Chapter 2

Historiographical Discussion

Before reviewing the literature more specifically

related to the field of curriculum history, it is

necessary to address some broader issues concerning the

nature of history as well as its role in the study of

curriculum. A historical study of History as a school

subject is doubly in need of a grounding in the

philosophy of history, since whatever approach is

adopted either regarding the teaching of history, or the

conduct of historical research into the curriculum, this

must be informed by certain beliefs regarding the nature

of history and its status as a form of knowledge. This

chapter and the first section of Chapter 3 therefore

serve two functions by allowing me to locate the present

study in the historiographical literature, and by

providing a framework for analysing ideas concerning the

nature of history and the purpose of teaching it as

these are embodied in Hong Kong’s secondary school

History curriculum.

The purpose of this chapter is to review and assess

some of the philosophical approaches to the study of

history which have been particularly influential in

recent years, and in doing so to elaborate the

philosophical position which informs the present study.

25

What follows is intended to provide an outline of the

current state of debate within the discipline of history

over what it is that historians do, or should be doing.

It also attempts to establish a basis for comparing

'History' with 'Chinese History' by looking at

historiographical developments in modern China as well

as in ‘the West’, while avoiding any simplistic ‘East’ –

‘West’ dichotomy. This discussion provides a framework

for the review of research on curriculum history in

Chapter 3.

A Note on Historiographical Typology

In the present chapter, four broad ‘types’ of

history are discussed. These include what has been

called the scissors-and-paste approach, determinist

interpretations of history, ‘postmodern’ or relativist

approaches, and finally the view of history as a

critical, rational ‘craft’. Approaches to history which

treat it as a ‘religion of the state’, and which often

combine determinist assumptions with scissors-and-paste

methods, are also discussed. This typology is derived

principally from the ideas of Collingwood, MacIntyre and

Berlin.1 The distinction between the ‘scissors-and-paste’

approach and ‘scientific’ history is taken from1 R.G. Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’ (O.U.P., 1994) and ‘An Autobiography’ (Pelican, 1944); Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, in ‘Four Essays on Liberty’ (O.U.P., 1969) pp. 41-117; Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985) and ‘ThreeRival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition’ (Duckworth, 1990)

26

Collingwood. From Berlin comes the distinction between

‘deterministic’ views of history which try to construct

universal laws around accounts of the human past, and

approaches which assume the existence of genuine free

will and individual moral choice. Their arguments are

supported by the ethical philosophy of MacIntyre, which

also provides the basis for the conception of history as

a ‘craft tradition’ which is advanced in the final

section.

Marwick has observed that ‘few practising

historians have actually engaged in a dialogue with the

philosophers of history’2, since historians are generally

‘no more than skilled artisans’3, for whom any

philosophical justification of what they do appears

unnecessary. Indeed, Marwick, like Elton,4 sees

philosophical attempts to explain what it is that

historians do as a debate in which working historians do

not ordinarily need to intervene. However, the recent

popularity of ‘postmodernist’ theory in the field of

academic history has provoked several responses of a

quasi-philosophical nature from practising historians,

notably those of Stone, Evans and Windschuttle.5

Postmodernists such as Joyce and Jenkins see all

historical knowledge (and knowledge as such) as entirely

2 Marwick, ‘The Nature of History’ (Macmillan, 1989), p. 2983 Ibid., p. 254 G.R. Elton, ‘The Practice of History’ (Sydney University Press, 1967)5 Lawrence Stone, ‘History and Postmodernism’, in ‘Past and Present’(May, 1991); Richard Evans, ‘In Defence of History’ (Granta, 1997); Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Killing of History’ (The Free Press, 1996)

27

subjective and relative – as determined by the dominant

‘paradigms’ of thought at any particular time.6 The most

general distinction between ‘types’ of history made by

postmodernists is between ‘certaintist’ history (that

is, all history which makes any claim to reflect the

objective truth concerning what happened in the past),

and ‘postmodern’ history, which abandons such

‘certaintist’ claims.7 The debate over ‘postmodernism’ is

seen by both sides as essentially a debate over the

status of historical knowledge, and the issues of

objectivity and relativism. These are the same

philosophical issues to which Collingwood and Berlin

attempted to provide philosophical answers. They are

also issues with which MacIntyre deals in his discussion

of ethical philosophy – a discussion which leads him to

the conclusion reached by Collingwood: that history is

the basis of philosophy, and not the other way around.8

MacIntyre, whose philosophy encompasses theories of

knowledge generally and thus also of history as a form

of knowledge, has traced the roots of postmodernist

thought back to Nietzsche’s critique of ‘the

Enlightenment project’.9 The thinkers of the European

Enlightenment aspired to construct an encyclopaedic

account of all human knowledge and experience, which6 Patrick Joyce, ‘The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History In Britain’, in ‘Past and Present’ no. 158 (Feb. 1998), pp. 207-235; Keith Jenkins, ‘Rethinking History’ (Routledge, 1991)7 Jenkins, op. cit.8 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985)9 ibid, and Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry’ (Duckworth, 1990)

28

would, they believed, ultimately produce a body of

social scientific theory with which no rational person

could disagree. This ‘encyclopaedic’ mode of thought is,

MacIntyre argues, still reflected in the institutional

arrangements of the modern university.10 However, the

Enlightenment project in fact gave rise, as in his view

it was bound to do, to a number of rival and

contradictory theories of ethics, society or history –

such as those of Kant, Hegel, Comte or Marx – each

claiming universal and absolute validity. Nietzsche’s

genius was to appreciate that this was the inevitable

outcome of the Enlightenment conception of knowledge and

truth, and that furthermore there were, a priori, no

rational grounds for judging between the claims of the

various rival theories.11

The response of Nietzsche was to attempt to abandon

theory and the pursuit of ‘truth’ altogether. In place

of social scientific theory, he at one stage proposed

the construction of ‘genealogies’ which would be nothing

more than the projection of the individual thinker’s

‘will to power’.12 However, according to MacInytre this

genealogical project in turn proved unsustainable –

Nietzsche himself escaped into madness, while Foucault,

in some ways his most distinguished heir, assumed in his

later work the posture of a conventional academic

10 MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions…’, Chapter 111 ‘After Virtue’, Chapters 5 and 912 MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry’; Ronald Hayman, ‘Nietzsche – Nietzsche’s Voices’ (Phoenix, 1997)

29

historian.13

MacIntyre sees ‘genealogy’ and ‘encyclopaedia’ as

the two dominant, but fatally flawed, modes of thought

in modern academic philosophy. He proposes as an

alternative to both modes a conception of philosophy as

an Aristotelian practice, conceived of as a living

tradition of enquiry in which ‘the best theory so far’

is determined by a critical awareness of the history of

that tradition to date. MacIntyre’s Aristotelian

position involves a theory of knowledge and of history

as a critical practice very similar to that of

Collingwood, even though the latter is often

misleadingly labelled an ‘idealist’.14

There remains the crucial question, as far as this

study is concerned, as to whether the ethical and

historical philosophies of MacIntyre and Collingwood,

and the historiographical categories derived from them,

can have any relevance to a discussion of history and

history teaching in China, especially given that neither

of these philosophers make any reference to Chinese

history, thought or culture in their work. Several PhD

theses could, and certainly should, be devoted to

tackling this question thoroughly; to do so in a single

chapter such as this would be impossible. However, the

following discussion makes extensive reference to

13 Ibid.14 MacIntyre, op.s cit.. On the development of Collingwood’s philosophical thought see Jan van der Dussen, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in R.G. Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’ (Oxford, 1993).

30

literature on Chinese history and culture in addressing

the broader issue of whether Chinese views of history

are necessarily incommensurable with those of ‘the

West’. It is argued that no single view or category of

history can be portrayed as exclusively or essentially

‘Western’ or ‘Chinese’.

The ‘types’ of history discussed below do not

represent impermeable divisions between different

categories of historian. For example, as Collingwood

himself observed, many historians tend occasionally to

slip into ‘scissors-and-paste’ habits.15 Nonetheless, the

current furore over ‘postmodernism’ amongst historians,

along with the fashion for ‘postmodern’ ideas and

terminology both in the contemporary curriculum studies

field and in the field of ‘cultural studies’, make it

appropriate here to adopt a typology which highlights

the issues of relativism, objectivity and the status of

historical knowledge, as well as the value and purposes

of historical study.

History as Established Knowledge – ‘Scissors and Paste’

Collingwood applies the ‘scissors-and-paste’ label

to the kind of history which involves assembling the

statements of previous ‘authorities’ in order to

15 Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’

31

construct a true narrative of the past.16 This has been

and largely still is for most people what ‘history’ has

meant – being instructed at school to base their essays

on extensive reference to secondary sources, usually

consisting of textbooks which are themselves the

distillations of other secondary sources, with little if

any opportunity to engage in the critical analysis of

historical evidence. School curricula in many countries

are nowadays moving or attempting to move away from this

‘scissors-and-paste’ approach, while academic historians

in ‘the West’ have long claimed to be practising a

different kind of history. However, despite recent

curricular reforms in some parts of the world, old

habits die hard, so that even where ‘scissors-and-paste’

history is now condemned in theory, it may continue to

be widely prevalent in practice, especially as regards

the teaching and learning of history in schools (See

Chapter 3). For the purposes of this study, therefore,

it is necessary to analyse more precisely what is meant

by ‘scissors and paste’ in order to be better able later

to identify its possible manifestations in Hong Kong’s

history curriculum.

The scissors-and-paste historian is in essence a

collector of ready-made statements which he then

arranges into a coherent narrative of the events in

which he is interested. The methodology itself does not

imply any particular political ideology, but easily

lends itself to any attempt to prove a thesis by16 ibid., pp. 257-66, 274-82

32

reference to the works of recognised ‘authorities’. It

may be particularly prevalent in societies, such as

those of medieval Europe or modern totalitarian states,

where the political or religious authorities impose

narrow constraints upon the range of acceptable

historical interpretations. When the scissors-and-paste

historian is free to exercise his own judgement, he may

not necessarily accept the statements of his authorities

uncritically since, especially in cases where different

authorities say conflicting things, he may have to

attempt to identify ‘true’ statements from ‘false’. The

‘true’ statements are then incorporated into the

narrative, while the ‘false’ statements deemed unworthy

of inclusion are discarded.

