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
70
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
71
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.
74
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
76
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)
77
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
78
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)
79
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
80
‘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).
81
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
82
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
83
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
84
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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