince the 1980s to reconceptualize and reconstruct world history from a globalperspective as well as the complex ideological, institutional, andsociopsychological issues that hindered their efforts. It argues that thesuccess and failure of their work were in many ways related to the extent towhich they were able (or unable) to overcome these barriers. The articlediscusses the new theoretical framework that Chinese historians developed,newly published world history texts, and reactions to recent Westernscholarship. It concludes that, despite various problems, the Chinesehistorians' efforts signifi ed an important step in their long endeavor toenvision a world history with Chinese characteristics.
    Writinghistory has long been an important part of Chinese tradition. As early as thetime of the Han dynasty, the great historian Sima Qian (145–86 B.C.E.)described many countries of the known world in his Historical Record.¹But writing world history from a global perspective was a relatively newendeavor of Chinese historians in the twentieth century. Up to the mid 1940s,there had been no "world history"—only Chinese history and"Western history"—in the curriculum of China's secondary and tertiaryeducation.²Even though some historians labored to write world history, most of their workscan only be defined as the "history of different countries."³ Not until the late1950s and early 1960s was the first organized attempt made in China [End Page 325] to depict world historyin a universal pattern of development of human society. That collective effortled to the first multivolume, "official" world history text,⁴ which was publishedin 1962 and often dubbed "a milestone in the development of China's worldhistory."⁵The 1962 text followed the Marxist stages (universalized in Soviethistoriography) of development from communal society through slavery,feudalism, and capitalism, to socialism.⁶ Because the Marxist theory of socialevolution drew on European historical experience, the Chinese text based onthis model was bound to be Eurocentric and focused on the countries and eventsthat best illustrated these orthodox five stages.⁷ Moreover, partly dueto its concentration on demonstrating underlying laws of historicaldevelopment, the text largely neglected horizontal development (interactionsamong different regions and cultures),⁸ and it excluded Chinese history.⁹
    Sincethe 1980s, partially responding to the diversification of Chinese society, moreand more historians have called for a critical reevaluation of China's worldhistory field and a reorientation in thinking and writing about the globalpast. A central part of their effort to reconceptualize and reconstruct worldhistory "with Chinese characteristics" [End Page 326] is to exclude Eurocentrism (or West-centrism) ininterpreting the origins of the modern world and the course of modern historysince 1500. During the 1980s and 1990s, in line with Deng Xiaoping's"reform and opening," many contemporary Western theories enteredChina and provided, interestingly, handy weapons to battle the West-centrismembedded in China's historical studies. Most importantly, Chinese scholarsbecame increasingly aware of the global history approach prevalent amongEuro-American scholars in recent decades.¹⁰ Mainly owing to the strenuous efforts ofthe prominent historian Wu Yujin (1913–1993), followed by others, the globalhistory perspective was accepted and adopted by most people, almost becoming anew "guiding theory" in China's world history field.