Scissors-and-paste history typically manifests

itself in the student essay, but the temptation to

resort to such methods is also evident in the work of

academic historians when their desire to prove a point

subverts their respect for the conventions of their

discipline. Right up to the nineteenth century, however,

scissors and paste was the predominant historical method

in Europe, though it became more refined and critical

from the seventeenth century onwards. Collingwood

described the method in its simplest (ancient and

medieval) form as follows:

‘An historian collected testimony, spoken or written, using

his own judgement as to its trustworthiness, and put it

together for publication: the work which he did on it being

33

partly literary – the presentation of his material as a

connected, homogeneous, and convincing narrative – and partly

rhetorical, if I may use that word to indicate the fact that

most ancient and medieval historians aimed at proving a

thesis, in particular some philosophical or political or

theological thesis.’17

Collingwood recognised that scissors-and-paste history

had become more critical and sophisticated since the

Middle Ages, but placed the real ‘scientific revolution’

in history much later – in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. As evidence of the kind of change

in historical method which he claimed had taken place

around this time, he instructed his readers to compare

Grote’s account of the Peloponnesian War with that given

in the Cambridge Ancient History, and to ‘mark in each

book every sentence of which he can find the original in

Herodotus and Thucydides’.18

In China, however, the ‘excessively annalistic and

scissors-and-paste forms of the past’19 appear to have

died harder and later than in Europe. To say this is not

by any means to imply that scissors and paste has been

the only approach to the past evident in China, but the

prevalence of state-centred and state-controlled

17 Ibid., p. 25818 Ibid., p. 26019 E. G. Pulleyblank, ‘The Historiographical Tradition’, in Dawson, ed., ‘The Legacy of China’ (O.U.P., 1964), p. 164. Pulleyblank goes on to emphasise that while annalistic, scissors-and-paste forms may have dominated official, state-sponsored historiography in China, ‘in their critical handling of sources Chinese scholars of today arefollowing in the footsteps of their eighteenth-century predecessors and have little to learn from the West’.

34

historical scholarship does seem to have inhibited the

practice of history as a critical, rational ‘craft’.20

For example, Qian Mu’s account of the way in which he

went about researching in 1937 for his famous two-volume

history of China is suggestive of the habits of

scholarship associated with the ancient statist

tradition of official histories, heavily reliant on the

established, classicial ‘authorities’:

‘Each week I called on the principal of the county middle

school, who let me borrow books from the school library. They

had the twenty-five dynastic histories and the ten

encyclopaedias, which were all the books I needed. Each week I

would exchange one for another.’21

When it is borne in mind both that Qian embarked on this

project with the express aim of proving a particular

thesis, namely that of the superiority and vitality of

an exclusively Chinese form of civilisation, and that he

saw Chinese historians as performing, in a very real

sense, the role of high priests of a cult of

Chineseness22, then a comparison with Collingwood’s

earlier-quoted characterisation of the scissors-and-

paste approach in ancient and medieval Europe appears

even more apt. Nonetheless, it is essential to bear in

20 On the residual pull of more uncritically culturalist attitudes towards the Chinese past, see Wang Gungwu, ‘Juxtaposing Past and Present’, in ‘The Chineseness of China’ (O.U.P., 1991), pp. 209-22921 Quoted in Jerry Dennerline, ‘Qian Mu and the World of the Seven Mansions’ (Yale University, 1988), p. 64.22 Qian Mu, ‘The Spirit of Chinese History’ (Zhongguo Lishi Jingshen), (Dong Si Publishing House, Taipei), pp. 1-18, pp. 92-4

35

mind that there are some Chinese historians who,

particularly in the past century, have adopted an

increasingly wide variety of approaches to the past

influenced both by indigenous and foreign traditions.

The phrase ‘scientific history’ was used by

Collingwood to distinguish what he regarded as ‘history’

proper from ‘scissors and paste’. History’s claims to be

regarded as a discipline which is in some sense

‘scientific’ have long been central to debates in Europe

concerning the nature of our knowledge of the past, and

in this century the concepts of Western science have

also been deployed in an ongoing Chinese debate over the

status of history as a form of knowledge. The twists and

turns of these debates, and the extent to which they

overlap, are traced and examined below. In the course of

what follows, however, it may perhaps prove useful to

take as a benchmark Collingwood’s strictures concerning

the unscientific nature of scissors-and-paste history:

‘It is the fact that [his] statements have to be found by him

ready-made in his sources that makes it impossible for the

scissors-and-paste historian to claim the title of a

scientific thinker, for this fact makes it impossible to

attribute to him that autonomy which is everywhere essential

to scientific thought; where by autonomy I mean the condition

of being one’s own authority, making statements or taking

action on one’s own initiative and not because those

statements or actions are authorized or prescribed by anyone

else. …The scissors-and- paste historian is interested in the

“content”, as it is called, of statements: he is interested in

36

what they state. The scientific historian is interested in the

fact that they are made.’23

If scissors-and-paste history does not qualify as

‘scientific’, then what kind of history, if any, can

actually claim to make the grade?

History and Determinism - History as 'Science'

The European Enlightenment gave rise to various

attempts to fit the facts of history into theoretical

frameworks claiming some of the properties of the

natural sciences. Thus Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Spengler,

Toynbee and a host of others proclaimed the discovery of

universal ‘laws’ of history – laws with predictive as

well as explanatory power. MacIntyre has used the term

‘encyclopaedic’ to describe this mode of thought.24 The

‘determinist’ label adopted here is taken from Isaiah

Berlin, to whom further reference is made below.25 This

section focuses on those versions of determinist history

which seem of most relevance to the place and the period

with which this research is concerned.

Marx’s view of history as a ‘science’ has of course

been very influential in mainland China. It was

implicit, for example, in the statement made in May 2000

by Chen Zili, China’s Minister for Education, when in

23 ‘The Idea of History’, pp. 274-524 See above, n. 125 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, in ‘Four Essays on Liberty’, pp. 41-117 (O.U.P., 1969)

37

response to a question regarding the proposal to create

a ‘New History’ subject in Hong Kong (see Chapter 9),

she insisted that ‘Chinese history… should be introduced

to students in a very comprehensive and scientific

way’.26 The basic theory underlying Marxist history, that

of the materialist dialectic, is too familiar to warrant

any detailed exposition of it here. There have been,

however, a large number of variations on the basic

Marxist theme, some of which have emerged in the course

of developments in historical studies within mainland

China since 1949. The main phases of official

historiography on the mainland correspond with the main

political shifts during this period. For example,

orthodox Soviet interpretations of history-as-class-

struggle were very influential during most of the 1950s,

but after 1959 more traditional and ethno-centric

attitudes towards the national past began to reassert

themselves, so that whereas ‘class struggle’ might still

provide the main model for interpreting ‘foreign’

history, there was some resistance to applying ‘class

analysis’ to the history of China.27 The Cultural

Revolution represented something of a hiatus in academic

history, but it featured hysterical campaigns against

‘old thought’, for example the campaign condemning

26 ‘Chinese History should not lose its status: Beijing’, in ‘The South China Morning Post’, May 28, 2000, p. 4.27 See Wang Gungwu, op. cit., pp. 223-224. The twists and turns in official interpretations of history have been particularly evident in the development of the school history curriculum on the mainland (See Chapter 3 below)

38

Confucius and Lin Biao.28 The Deng era of ‘Socialism with

Chinese characteristics’ brought some freeing up of

debate over the Chinese past, but the decay of socialist

ideals in China, and the jitteriness of the regime in

the 1990s, have led to a growing emphasis on ‘Chinese

characteristics’ rather than on socialism.29

The type of history written in Communist China, as

well as the uses to which history has been put in

political discourse, illustrate the strong persistence

of the traditional moralising impulse among Chinese

historians.30 The tendency to moralise is, however,

common to much Marxist history,31 whether it is written

in China, Russia, or London, even though moral praise or

blame would seem to be inconsistent with the scientific

pretensions of Marxist theory. Imperialists, for

example, are condemned for exploiting colonial peoples,

although this exploitative relationship is seen as

dictated by universal historical laws rather than as the

result of individual moral choices.32 In the same way,

28 See Wang Gungwu, op. cit., p. 22929 See Chapters 3 and 9 below.30 See Pulleyblank, op. cit., and also Beasley and Pulleyblank, ‘TheHistorians of China and Japan’ (O.U.P., 1961), pp. 1-9. More is saidabout traditional Chinese historiography in (iii) below.31 Although not, it should be said, all history by Marxists. The fact, for example, that Christopher Hill is a Marxist, does not detract from the validity of the history he writes, because he is not obviously engaged in trying to force his evidence into a preordained theoretical straightjacket.32 Two of the classic examples of this are Marx’s article ‘The British Rule in India’ (New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; reprinted in ‘Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernisation’, edited with an introduction by Schlomo Avineri, New York, 1968, pp. 125-30;and Lenin’s ‘Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism’, (Peking,Foreign Languages Press, 1965).

39

‘bourgeois morality’ and ‘proletarian morality’ are

compared, and one declared superior to the other,

despite the simultaneous assertion that both are the

inevitable products of particular sets of material

circumstances. Thus Marxist history illustrates one of

the paradoxes of much determinist history, since on the

one hand it espouses a theory of scientific ‘laws’ of

history which determine the behaviour of social classes

and of individuals, while on the other hand it issues

moral condemnations of some of those who follow these

‘laws’, implying that they could have chosen to act

otherwise and that therefore these ‘laws’ are not laws

at all.

The waning of the influence or credibility of

Marxism in China in recent years has led the regime to

place new emphasis on the nationalist, culturalist and

racialist elements in its ideology.33 In other words, the

ethnic and cultural Chineseness of the People’s Republic

now matters far more than its internationalist,

proletarian character. Indigenous prejudice plays a

33 See Wang Gungwu, ‘Introduction’, in ‘The Chineseness of China’ (O.U.P., 1991), pp. 1-7 (though Wang is typically non-committal about the degree of ‘Great Han chauvinism’ exhibited by post-Cultural Revolution Chinese historiography. On China’s crisis of national identity, see Dittmer and Kim, ed.s ‘China’s Quest for National Identity’ (Cornell, 1993), especially pp. 237-290, and on the state’s use of anti-Western patriotism to bolster its legitimacysee Jenner, ‘The Tyranny of History’ (Penguin, 1992), pp. 96-7, and Link, ‘Evening Chats in Beijing’ (Norton, 1992), pp. 210-211. On racialism in China, see Dikotter, ‘The Discourse of Race in Modern China’ (H.K.U.P., 1992), especially ‘Epilogue: Race as Class’, pp. 191-195), and ‘The Construction of Racial Identity in China and Japan’ (H.K.U.P., 1997), pp. 25-33. On history and the state in China, see (iii) below.

40

large part in the definition of this Chineseness, but

Western science or pseudo-science has also been deployed

to construct theories of biological and cultural

determinism which claim to provide a scientific basis

for assertions of the incommensurability of Chinese

history and Chinese values. For example, Sautman

observes that most Chinese scientists continue to insist

that all Chinese are descendents of ‘Peking Man’, and

therefore that ‘the Chinese race’ evolved separately in

China, despite the fact that there is now an

overwhelming body of evidence to show that the various

races in fact diverged at a relatively late stage, and

that all modern humans share an African ancestry.34 This

resistance of Chinese scientists to conclusions that are

accepted by scientists virtually everywhere else is,

according to Sautman, a reflection of the fact that

‘sinocentric views are a state-certified orthodoxy in

China’.35 Myths of descent, whether from ‘Peking Man’ or

‘the Yellow Emperor’ are, he writes, used to ‘draw a

scientifically false wall of separation between Chinese

and other peoples’.36 It is also sometimes claimed that

China’s various ethnic minorities somehow share in this

common descent, thus theoretically binding these

minorities more closely within a Chinese biological

unity – albeit a hierarchical unity, with ‘the Han race’34 Barry Sautman, ‘Myths of Descent, Racial Nationalism and Ethnic Minorities’, in Dikotter, ed., ‘The Construction of Racial Identity in China and Japan’, pp. 75-95, esp. pp. 84-89, ‘Peking Man as Chinese Everyman’.35 Ibid., p. 8836 Ibid., p. 95

41

implicitly superior to all others. This vision of an

ethnically-defined nation has been a feature of

Nationalist as well as Communist ideology – China’s

first national museum, established in the 1930s,

‘embraced ethnology (with a particular emphasis on the

study of border peoples) and biological evolution with

the aim of demonstrating that human life originated in

China.’37 Symbols from China’s past are still used by the

government of the People’s Republic to bolster this

sense of blood-brotherhood between the minorities and

the Han majority, as in the statement that ‘the Great

Wall is the joint achievement of all China’s minority

nationalities’ – a claim that Sautman compares to

‘characterising Germany’s Festung Europa of 1940-4 as a

pan-European endeavour.’38

The German analogy serves as a reminder that this

kind of pseudo-scientific, racialist approach to the

past has enjoyed a depressingly broad international

following during the twentieth century. It was Oswald

Spengler who, in the 1920s, popularised the theory that

nations were, in effect, discrete phenomena of nature

engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Different

nations in turn would rise, flourish, wither and die,

‘with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the

field’.39 The influence of Darwinist notions on37 John Fitzgerald, ‘Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class inthe Nationalist Revolution’ (Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 5438 Ibid., p. 9039 quoted in Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’, p. 223. For a briefanalysis of Spengler’s (and Toynbee’s) work theory of history see also pp. 181-183 in the same book.

42

interpretations of human history and culture dates back,

in China as in Europe, to the late nineteenth century.40

In Japan as well, hierarchical classifications of human

types derived from the West influenced official

attitudes towards the Ainu of Hokkaido, and anti-

Semitism gained a following among Japanese academics,

despite the fact that Japan had virtually no Jewish

population of its own.41 Indeed in modern Japan, as in

modern China (and modern Germany42), blood and race are

still seen as central to national identity. Such

notions, moreover, have not been confined to political

extremists of the left or right. Qian Mu, ostensibly a

conservative Chinese traditionalist, discussed the

theories of the German historicists Hegel, Marx and

Spengler in the preface to a work expounding and

defending his views concerning the uniqueness and

superiority of Chinese civilisation. Spengler, Qian

contended, was wrong not in seeing nations as discrete

phenomena of nature, but in arguing that nations, like

flowers, must die. Chinese civilisation was, he

insisted, immortal.43

40 See Dikotter (1992), pp. 98-107, ‘Race as Nation’.41 See Richard Siddle, ‘The Ainu and the Discourse of “Race”’, and David Goodman, ‘Anti-Semitism in Japan: Its History and Current Implications’, in Dikotter, ed., (1997), pp. 136-157, and 177-198.42 The recently elected SDP-Green coalition in Germany proposes to introduce legislation making it possible for the first time for non-ethnic Germans to become naturalised German citizens.43 Qian Mu, ‘Zhongguo Lishi Jingshen’, Chapter 1, pp. 1-18, especially pp. 13-18. Qian was in fact influenced and to some extent inspired by Zhang Binglin, whose highly chauvinist ideas are discussed in Chow Kai-Wing, ‘Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han Race in Modern China’, in Dikotter, ed. (1997),pp. 34-52. For an account of Zhang’s influence on Qian, see

43

Liberals, too, have had their versions of

determinism, the latest of which is Fukuyama's 'End of

History' theory, based on his reworking of Kojeve's

interpretation of Hegel.44 At the end of the 1980s,

Fukuyama twisted the knife in the expiring corpse of

state communism by reclaiming for liberal capitalism one

of the pillars of Marxist ideology: Hegel's dialectical

theory of historical progress. Instead of seeing this

dialectic as culminating in some future communist

utopia, Fukuyama claimed that 'History' with a capital

'H' had in fact already reached a full stop, represented

by modern liberal capitalist society. This was so, he

argued, because no credible alternative to liberal

capitalism was any longer conceivable - no alternative,

that is, which would have greater potential for

satisfying the full range of human needs or desires. The

future would still pose problems for humanity -

'history' with a small 'h' would continue - but these

would all arise and be resolved within the framework of

liberal capitalism. The big struggles of 'History' were

over; 'Agreeing on ends, men would have no large causes

for which to fight.' 45 Fukuyama admits that such a

world, however comfortable, might be a little dull, and

cites Nietszche's vision of 'the last man': the

liberated slave whose victory brings with it the victory

of slavish values, who is happy in the satisfaction of

Dennerline, op. cit.44 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History and The Last Man’ (Penguin,1993)45 Ibid., p.311

44

his natural appetites, content to be equal without

striving for superiority, and divested of that sense of

broader communal responsibility associated by

Tocqueville with aristocratic values. Following

Tocqueville, Fukuyama sees the passion for equality and

the willingness to rest content in comfortable

mediocrity as typifying the inhabitants of a modern

democracy like America. Like Tocqueville, and unlike

Nietzsche, he is contentedly resigned to the inevitable

spread of the ‘American way of life’.46

Keith Windschuttle has commented that Fukuyama’s

thesis represents ‘a celebration by an American of the

American triumph in the Cold War, a response that the

author thinks all humanity should share,’ as well as

being a reflection of the fact that 'new ideas that

might seem to have universal application very often

reflect more about the time and place in which they were

produced than anything else.'47 While the ideology

associated with Fukuyama’s historicism may be far

removed from those of Marx or Spengler, these thinkers

share what Berlin has termed the ‘naïve craving for

unity and symmetry at the expense of experience’.48 Like

Collingwood, Berlin saw the problem of modern

46 Ibid. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Democracy in America’ (Mentor, 1984). Tocqueville does not, however, attempt, in the way that Fukuyama does, to extrapolate a grand theory of human history from his conclusions.47 Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Killing of History’ (The Free Press, 1996), p. 177. See also pp. 159-184 for Windschuttle’s detailed criticism of Fukuyama’s arguments, as well as his review of some of the reactions to them from Marxist historians.48 Berlin, op. cit., p. 43.

45

historicism as arising out of a false analogy between

history and natural science, an analogy which resulted

not only in the urge to construct grand theories in

history and the social sciences which would trace the

universal laws governing human behaviour, but also, at a

less ambitious level, was reflected in the insistence of

some historians, such as E.H.Carr, that the requirements

of ‘scientific’ objectivity dictated that historians

refrain altogether from passing moral judgements in

their work.49 Berlin argued that the writing of such

‘value-free’ history was both impossible and

undesirable, but also contended that those who accept

historicist ‘theodicies’, such as those of Marx,

Spengler and Hegel/Fukuyama reviewed above, can,…

‘…if [they] seek to be rational, praise and condemn, warn and

encourage, advocate justice or self-interest, forgive,

condone, make resolutions, issue orders, feel justified

remorse, only to the degree in which [they] remain ignorant of

the true nature of the world. The more we know, the further

the area of human freedom, and consequently of responsibility,

is narrowed.’50

49 Carr’s position is much more subtle (and sensible) than this brief reference might seem to imply. See ‘What is History’ (Penguin,1990), pp. 72-3, 78-9, 81-3, 119-23 and 130-32, and Chapter 3, ‘History, Science and Morality’. However, what Berlin chiefly objected to was what he saw as Carr’s untenable compromise between atheoretical belief in determinism and a practice which assumed the operation of free will – as Carr put it: ‘The fact is that all humanactions are both free and determined, according to the point of viewfrom which one considers them.’ Also, ‘Adult human beings are responsible for their own personalities.’ (‘What is History’, p. 95.For Berlin’s attack on Carr, see ‘Four Essays on Liberty’, p. xiii and p. xvii.)