    Inshort, during the last quarter century, three main developments occurred in (ifnot dominated) China's world history field. First, many important works byWestern scholars were introduced into China and many were translated intoChinese, especially those who advocated or applied global perspectives andapproaches, such as Geoffrey Barraclough, L.S.Stavrianos, Fernand Braudel,Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu-Lughod, R.Bin Wong, andKenneth Pomeranz.¹¹Second, partly inspired by contemporary Western scholarship [End Page 327] and partly drawing onthe tradition of Marxist historiography, China's world historians developedtheir own global perspective and theoretical framework to reconceptualize theworld's past, emphasizing the process in which relatively isolatedcivilizations became increasingly interrelated and interactive, so that by thelate twentieth century, every corner of the world had been"globalized." Third, guided by their new global history theory, theyhave produced several multivolume world history texts.¹²
    Perhapsby Western academic standards the above accomplishments were not veryimpressive, but it is an understatement to say that even such"moderate" results were difficult to reach. In the project toreconstruct world history that would exclude Eurocentrism and incorporateChinese experience, Chinese historians encountered complex ideological,institutional, and even sociopsychological problems or barriers that hinderedtheir efforts. These problems included the powerful ideological legacy of theSoviet model of historiography, the long divide between historiansstudying/teaching Chinese history and those in non-Chinese history fieldsconceptualized as "world" history, and the ambivalent state of mindof historians in their re-evaluating the growth and development of China andEurope in the post-1500 world. This essay examines the efforts of Chinesehistorians to reconstruct world history in the last twenty-five years. Itexplores how the ideological, institutional, and sociopsychological factorsinfluenced their minds and their work. Using the rewriting of "modernhistory" (1500–1900) as an example, the paper argues that their success orfailure in revising world history from a global perspective was in many waysrelated to the extent to which they were able (or unable) to surmount or bypassthese barriers. [End Page 328]
    WuYujin and the Rise of Global History Theory in China
    Itwas Wu Yujin who initiated the venture to reconstruct world history withChinese characteristics in 1978 and, after two decades, Wu's theory had beenestablished as almost a new orthodoxy in China's world history field. In fact,nearly all of the published world history texts since the early 1990s have moreor less followed Wu's pioneering work.
    Trainedat Harvard University in the 1940s,¹³ Wu Yujin had long been exposed toWestern historiography. In the early 1960s, he served as one of the twoeditors-in-chief of the first multivolume world history text. It was during theprocess of compiling the 1962 text he questioned the Soviet model ofhistoriography for the first time, which led to his long search for alternativeways to construct world history. After the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Wubegan to advocate his own ideas of world history that departed from the modeladopted from the Soviet Union.
    AmongChina's world historians, Wu was the first to systematically criticize theSoviet model of historiography. While still giving it considerable credit fortaking changes in socioeconomic formations as the standard for periodizing theworld's past, emphasizing the role of the masses in historical evolution,paying attention to the histories of repressed and conquered peoples, andderiving the underlying "laws of history" from changes in the modesof material production, he argued that the Soviet model had serious flaws. Atthe very least, the Soviet model and Chinese world history texts stemming fromit were not really free from the influence of Eurocentrism. They continued toperiodize world history according to European historical experiences, and theyattempted to put world history into a fixed pattern of socioeconomicdevelopment, which was then often applied mechanically to all areas andnations. This sometimes resulted in the distortion of the historicalexperiences of non-Western countries to fit the model. Moreover, the worldhistory compiled within this framework was often little more than a list ofperiods and countries put together without any effort to show the organicdevelopment of interrelations and interactions between different regions,nations, and societies over time.
    Wu'sworld history theory included mainly the following components. First,"world history" cannot be comprehensive, and it should [End Page 329] not be merely the sum ofall existing national and regional histories. Rather, it is a special subfieldof historical research and the history profession with clearly defined andlimited goals. The study of world history aims at exploring the process through which fragmented andlargely isolated parts of the world in earlier times grew into the fullyinterconnected and interactive global community of more recent times. From thispoint of view, "world history" cannot be limited to the history of"foreign countries outside China"; it must include and take accountof Chinese experience. In short, Wu argued, "world history" (or"global history," to be precise) did not exist in ancient times;rather, it resulted only from the development of human history. Therefore themain task of "world history" as a subfield of the history disciplineis not just to discover and demonstrate universal rules of historical changedefined either by Marxist historical materialism or by non-Marxian grandsynthesizers such as Spengler and Toynbee, but to explain how the history of human groups became a world history.Using another (perhapsmore fashionable) term, to a large extent what Wu was interested in was the"history of globalization."