46

Therefore relativism is, according to Berlin, one of the

logically inescapable consequences of an historicist

position. A more fundamental problem of such theories,

which he pointed out, is their lack of susceptibility to

proof or disproof. If all human thought and experience

are structured and determined, he argued, then it cannot

be possible for an individual to step outside the

structure and gain objective knowledge of it.51

The issues of relativism and objectivity as they

relate to history will be further discussed below.

Before returning to these issues, however, it is worth

looking in a little more detail at the relationship of

history to the interests of the state.

History as the Religion of the State

Doctrinaire Marxism or belief in a liberal-

capitalist nirvana tend to encourage, and in turn

receive encouragement from, a combination of determinist

ideological assumptions and scissors-and-paste methods.

An impulse to glorify the national past can give rise to

the same tendency, as the history of almost any nation

can testify. Thus in France even today the Great

Revolution of 1789 continues to arouse passions, and the

force of the Napoleonic Legend means that any scholar50 ‘’Historical Inevitability’, in ‘Four Essays on Liberty’ (O.U.P.,1969) p. 58 ‘if [they] seek to be rational’ is perhaps a key caveat,since nowadays there are increasing numbers of scholars around the world who claim to reject rationality. See the section on postmodernism below.51 Ibid.

47

who tries to approach the subject of Napoleon’s career

in a critical, revisionist spirit is entering a

political minefield.52 In Britain too, the kind of

history writing parodied by Sellar and Yeatman in 1930,

when they dedicated ‘1066 and All That’ to ‘the Great

British People without whose self-sacrificing

determination to become top Nation there would have been

no (memorable) history’, is by no means dead.53 This is

evident, for example, in the field of imperial history,

where any work like Cain and Hopkins’ ‘British

Imperialism’ which proposes a new, critical

interpretation of the subject lays itself open to

attacks from those who still demand that such histories

should reinforce the notion that the Empire was, as

Sellar and Yeatman would say, ‘a good thing’ for all

concerned.54

Phillips and Green have noted how in a number of

modern societies – from Estonia and Finland to Germany

and Japan - history has been pressed into service by

politicians and scholars eager to bolster or, sometimes,

to invent a national identity for the inhabitants of52 The classic study of the historiography of Napoleonic studies is Pieter Geyl’s ‘Napoleon: For and Against’ (Peregrine Books, 1965).53 W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, ‘1066 and All That’ (Methuen, 1930), ‘Compulsory Preface’54 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘British Imperialism’ (Longman, 1993). Cain and Hopkins trace the influence of Britain’s ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ elite, centred in the City of London, in shaping the development of the Empire – an approach which provoked abitterly hostile review from Paul Johnson, author of ‘The Offshore Islanders’ (Penguin, 1975), who wished to see the heroic and populist aspects of imperial history emphasised. For more on the relationship between patriotism and school history curricula in Britain and France, see Chapter 3 below.

48

their states, and to foster among their populations a

sense of patriotic loyalty.55 Such efforts to socialise

citizens as patriots have naturally been concentrated in

school civic education and history curricula, though, as

is demonstrated in subsequent chapters, Hong Kong has in

this respect been somewhat exceptional. In some states –

usually if not always those considered to have been

‘totalitarian’ – the whole apparatus of academic history

has been geared towards the construction and

dissemination of fiercely nationalistic interpretations

of the past. Craig has shown how in the Weimar Republic,

for example, the version of Germany’s recent past put

about by the highly conservative, right-wing,

nationalist academic establishment helped to undermine

the legitimacy of the country’s fragile democratic

institutions.56

The content of ‘patriotic’ curricula is not always

or everywhere chauvinist or xenophobic, since the

ideological content of ‘patriotism’ varies.57 Nor does a

concentration on national history necessarily imply a

celebration of the national past. In post-war Germany,

for example, ‘the genocidal debacle of Hitler’s Third

Reich’ has given rise to what Evans describes as ‘an

understandable obsession with national self-examination’

which makes it difficult for German historians to make a55 Robert Phillips, ‘History Teaching, Nationhood and the State’ (Cassell, 1998), pp. 1-2; Andy Green, ‘Education and State Formationin Europe and Asia’, in Kennedy (ed.) ‘Citzenship Education and the Modern State’ (Falmer Press, 1997).56 Gordon Craig, ‘Germany 1866-1945’ (O.U.P., 1981), pp. 421-42457 See Lucien Pye, cited below, and Green, op.cit.

49

successful career out of studying the history of other

nations.58 Elsewhere in Europe, however, insularity also

continues to characterise the concerns of most academic

historians – and of school history curricula (though, as

discussed in Chapter 3, this is beginning to change).

Evans writes of France that

‘the assumption of cultural superiority has guaranteed that

the vast majority of historians do not really consider the

history of other countries worth studying, although there is a

partial exception in the case of Britain… Synoptic French

surveys of aspects of the history of ‘the West’ have too often

been devoted mainly to the history of those particular topics

in France, which has been taken axiomatically – and of course

quite wrongly – as typical of the history of Western humanity

as a whole…’59

‘Patriotic’ history of this kind is a phenomenon of

the past two hundred years in Europe, though precedents

for it can be found much earlier.60 The development of

national educations systems in Europe was, as Andy Green

has demonstrated, largely concerned with reinforcing

‘social control, moral conformity, and political

acquiescence’ amongst the populations of the new and

often fragile nation-states, and to bolster the power of

politically and economically dominant elites.61 The use

58 Richard Evans, ‘In Defence of History’ (Granta, 1997), p. 18059 Ibid., pp. 179-18060 See Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Nations and Nationalism Since 1780’ (Cambridge, ‘Canto’, 1990)61 Andy Green, ‘Education and State Formation’ (Macmillan, 1990), p.31

50

of history – both in schools and more broadly – to

inculcate nationalist kinship myths was part of this

strategy. David Brown has shown a similar process at

work in contemporary South-East Asia, whereby particular

visions of ethnicity have been promoted by post-

independence political elites to strengthen their own

power, and the cohesion of their states.62 In the most

extreme versions of nationalist history in Europe or

Asia, such as those inspired by German historicists like

Spengler, ‘nations or cultures or civilizations… are

certainly not merely convenient collective terms for

individuals possessing certain characteristics in

common; but seem more “real” and more “concrete” than

the individuals which compose them’.63 The example of

Spengler, and of the Germany in which he lived, also

serves as a reminder that modern nationalism, whatever

its origins, has, like any religion, come to command

real faith amongst its adherents. The way in which a

Spenglerian form of nationalism has influenced modern

Chinese historiography was discussed above. However, the

broader issues of patriotism in Chinese history, and the

extent of the manipulation of history by the Chinese

state, merit further attention here due to their

particular pertinence to this research.

The level of official sensitivity in mainland China

with regard to the issue of patriotism was brought home

62 David Brown, ‘The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia’ (Routledge, 1994). See also Chapter 5 below.63 Berlin, op. cit., p. 46.

51

to me personally in the summer of 1998 when I was asked

to write a short article for a mainland newspaper

describing my feelings about the situation in Hong Kong

one year after its return to Chinese rule. My

reflections were generally very positive indeed, my only

slight reservation being a concern that the authorities

in Hong Kong might possibly be putting too much emphasis

on the need for patriotism, and that within their

definition of patriotic duty, they perhaps needed to

allow more scope for criticism of the state authorities.

The last paragraph of my article, in which this concern

was expressed, was entirely deleted when the article

finally appeared, although my other, entirely positive

comments, were printed intact.64 The parallel with the

censorship of my piece for the school magazine is

evident. (See Chapter 1)

This problem of squaring the desire for a critical,

rational approach to the Chinese past and present with

64 Edward Vickers, Yige Yingguoren de Ganshou (‘An Englishman’s Impressions’) in Beijing Qingnian Bao, July 2, 1998. The offending paragraph, in the original English, read as follows:‘As a non-Chinese resident of Hong Kong, the only main worry I have relating to the political atmosphere here concerns the increasing emphasis by Tung Chee Hua and members of his administration on ‘patriotism’. I believe that patriotism is essentially a good thing,but, if it is allowed to develop into a chauvinistic nationalism, itcan become extremely dangerous. As an Englishman, I am hardly in a position to lecture Chinese people on the dangers of chauvinism – particularly in the light of the disgraceful behaviour of British football fans in France recently. Nonetheless, I want to emphasise that patriotism is not a set of ‘correct concepts’ that can be learnt or memorised. Love of one’s country is something best expressed by a willingness to look critically at the faults which one’s country has, and do one’s best to correct them. I hope that this is the sort of patriotism which will develop amongst the Chinese citizens of Hong Kong.’

52

the demands of a militant and often xenophobic

patriotism is one that Chinese thinkers have faced

throughout this century. As Vera Schwarz observes with

regard to the May Fourth intellectuals:

‘Sceptics in an age of nationalist revolution, they faced the

added obstacle of being seen as traitors of national culture.

Their repeated efforts to prove that rational doubt is not

inherently corrosive of national self-confidence consumed much

of the intellectual energy that might have gone into deepening

their own understanding of critical philosophy.’65

There is, according to Michael Ng-Quinn, an irony here,

since the concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘the nation’ are,

strictly speaking, themselves alien to indigenous

Chinese traditions. Chinese thinkers, he argues,

traditionally equated Chinese culture with the civilised

culture of the world, and exhibited ‘a preference for

differential interaction with other states on the basis

of cultural compatibility.’66

This view of the incompatibility of modern

nationalism with ‘traditional Chinese culture’ is to

some extent supported by John Fitzgerald. In his recent

study, ‘Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in

the Nationalist Revolution’,67 he notes the tension

between the universalist ethics which was a feature of

65 Vera Schwarz, ‘The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement’ (California, 1986), p. 290.66 Michael Ng-Quinn, in Kim and Dittmer ed.s, ‘China’s Quest for National Identity’ (Cornell, 1993), p. 33.67 John Fitzgerald, op. cit.

53

China’s traditional culture, and the emphasis on

cultural and racial difference which characterised the

thinking of many nationalists. Kang Youwei, in

particular, agonised over the contradictions between

these different conceptions of culture.68 Nonetheless,

while acknowledging the continuing strength of the

relationship between ethical concerns and conceptions of

nationalism and culture in China, Fitzgerald cautions

against extrapolating from such observations a theory of

the fundamental incommensurability of ‘Chinese’ and

‘Western’ cultures. For example, he recounts how Western

residents of the Treaty Ports in the nineteenth century

observed that the Chinese pace of life was more languid

than theirs, and how they attributed this to ‘John

Chinaman’s’ cyclical conception of time. On the basis of

this evidence, they tended to ‘essentialise… a timeless

Orient and a progressive Occident’. Fitzgerald points

out, however, that ‘it is well to remember that Hong

Kong Chinese have been prone to make similar comments

about the leisurely pace of life and work in the

People’s Republic in recent years.’69 He then goes on to

argue that differences between European and Chinese

perceptions of ‘time’, as of ‘nation’ or ‘community’,

need to be understood in terms of history rather than of

‘culture’ viewed as a timeless essence:

‘In comparing the imagined community of the nation with

68 Ibid., Chapter 269 Ibid., p. 50

54

earlier forms of community, Benedict Anderson has drawn a

historical distinction rather than a cultural one, which

applies equally to Europe in the age of monarchy and to China

under the emperors. This historical distinction is one between

consciousness of a moral order outside of progressive time and

consciousness of movement in history. In Europe, the

transition from one to the other marked a watershed in the

development of a distinctively modern consciousness, “which,

more than anything else, made it possible to ‘think’ the

nation”.’70

Fitzgerald’s view is thus similar to that which informs

the present study, in he sees tradition not as a pre-

determined ‘given’, but as a historical construct. This

does not involve denying the existence of highly

significant differences between Chinese traditions and

those of ‘the West’ or elsewhere, but it questions the

assumption that these differences represent an

unbridgeable chasm between monolithic absolutes.

In dynastic China, history served as a guide to

bureaucratic practice, and as a mirror which Confucian

officials could and, on occasion, did hold up before the

Emperor in order to upbraid him. ‘Distributing praise

and blame in order to provide uplifting examples and

warnings against infringements of the ethical code’71 has

typically been seen as central to the historian’s role

in China, and in this respect, as Jenner has put it,

‘the Mao era strengthened the moralising approach to the

70 Ibid., p. 5071 Pulleyblank, in ‘The Legacy of China’, p. 146. See also William Theodore de Bary, ‘The Trouble with Confucianism’ (Harvard, 1996)

55

past, changing only a few of the criteria of

judgement’.72 One such criterion, according to Michael

Hunt, has been the importance of a strong state, and

this sense of the overriding need for a strong and

unified state has been intensified by China’s traumatic

experiences over the past hundred and fifty years:

‘The preoccupation with state power stood – and still stands –

as one of the signal features of modern Chinese national

identity. Looking to the past to define the new China,

political activists in the late Qing and the early Republican

periods took as a fundamental point of departure in their

thinking the conviction that establishing a strong state was

essential if China were to be saved.’73

Jenner goes so far as to assert that history in China

‘plays a role comparable to that of religious texts in

other cultures. It is also,’ he argues, ‘the Last

Judgement. The religion of the Chinese ruling classes is

the Chinese state, and it is through history that the

object of devotion is to be understood.’74 This analogy

between history and religion is one that is explicitly

drawn by Qian Mu, who argues that history, and the

‘moral spirit’ for which it is the vehicle, does indeed

perform in China a role comparable to that performed by

religion and nationalism in Western countries.75

72 W. J. F. Jenner, ‘The Tyranny of History’ (Penguin, 1993), p. 1573 Michael Hunt, in Kim and Dittmer ed.s, op. cit. (1993), p. 76. The same point is made by John Fitzgerald, in op. cit.74 Jenner (1993), p. 11.75 Qian, Zhongguo Lishi shang di Daode Jingshen (‘The Moral Spirit of ChineseHistory’), in ‘Zhongguo Lishi Jingshen’ (Dong Si, Taipei)

56

The prevalence in China of this view of history as

the religion of the state does not, however, necessarily

imply a vision of Chinese tradition as a monolithic,

57

timeless entity. As scholars such as Siu, Faure, Tao,76

and Schrecker77 have demonstrated, Chinese culture has in

fact always been immensely varied, diverse and subject

to change. In particular, while strong cultural

similarities and shared values have tended to

characterise and bind together Chinese societies, there

is an important distinction to be made between elite and

popular culture, with the latter especially being

characterised by substantial regional as well as

temporal variations. Faure and Tao argue that the

Chinese past needs to be seen in Chinese terms, so that

it is, for example, misleading to see in the past any

stark urban-rural divide separating the urbanised elite

from the rural ‘masses’, when the image of an urban-

rural continuum is closer to reality. The former view,

positing a stark divide, represents, they argue, one

instance of how in the twentieth century Shanghai has

‘taught the rest of China to see China through the eyes

of the Shanghainese.’78 Seeing the Chinese past in

Chinese terms does not, in the view of these scholars,

in any way preclude the making of meaningful comparisons

with non-Chinese societies, nor does it imply an

uncritical acceptance of some notion of a timeless

76 David Faure and Tao Tao Liu, ‘Unity and Diversity: local culturesand identities in China’ (University of Hong Kong Press, 1996), and another book on culture and identity in China, forthcoming; Helen Siu, ‘Remade in Hong Kong: Weaving Into the Chinese Cultural Tapestry’, in Faure and Tao ed. (1996).77 John E. Schrecker, ‘The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective’ (Praeger, 1991)78 Faure and Tao, forthcoming, ‘Introduction’. Here Faure and Tao are following Mote (1973).

58

Chinese ‘essence’. Schrecker shows how, even within the

culture of China’s bureaucratic elite, rival schools of

thought – usually arising out of disputes over the

exegesis of classical texts - have vied for influence

over the course of the centuries. He argues that the

mainland authorities, far from allowing the Chinese past

to be interpreted in its own terms, have perpetuated

gross ideological distortions. Even before the 1989

crackdown, he says,

‘…in what might be considered the relatively minor area of

historiography, scholars were still forced to call pre-

revolutionary China fengjian [the Chinese term usually

translated as ‘feudal’]. This bizarre distortion of the past,

of course, simply served to keep society from knowing where it

stood historically and, what was most important to the

Communists, utterly cut it off from the nation’s liberal

tradition.’79

There does, nevertheless, still seem to be a real

problem for many supposedly more ‘liberal’ Chinese

intellectuals when it comes to tolerating plural and

conflicting viewpoints. Perry Link has noted in his

journal of conversations with mainland intellectuals

during the 1980s that:

‘The search for Chinese precedents seemed to answer a need,

perhaps especially strong in Chinese culture, for a way “to

speak of” the current historical period. Ancient conceptions

of the moral dimensions of language still tended to require79 Schrecker, op. cit., p. 185.

59

that the historical record reflect not just what happened, but

“the proper view” of what happened. To look for ways to

understand the current predicament in earlier “proper views”

was emotionally and intellectually satisfying for many.’80

While differences and disagreements – whether over

historical interpretation, political principle,

religious beliefs or private values – have therefore

always been as much a feature of Chinese society as of

any other, the worship and primacy of the state,

combined with the habit of seeking ‘proper views’ from

past authorities, seems to be so strong a feature of the

culture that even many political dissidents have tended

to couch their demands for change in terms of the need

for a new (or revived) ‘correct’ orthodoxy, and for

strong, effective national leaders to embody and enact

it.81 A number of scholars have noted that notions of

civil society – that is, of limits beyond which the

authority of the state ought not to step – are, while

not entirely absent in traditional Chinese thought,

nonetheless relatively weak. In Confucian thought,

according to Edward Shils, although ‘tolerance is one of

the virtues…, it does not extend to divergent beliefs in

religious, philosophical, or ethical matters.’82 This

assessment is supported by Ambrose Y.C. King, when he

writes that ‘in Confucianism there was no recognized

80 Perry Link, ‘Evening Chats in Beijing’ (Norton, 1993), pp. 163-481 See Perry Link, op. cit.82 Edward Shils, ‘Reflections on Civil Society and Civility in the Chinese Intellectual Tradition’, in Tu Wei-Ming (ed.), ‘Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity’ (Harvard, 1996), p. 69

60

autonomous realm of politics, separate from or

independent of morality,’ and ‘political pluralism was

hardly conceived as a desirable state of affairs.’83 In a

society where official history also tends to be treated

as religious text – a depository of moral exemplars from

the past – it is also seen as part of the state’s

function to define the ‘correct’ view of the past.

Lucien Pye argues that twentieth century Chinese

nationalism lacks what he calls an ‘idealistic

substance’. Whereas countries like France, Britain and

America each have, according to Pye, sets of values or

ideals, derived from the defining events of their

national histories, which in turn ‘establish constraints

on the behavior of the elite by setting standards as to

what is expected of true national leaders’, Chinese

nationalism, he argues, lacks such a ‘content’:

‘…China lacks the idealistic substance of a modern form of

nationalism which can provide either inspiration for popular

mobilization or disciplining constraints on elite behavior.