    Second,"world history" must relinquish all kinds of "centrism"caused by national or ideological bias, whether Eurocentrism or Sinocentrism."World history" researchers should transcend the narrowness of asingle nation or one particular ideology, and acquire a worldwide view. Whetheror when a nation, a region, or an event should be given more attention thanothers depends on the role it played at a certain historical moment and itssignificance in the process of world historical development. For example, Wu'sreconstruction of world history started with the major events and developmentsof the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in his (and many others') viewproved to be the turning point in the process of history becoming worldhistory.¹⁴Because Western Europe was supposedly the driving force of this historicalturning point that accelerated the process of human interaction at a globallevel, the changes that occurred at the western end of the Eurasian continentand factors that nurtured these changes should be the primary focus of worldhistory.
    Third,the long period over which the history of human groups developed into a worldhistory included two dimensions: longitudinal [End Page 330] and horizontal, or jing and wei in Chinese,which constituted the two fundamental aspects of historical development.Longitudinal development (or development through time) refers to the evolutionin the modes of production and the corresponding changes in society over time,which remained somewhat in line with the Marxian stages of social evolution.Horizontal development is the process in which scattered and relativelyisolated parts of the world gradually broke various barriers and becameincreasingly connected, eventually merging into a closely knit globalcommunity. According to Wu, the common basis and ultimate propelling force ofboth longitudinal and horizontal development was the progress of materialproduction. In other words, the growth of material production was thequintessential commonality of these two dimensions of the process to turn thehistory of human groups into a world history.
    Finally,Wu argued that both Western synthesizers (such as Spengler and Toynbee) andSoviet world historians concentrated on one or the other "universal"pattern of human history. Their overemphasis on uniformity and eagerness toprove universal theories made them sometimes overlook the variations anddiverse situations in history. Moreover, neither considered horizontal historyan equally important subject and gave it proper treatment, though to someextent both touched upon the issue in different ways. To Wu, because worldhistory as a subfield belongs to macro history, the core of which is to revealhow the world became integrated, world historians should base their studies onnational, regional, and other histories, but they must go beyond these"specific" histories and view the world as a whole, looking attransnational, transcultural subjects. He personally led the research team atWuhan University to study world history of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, using macro and comparative approaches to explore the issues acrosslarge geographical areas.¹⁵[End Page 331]
    Whilecriticizing the Soviet model of world history studies, Wu continued to asserthis belief in Marxist theory and historiography. In fact, he said that, tosearch for a solution to the problems of the old Soviet as well as Westernnon-Marxist models and to reconceptualize world history as a whole, he"sought advice from the classics of Marxism."¹⁶ Beginning in 1978,in most of his writings and open speeches, Wu repeatedly quoted the followingwords of Karl Marx:
    Worldhistory has not always existed; history as world history a result [sic].¹⁷
    Thefurther the separate spheres, which act on one another, extend in the course ofthis development and the more the original isolation of the separatenationalities is destroyed by the advanced mode of production, by intercourseand by the natural division of labor between various nations arising as aresult, the more history becomes worldhistory.¹⁸
    . .. It (big industry) produced worldhistory for the first time, insofar as it made all civilized nations andevery individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wantson the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness ofseparate nations.¹⁹
    Wuclaimed that it was these ideas of Marx that inspired him to reconceptualizeworld history. But it was also possible that he felt he had to put his globalapproach to world history in a "politically correct" framework,considering the fact that he began to advocate his "new" concept ofworld history less than two years after the end of the ideology-dominatedCultural Revolution. Even though he often cited many other Western scholars,these quotations of Marx were always present in Wu's writings on world history.Perhaps he felt that, without the "spiritual support" of Marx, itwould have been more difficult to convince his younger colleagues, who weretrained in the Marxist tradition after 1949 and had little access to othertheories, to convert to his "new" concept of world history. Moreover,the above quotations seemed to point to another dimension in the Marxist viewof world history: Marx not only emphasized the stages of social evolution (longitudinal [End Page 332] development), but also highlighted the process in which history became a worldhistory (horizontal development), and the latter had hitherto been overlookedin previous world history works, Soviet or Chinese.