Instead an overwhelming sense of ethnic identity operates to

obscure the fact that there are very few specific ideals for

defining unambiguously the meaning of ‘Chineseness’. Chinese

nationalism is not something Chinese society can use to limit

the Chinese state. Rather, Chinese nationalism is what the

leaders of the day say it is, and this means that it becomes a

defense of their formulation of what the consensus should

83 Ambrose E. King, ‘State Confucianism and Its Transformation: The Restructuring of the State-Society Relation in Taiwan’, in Tu Wei-Ming (ed.) (1996)

61

be.’84

One is tempted to quibble over the degree of

‘unambiguousness’ which any nationalism displays, but

Pye’s central assertion concerning the extremely state-

centred, state-defined and ethnically chauvinist nature

of Chinese nationalism seems to be well-supported by the

findings of other scholars. This seems to have been

particularly the case in the field of history, where the

interpretation of key historical events or phenomena

such as the May Fourth Movement has tended to be tightly

controlled and manipulated by the state authorities,

whether Communist or Guomindang.85

Is acceptance of this kind of manipulation of

history by the state somehow an integral part of what it

means to be Chinese, or is it, like other aspects of

Chinese culture, the product of specific historical

circumstances, and therefore not eternal or unchanging?

The strength in China of the approach to history which

sees it as ‘the religion of the state’ might appear to

support the view that there is something so essentially

Chinese about this vision of history that it constitutes

a central and inviolable component of a uniquely

‘Chinese’ cultural discourse. Two possible objections to

this view have been suggested in the foregoing

discussion. Firstly, that no matter what impression

Chinese state authorities have tried to convey, and no84 Lucien Pye, ‘The Spirit of Chinese Politics’, (Harvard, 1992 edition), pp. 231-23285 See Vera Schwarz, op. cit.

62

matter how difficult many Chinese intellectuals have

found it to shake off their obsession with the state and

with its role in setting ‘correct’ moral standards,

Chinese culture is not and has never been a singular,

monolithic entity entirely set apart from other cultures

of the world. Studies of the cultures of Hong Kong and

especially of Taiwan have, as is discussed in later

chapters, underlined the varied and changing nature of

definitions of ‘Chineseness’. Secondly, even if the

‘religion of the state’ approach to history has been

particularly strongly ingrained in China, one need only

look at the changes historical scholarship elsewhere in

the world has undergone over the past two centuries to

see that there is nothing uniquely Chinese about many of

the ideas that constitute this ‘religion’ in its present

form. Contrasting views of the extent and nature of

Chinese cultural distinctiveness, and the implications

of this for the study of the Chinese past, are discussed

further in the following two sections.

'Postmodern' History - History as Genealogy

Over the past two or three decades, one kind of

response to the perceived failures both of attempts to

fit history into what might be called a natural science

‘paradigm’, and of the ‘social sciences’ to live up to

their earlier predictive pretensions, has been to deny

altogether the possibility of ‘knowledge’ in the sense

63

in which that word is commonly understood.86 Postmodern

approaches to history, with their origins in French

poststructuralist linguistics and literary criticism,

are extensions of the argument that language can tell us

nothing about ‘reality’, and that the meanings we

ascribe to language are therefore entirely arbitrary.

‘There is,’ as Evans concedes, ‘much to be said for

paying closer attention… to the surface patterns and

meanings of language.’87 Some of the work produced under

the influence of postmodernism, for example on popular

mentalities, memory, the cultural dimensions of power

and authority and gender, provides ‘a new dimension of

understanding that moves well beyond the limitations of

social history.’ Cultural history ‘in the postmodern

mode’ has helped to ‘reorient our understanding of many

areas of political and social history, from the French

Revolution to the First World War and beyond.’88 The work

of Matthew Turner on popular culture and identity in

Hong Kong, cited in Chapter 5 below, is a case in point.

However, while the post-

86 See Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Character of Generalisations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power’, in ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985), Chapter 887 Richard Evans, op. cit., p. 18488 Ibid.

64

modernist emphasis on the political aspects of language

can thus provide illuminating historical insights, the

usefulness of such scholarship diminishes when the ideas

in which it originates are pushed too far, ‘so that we

get an intellectual reductionism instead of a socio-

economic one, or we abandon anything other than politics

and ideas as irrelevant to an understanding of human

motivation and action in history.’89 In other words,

postmodernist analysis can, and frequently does,

degenerate into an assertion of cultural-linguistic

determinism.

Most postmodernists – or at least those defined as

such by Jenkins –90 deny the existence of historical

‘facts’, at the same time as attacking attempts to

impose particular ‘meta-narratives’ (Marxist,

Positivist, Idealist, Augustinian, etc.) onto history.

Trying to recapture the ‘true’ meaning of past events or

texts in the light of their historical context is, in

the view of these thinkers, futile. Rather, as Ankersmit

proclaims, historians should ‘“let go of” the historical

context’ and seek to ‘discover the meaning of a number

of fundamental conflicts in our past by demonstrating

their contemporaneity.’ The only interest which

historical writing can hold for us, he argues, lies in

the ‘fascination’ of the historian’s ‘conceptions’; what

he calls ‘the metaphorical dimension’. ‘Criticising

metaphors on factual grounds,’ Ankersmit says, ‘is

89 Ibid., p. 18690 Keith Jenkins, ‘The Postmodern History Reader’ (Routledge, 1997)

65

indeed an activity which is just as pointless as it is

tasteless. Only metaphors “refute” metaphors. As

Ankersmit sees it, therefore, for rules of evidence the

postmodernist should substitute aesthetic taste.91

It was for this reason that Foucault, the doyen of

postmodern historians, used to insist that his history

should be read as fiction, while his followers have

often tended to blur or deny the distinction between

history and literary fiction. However, despite the

philosophical relativism which postmodernists profess,

much of their energy has been devoted to that favourite

pursuit of traditional thinkers of the radical left and

right: bourgeois-bashing. Many of the most prominent

apostles of postmodernism, from Foucault onwards, have

been disillusioned Marxists, while the philosophical

pedigree of postmodernism, which owes its greatest debt

to Nietszche and Heidegger, has close affinities with

that of Nazism.92 Despite their claims that

91 F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’, in Jenkins (ed.), op. cit. (1997), p. 29192 See Windschuttle, op. cit.. See also Evans’ discussion (in Evans,op. cit., 1997, pp. 233-238) of the prominent post-structuralist literary critic, Paul de Man, who worked as a Nazi propogandist during World War II.

66

postmodernism promotes pluralism and tolerance, those

thinkers, critics and historians who profess

postmodernism have frequently shown themselves to be

exceedingly intolerant of those who disagree with them.

As J.G. Merquior has commented of Foucault and his

disciples:

‘…these post-philosophical philosophers mock at the claims of

all knowledge, but are little prone to extend scepticism to

their own comprehensive negative views on science and society.

Refusing all critical debate, they seem to labour on the

illusion that the absence of method and the neglect of

argumentative rigour leads automatically to a virtuous grasp

of ‘real problems’. They do not blush to pass as writers

rather than professional thinkers, yet the ‘literary’ cloak

barely covers a huge dogmaticism.’93

Dogmaticism is, indeed, the inevitable, if

inconsistent, outcome of the postmodernists’ relativist

position. It is evident, for example, in Keith Jenkins’

attack on Geoffrey Elton’s ‘certaintist’ approach to

historical knowledge, by which he means Elton’s

insistence that the proper object of history is to

attempt to establish the truth about the past. In the

course of ridiculing Elton for clinging to such a

hopelessly outdated ideal, Jenkins declares that

‘…one can of course distinguish between histories; some are

better than others. But what would count as better at this

present juncture would have to be argued for in terms of, say,93 J.G. Merquior, ‘Foucault’ (Fontana, 1991), p. 159

67

theoretical frames of reference and method and social use…’94

In arguing for the priority of theory over experience

and of the present over the past, and in refusing to

take seriously historians’ claims concerning the

importance of evidence or objectivity, postmodernists

like Jenkins and Pennycook dismiss as naïve the belief

that history either can or should ‘reference reality’.95

Instead they follow Foucault in asserting that history

as a discipline exists merely as a rhetorical resource

enabling us to write ‘histories of the present’. The

work of the historian, in this view, is to construct ‘a

genealogy of history as the vertical projection of its

position’.96

As was noted at the start of this chapter, the

postmodernist view of knowledge and history as

‘genealogy’ originates with Nietzsche. MacIntyre has

argued that the history of Foucault’s thought in

particular poses and answers the question of whether or

not this genealogical project can in fact be carried

through successfully. He shows that ‘the intelligibility

of genealogy requires beliefs and allegiances’ –97 to

common ‘standards of truth, reference and rationality’

94 Keith Jenkins, ‘On “What is History?”: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White’ (Routledge, 1995), p. 9595 Alistair Pennycook, ‘English and the Discourses of Colonialism’ (Routledge, 1998), p. 2796 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Keith Jenkins (ed.), ‘The Postmodern History Reader’ (Routledge 1997), p. 12697 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry’ (Duckworth, 1990), p. 55

68

–98‘of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance’.99

Without such standards, the genealogist cannot

characterise or explain his project to himself or to

others, let alone evaluate his own success, without

‘falling back into a nongenealogical, academic mode,

difficult to discriminate from the encyclopaedist’s or

professorial academic mode in the repudiation of which

the genealogical project had its genesis and its

rationale’.100 Thus Foucault ultimately ‘regressed into

academia’,101 adopting a plain, academic style in his late

interviews and in his ‘History of Sexuality’ in which he

makes ‘truth claims’ indistinguishable from the kind

made by the conventional historian. What is true of

Foucault is also, according to Richard Evans, true of

his disciples. In discussing the controversy which

erupted during the late 1980s over the revelations of

the pro-Nazi activities of the leading postmodernist,

Paul de Man, Evans notes that

‘de Man’s defenders did not hesitate to make liberal use of

the rhetoric of factual objectivity, and more than one of them

made the explicit claim to “set the record straight” about the

literary theorist’s wartime past, condemning in the process

the “misreadings, distortions and selective slanting of

quotations” they believed had been employed by de Man’s

critics.’102

98 Ibid., p. 5499 Ibid., p. 55100 Ibid., p. 53101 Ibid., p. 54102 Richard Evans, op. cit.

69

One very influential writer associated with

postmodernism is the Palestinian-American literary

critic Edward Said. Said’s work has been greatly

influenced by Foucault’s theories of ‘discourse’ and

‘power-knowledge’, and by Jean Francois Lyotard’s

concept of ‘metanarratives’, a derogatory term applied

to historical accounts that claim to see meanings in

events which may go beyond what is apparent to the

participants. Said argues that Western attempts to

‘know’ the Orient

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have in reality been part and parcel of the imperialist

project to impose order on and to dominate the Oriental.

He claims that in this process the perspectives of the

indigenous peoples of the non-European world have been

ignored or undervalued. Here he undoubtedly has a point,

as he does when he draws attention to the history of

Western arrogance and racism towards ‘natives’. However,

Said does not rest content with calls for a redressing

of the balance through fuller account being taken of

indigenous perspectives, but proceeds to a fundamental

critique of the claims of Western scholarship to

contribute anything to our ‘knowledge’ of non-Western

societies. He asserts that, in the study of such

societies, Western historiography cannot hope to see

beyond the judgements of the ‘native’ peoples

themselves.103 This view is echoed by Pennycook, who

writes that ‘if I can play any role in helping to reduce

the pernicious effects of colonialism, then, as a

European, I must first seek out and question the

colonizer within myself’. However, he then eludes the

question of whether his own study constitutes an attempt

to ‘know’ another culture, or whether it can be of any

interest to ‘people of non-European/American background’

– ‘rather this is’, he argues obscurely, ‘a question of

not trying to read effects on others of processes I am

trying to understand myself.’104 This disclaimer comes

close to acknowledging the solipsism which MacIntyre and

103 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’, (Penguin, 1991)104 Alistair Pennycook, op. cit., pp. 28-9

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others have seen as inherent to postmodernism, though

Pennycook and Said treat whole ‘cultures’ rather than

individuals as the basic units of consciousness.

In ‘Orientalism’, Said quotes with approval a

passage in which the author of a 1932 book on Chinese

philosophy criticises the Western tendency to speak of

European thought as ‘accepting and gathering up the

whole of the human tradition.’105 Here he has a strong

case, as most contemporary Western philosophers remain

almost wholly ignorant of the Chinese philosophical

tradition, despite the fact that evidence is

increasingly emerging of the very significant impact

which Chinese thought and images of China had on

European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries.106 However, Said’s attacks on ‘Western’

tradition, and the cultural theory he has attempted to

construct in opposition to this tradition, have been

hijacked by a variety of Third-World nativist

chauvinists and put to ideological uses which their

originator himself finds disturbing.107 Said now denies

that he ever sought to imply that ‘the entire West is an

enemy of the Arab and Islamic or for that matter the

Iranian, Chinese, Indian and many other non-European

peoples who suffered Western colonialism and prejudice,’

and condemns the way in which ‘the very existence of105 Said, ‘Orientalism’, p. 254106 See Thomas H.C. Lee ed., ‘China and Europe, Images and Influencesin Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’ (Chinese University Press, 1991)107 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’ (Penguin, 1995), ‘Afterword to the 1995 Printing’, pp. 329-354

72

Orientalism and Orientalists is seized upon as a pretext

for arguing… that Islam is perfect, that it is the only

way…, and so on and so on. To criticize Orientalism, as

I did in my book, is [wrongly seen as] in effect to be a

supporter of Islamism or Muslim fundamentalism.’108

Among those who have attempted to turn Said’s

‘Orientalist’ theories to similar uses in recent years

are a number of Chinese ‘postcolonialists’ who seek ‘to

turn “cultural China” into a totalizing conceptual

framework in which Chineseness can be established once

and for all as a unique indigenous model of knowledge, a

register of a historically new epoch, and a distinctive

quality of cultural experience.’109 For these theorists,

‘postcolonialism’ is a convenient conceptual tool with

which to attack ‘the West’, while asserting the

fundamental incommensurability of what they see as

‘Chinese’ culture and history. Their approach

incorporates, according to Ben Xu, a ‘unidirectional

history [which] assumes only two mutually exclusive

categories, modernity and Chineseness. It treats

modernity and Chineseness as two fixed models, two

articles of faith, rather than as testable hypotheses.’110

In other words, it is the old scissors-and-paste,

history-as-religion-of-the-state approach, expressed in

108 Ibid., p. 331109 Ben Xu, ‘From Modernity to Chineseness’ (‘positions’ 6:1, Spring 1998), pp. 214-215. Xu is referring specifically to the views of Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, co-authors of the article ‘From Modernitiy to Chineseness’ (Wenyi zhengming [Debates on literature and art] 2 (April 1994): 10-20110 ibid., p. 219

73

the academic jargon of the 1990s. Postmodernist theory

has, in the hands of the scholars whom Xu criticises,

become an excuse for scissors-and-paste history pressed

into the service of a determinist, chauvinist view of

culture and ethnicity.

This alliance of Chinese nationalism with

postmodernism has been severely criticised by other

Chinese scholars. Shao Jian, for instance, has pointed

out that ‘the nativist blueprint for Chineseness

reflects a dangerous dream of a new cultural hegemony,

which is disguised as a struggle for cultural

independence and counteraction against the old Western

hegemony.’111 Writers such as Ben Xu, belonging to what

might be termed the postcolonialist mainstream, have

also attacked the Chinese cultural nativists for

perverting the pluralism they regard as integral to

their standpoint. However, as has been argued above,

appeals for pluralism, or historical accuracy, or

appeals to any moral imperative at all that are made

from a fundamentally relativist standpoint have a

decidedly shaky basis, making it difficult to argue from

such a point of view that there are ‘legitimate’ and

‘illegitimate’ forms of postcolonialism.112 The position

which Xu, for example, espouses is one of dogmatic anti-

dogmatism as opposed to the dogmatic nativism of those

Chinese ‘postcolonialists’ he attacks. Xu’s position,

like those of Foucault, Said, Jenkins or Pennycook, has

111 ibid., p. 220112 Windschuttle and Evans, op.s cit.

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no firmer foundation than that of a philosophically

arbitrary personal preference.

History as a critical, rational ‘craft tradition’

As was argued at the beginning of this chapter, a

convincing response to both relativist and determinist

theories of knowledge and history is provided by

Collingwood’s philosophy of history and by the ethical

philosophy of MacIntyre.113 Both of these thinkers reject

utterly the notion that ‘the truth is out there’,

waiting to be discovered, or the idea that philosophy

can be reduced to a list of eternal problems in search

of universal solutions. If the objective of philosophy

or social science is to supply a ‘perfect theory’, or if

the objective of history is to supply a ‘perfect account

of the human past’, then Collingwood and MacIntyre would

both agree with the postmodernists that such efforts are

doomed to failure. ‘Truth’ in philosophy, history or the

social sciences is not, and cannot be, something

eternal, absolute and unchanging but is necessarily

provisional, shifting and open to doubt. Nonetheless,

MacIntyre tells us, while we cannot aspire to ‘a perfect

theory’, we can and must aim at ‘the best theory so

far,’114 and the only way to ascertain this is through

historical study – through the sort of history which, in113 Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’ (Oxford, 1994); ‘An Autobiography’ (Pelican, 1944); MacIntyre, ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985)114 MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 277

75

Collingwood’s words, attempts to ‘understand the present

by reconstructing its determining conditions’, and which

sees itself as nothing less than ‘the science of human

affairs.’115

If history as Collingwood sees it is scientific,

however, it is not a science on the model of the natural

sciences, for it does not aim at constructing a ‘science

of human nature’ with predictive power. This is because

the subject matter of history is not external to the

human mind; it is that mind itself, which, though it

contains irrational elements, is in the ‘self-conscious

creation of its own historical life’ necessarily

rational and autonomous.116 In studying the past,

Collingwood tells us, the scientific historian is like

the hero of a detective novel putting the evidence

(rather than the suspect) ‘to the torture’117 - not simply

by rearranging his sources into a plausible narrative

account, but by imaginatively re-enacting in his own

mind the past thought of which his sources constitute

the present traces.118 Of course a bad historian, like a

bad detective, may in reality do the former rather than

the latter, but a good one will follow Lord Acton’s

advice, and ‘study problems, not periods’.119 The question

then arises as to which problems the historian should

study. The answer to this is provided by the history of115 Collingwood, ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1926’, in ‘The Idea of History’ (Oxford, 1994)116 Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’117 Ibid., p. 270118 Ibid., pp. 282-302119 quoted in Ibid., p. 281

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historical enquiry prior to his participation in it. As

MacIntyre puts it, the problems or ‘goals’ of each

particular discipline or ‘practice’ do not arise

randomly or arbitrarily, but ‘themselves are transmuted

by the history of that activity.’120 Indeed, for

Collingwood and MacIntyre this is as true of the history

of natural science as it is of history tout court or of

thought in general, for, as Collingwood points out, ‘It

is only in so far as Einstein knows [Newton’s] theory

that he can make an advance upon it. Newton thus lives

in Einstein in the way in which past experience lives in

the mind of the historian.’121 Progress, therefore, is

not, like biological evolution, ‘a mere fact to be

discovered by historical thinking: it is only through

historical thinking that it comes about at all.’122

For MacIntyre, as for Collingwood, the only way in

which we can know that we are progressing, or know that

our way of thinking is ‘true’ in any real sense, is

through critical reflection on the history of our

practical experience. Collingwood’s formulation

anticipates the philosophy of Popper as well as that of

MacIntyre:

‘How can we ever satisfy ourselves that the principles on

which we think are true, except by going on thinking according

to those principles, and seeing whether unanswerable

120 MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 193121 Collingwood, ‘The Idea of History’, p. 334122 Ibid., p. 333; See also MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions of MoralEnquiry’ (Duckworth, 1990)

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criticisms of them emerge as we work? To criticize the

conceptions of science is the work of science itself as it

proceeds; to demand that such criticism should be anticipated

by the theory of knowledge is to demand that such a theory

should anticipate the history of thought.’123

The ‘standards of truth, reference and rationality’

which we need to make our thought intelligible must be

found, if they are to be found at all, in the history of

thought itself. This is the basis of MacIntyre’s concept

of philosophy as a ‘craft tradition’. When he speaks of

‘tradition’ as a mode of enquiry, however, he is not

advocating the uncritical acceptance of the legacy of

the past. On the contrary, he characterises this

uncritical concept as ‘dead tradition’, contrasting it

with ‘vital traditions’ which, he argues, are

‘in a centrally important way… constituted by a continuous

argument as to what [for example] a good university is and

ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is.