    Itis also fair to say that Wu's ideas of world history revealed a much greaterinfluence from contemporary Western authors and their works. Indeed, except fora rather thin theoretical "guidance" from Marx that was prudentlyintegrated into his narrative, Wu's (and others') speeches and essays on worldhistory were full of citations and interpretations of world history theories bysuch contemporary Western historians as Spengler, Toynbee, Braudel, Stavrianos,Wallerstein, and especially Barraclough.²⁰ As early as 1959, Wu had already writtena long review of Barraclough's 1955 book Historyin a Changing World.In an essay published in 1964, he mentioned Barracloughand Toynbee as examples of Western historians who opposed Eurocentrism.²¹ On the other hand,Marx's short note on "history as world history [is] a result" in Grundisse appeared (without discussion)for the first time in 1978 in Wu's writings, and his interpretation of thisnote and Marx's "...the more history becomes world history" firstappeared in 1982.²²In the 1980s, while Wu continued to quote these comments of Marx,²³ in his writings hepaid great attention to the ideas and approaches of L.S.Stavrianos and ImmanuelWallerstein.²⁴Perhaps Wu's educational background and his special interest in Westernhistoriography can help explain his familiarity with those Western historians.It is not inconceivable that he had already developed his global perspective onworld history based on what he learned from the above Western scholars beforehe found the relevant quotations from Marx.
    Marx'scomments on "history becoming world history" certainly inspired Wu,but they also served as an ideological cover for his attempt [End Page 333] to rewrite worldhistory. With these comments he was able to demonstrate that the Western"bourgeois" approaches to world/global history that he borrowed andadopted was not at odds with Marx's own ideas. In other words, Marx's view ofhorizontal development in world history somehow made it easier for him tobypass the powerful ideological "wall" built on the Soviet (andChinese) interpretation of Marxism which had always laid special emphasis onthe "fundamental, determining" course of longitudinal progress andtended to ignore the horizontal process of globalization.²⁵
    Employingthe New Theory: World History Texts of the 1990s
    Inthe mid 1980s, the State Education Commission authorized Wu Yujin (WuhanUniversity) and Qi Shirong (Capital Normal University) to compile a newmultivolume text of world history, which was eventually completed and publishedin 1994.²⁶The new text was constructed according to Wu's concept of world history andintended to reveal both the stages ofsocial evolution and the process inwhich scattered and relatively isolated human groups developed into a closelyconnected and well-integrated global community.²⁷ To have a better picture of thecontinuity and change in China's world history studies, it is important to takea closer look at this new multivolume text, which, [End Page 334] after its publication, was praised as "anothermilestone in the development of world history in China,"²⁸ "representingthe highest level of world history compilation in our country in recenttimes."²⁹
    Asstated, the 1962 text edited by Zhou Yiliang and Wu Yujin copied the Sovietmodel, constructing world history in light of the evolution of the relations ofproduction and the corresponding changes in social classes and class struggles.But the 1994 text, according to a Chinese historian, "straightened out theessential relations of the historical materialism" by giving the"forces of production" their due position as the determining factorbehind the "relations of production."³⁰ In other words, the new text no longertook class relations and class struggles as the ultimate impetus of historicalchange; instead, its authors saw the progress in productive forces such as"agricultural revolution" and "scientific-technologicalrevolution" as the ultimate impetus of other fundamental changes inhistory.³¹
    Correspondingto the theoretical revision, the structure and periodization of the 1994 textwere also altered. Chronologically the new text is divided into three largesections (comprised two volumes each): ancient history, modern history, andcontemporary history. The section on ancient history covers the primitivecommunal, slavery, and feudal societies worldwide, but its focus is the rise,development, and changes of agricultural civilizations on the Eurasiancontinent. The Eurocentric concept of "medieval period" wasabandoned, and the Soviet effort to squeeze the experiences of non-Europeannations into the Marxist framework of social evolution (especially into the"slave" and "feudal" categories) was solved or evaded byusing such concepts as "prefeudal" and "precapitalist." (责任编辑：admin)