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict.’124

MacIntyre sees it as the central purpose of education to

communicate and embody this concept of tradition, and he

argues that universities in particular should be places

of ‘constrained disagreement, of imposed participation

in conflict.’125

Collingwood and MacIntyre, like Berlin and Popper,123 Ibid., p. 230124 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985), p. 222125 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry’ (Duckworth, 1990), p. 231

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argue that the alternatives to a ‘critical rationalism’

based on experience and historical reflection are,

ultimately, either relativistic solipsism of the sort

embraced by poststructuralist and postmodernist theory,

or deterministic historicism of one sort or another.126

While these thinkers admit that it is impossible, on the

one hand, to absolutely disprove the historicist or

solopsist positions, on the other hand they insist that

our experience gives us absolutely no reason for

believing in either. On the contrary,

126 Berlin, op. cit.; Popper, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ (Routledge, 1966), ‘The Poverty of Historicism’ (Routledge, 1961)

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what underlies the philosophy of all these thinkers is a

conviction that our recent history gives us every reason

for believing that adopting an approach to history

which, to use Ankersmit’s phrase, “lets go of” critical

rationality is an extremely dangerous course.127

In the context of this study, concerned as it is

with the teaching of history in a Chinese setting, the

question may still be posed as to whether a ‘critical

rationalist’ approach to history is a phenomenon

specific to ‘Western culture’, and fundamentally alien

to ‘Chinese culture’. If the latter were the case, the

related question would arise as to whether it is

legitimate or desirable to import this notion of

‘critical rationalism’ into Chinese thought and

practice. It has been argued here, however, that such

concepts of ‘legitimacy’, or related concepts of

cultural ‘authenticity’ or the inability of cultures to

‘speak to’ each other, are based on highly dubious

philosophical foundations. There are, as Benjamin

Schwarz argues, ‘no a priori grounds for assuming that

all… attempts to find affiinities and compatibilities

[between Chinese and Western traditions in all their

‘variety’] are wrong in principle’.128 As he says of

attempts to compare the thought of Rousseau with that of

the Book of Mencius,

127 F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’, in Jenkins (ed.) ‘The Postmodern History Reader’ (Routledge, 1997), p. 291128 Benjamin Schwarz, ‘Tradition versus Modernity’, in ‘China and Other Matters’ (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 58

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‘We should not be deterred by culturalistic-historistic

arguments that there cannot possibly be any comparison between

the thoughts of a Chinese literatus living several centuries

before Christ and those of a neurotic social philosopher in

eighteenth-century France.’129

The foregoing discussion has highlighted the

strength of the state-centred, state-controlled

traditions of Chinese historiography, and the Great Wall

of Chineseness that several self-styled

‘postcolonialist’ Chinese scholars, along with others

who take a more straightforwardly culturalist or

chauvinist view, have tried to erect against what they

see as alien ideas and values. For historical, political

and ideological reasons, history writing in China has

remained largely confined within limits set by state

authority and scissors-and-paste methodology, and the

requirements of moral exhortation. This is reflected,

for example, in the recent crop of mainland works on

Hong Kong history, with their dry, narrative,

descriptive style, and their suffocating ideological

correctness.130

But modern Chinese historiography, encompassing

work by scholars of both Chinese and non-Chinese origins

around the world, is far more varied, sophisticated and

129 Ibid., pp. 58-9130 See, for example, Liu Shuyong, ‘An Outline History of Hong Kong’ (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1997); Yu Shengwu, Liu Duyong (ed.s), ‘20 Shijiede Xianggang’ (‘20th Century Hong Kong’), (Zhongguo Da Bai Ke Quan Shu Chu Ban She, 1995); Zhang Xueyan, Qian Ningsheng (ed.s), ‘Xianggang Bainian’ (‘Hong Kong: One Hundred Years’), (Zhongguo Yanshi Chu Ban She, 1997).

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critical than mainland publications alone might appear

to suggest, even if many of the best studies of Chinese

history tend to be published in English in America. In

the field of Hong Kong history, for example, one of the

most interesting books published to date is ‘Hong Kong

in Chinese History’, by Jung-Fang Tsai, a Chinese

historian working in America.131 In Chapter 5, a number of

other highly ‘critical’ and ‘rational’ works on Hong

Kong by Chinese and non-Chinese historians are

discussed. In Taiwan, the history sections of most well-

stocked bookstores are now almost as likely to contain

Chinese translations of volumes of ‘The Cambridge

History of China’, or of works by Fairbank, Spence, or

by Chinese historians working on the other side of the

Pacific, as they are to contain dusty tomes by more

conservative traditionalists such as Qian Mu. There has

in recent years been an enormous amount of research done

by Taiwanese and other scholars on Taiwan’s own history,

culture and anthropology.132 A number of scholars – mainly

Taiwanese, American and overseas Chinese – have also

critically re-examined the history of Chinese thought in

search of a basis for comparing Chinese traditions with

those of the modern West. For these thinkers, criticism

does not mean, as it did for many of the May Fourth

generation, a wholesale rejection of the Chinese legacy

in favour of ready-made foreign ideas or ideologies.

Thus Wang Gungwu, albeit in the conclusion to a 1979

131 Tsai, ‘Hong Kong in Chinese History’ (Columbia, 1993)132 See Chapter 10

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paper in which he studiously avoided criticism of the

mainland regime, called for ‘a close unemotional look…

at the West today, at Marxism-Leninism around the world

today, at the strengths and weaknesses of tradition in

China and other parts of Asia and not least at the

historic role of tradition in the modernisation

process.’133

This is indeed precisely what many scholars, both

Chinese and non-Chinese, have increasingly been

attempting to do over the past twenty years. While some

academics, particularly on the mainland where their

freedom of enquiry is curtailed, have taken refuge in a

stereotypical concept of Chineseness, others, especially

in Taiwan, have rediscovered previously submerged or

suppressed indigenous traditions of critical thought,

and have sought to compare such traditions with those of

the West. Thus Mark Elvin, in his study of one early

nineteenth-century Chinese novel, has noted the author’s

‘rational approach to the Confucian Scriptures as

historical documents. His attitude, typical of much

eighteenth-century scholarship, was the first stage of

an unintended process of desacralization that began long

before modern Western ideas began to undermine the

thought structures of the Chinese.’134 Like Kang Youwei

one hundred years ago, although perhaps with the

advantage of a far more sophisticated appreciation of133 Wang, ‘May Fourth and the GPCR: The Cultural Revolution Remedy’, in ‘The Chineseness of China’ (O.U.P., 1991), p. 244.134 Elvin, ‘The Inner World of 1830’, in Tu (ed.), ‘The Living Tree’ (Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 58-9

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Western ideas, many contemporary Chinese thinkers manage

to combine a critical approach to their Chinese

intellectual heritage with an openness to Western ideas

and influences.135 This attitude is evident in the some of

the contributions to a 1995 volume entitled ‘Human

Rights and Chinese Values’136, in which one contributor,

Eliza Lee, proposes adopting what she terms MacIntyre’s

liberal-communitarian position as the philosophical

foundation of arguments for common human rights.137

This critical, rational position avoids, on the one

hand, the blind alleys of material, racial, cultural or

theological determinism, while on the other hand it

prevents us from being sucked into the relativist void

of postmodern ‘space’. The contrast which MacIntyre

makes between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ traditions is echoed

in Tu Wei-ming’s conceptualisation of Chinese culture as

a ‘living tree’.138 That culture, Tu argues, is not a

monolithic, static entity rooted solely in the soil of

the motherland, nor is participation in it necessarily

restricted to those who are Chinese by birth or descent,

but it is rather something at once more varied, changing

and open. The same view is implicit in the conclusion to

William Theodore de Bary’s ‘The Trouble with

135 On Kang Youwei, see Spence, ‘The Gate of Heavenly Peace’ (Penguin, 1982), especially chapters 1-4.136 Davis (ed.), ‘Human Rights and Chinese Values: Legal, Philosophical and Political Perspectives’ (O.U.P., 1995)137 Eliza Lee, in ibid., pp. 72-90; See also ‘William Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming ed.s, ‘Confucianism and Human Rights’ (Columbia,1998)138 MacIntyre, ‘After Virtue’ (Duckworth, 1985); Tu, ‘Cultural China’, in ‘The Living Tree’ (1994), pp. 1-34

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Confucianism’, when he writes:

‘Today no people can look to their own traditions alone for…

learning and understanding, any more than could the Confucians

earlier. The latter at least understood the need for dialogue

and discussion as essential to “advancing the Way”, even

though they were unable to sustain it, much less broaden it,

in the given circumstances. Now the time has come for us to

extend and expand the discourse, as a dialogue with the past,

with other cultures, and even with future generations, who

cannot speak for themselves but whose fate is in our hands.’139

History as a school subject might, if taught in a

critical, rational spirit, be expected to provide a

foundation for such a cross-cultural discourse. It is a

central purpose of this research to examine how, why and

to what extent such a vision of history teaching has

informed curriculum development and classroom practice

in Hong Kong.

139 de Bary, ‘The Trouble With Confucianism’ (Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 112

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