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If it feels like I link to China Media Project a lot, it’s simply because David Bandurski runs a damn good blog. Allow me to do so again and recommend his excellent post “Can China forget its own history,” a must-read for anyone interested in modern Chinese history and historiography. The accompanying essay/translation will also have particular resonance for those familiar with the documentary Morning Sun, in which Song Binbin’s recollections feature prominently. It’s such a strange expression — as if History could take sides. A decade ago, President Clinton used these words to scold the Chinese leadership, President Obama used the same phrase last week. There’s a a couple of things that trouble me about the sentiment. For one, it assumes a single track of historical progress. For another “History” in the service of competing claims in the here and now is a tricky ally, when it is used to forecast the future it can be even trickier. At the very least when history is remembered or enlisted to serve the present it requires the kind of gross simplification and eschewing of nuance that makes most historians cringe. Today YJ and I were discussing for the 1000th time the Τιbetan question and I suggested that my disdain and distaste for the Party line (and its supporters and parrots at home and abroad) had little to do with their opinion or right to hold such an opinion, but rather that the claims this group tended to make were of a different intellectual tradition than my own. The “Τιbet always has been, always will be part of China” crowd are starting from a point of certainty Via Danwei: The Beijing News October 7, 2008 Yan Chongnian (阎崇年), a scholar specializing in Qing history and Manchu culture, was attacked on October 5 when he was in Wuxi to promote his new book, The Kangxi Emperor. The prolific author was smacked twice in the face, allegedly because the attacker disagreed with his historical views. While it was unclear from the report which views got Professor Yan slapped by another dude (what kind of a guy slaps someone, anyway?), Danwei did some digging and came up with these little nuggets of Qing wisdom by searching the internet for “Yan Chongnian” and “traitor”: Wu Sangui, the general who has usually taken the blame for the collapse of Ming Dynasty (the last Han Chinese Dynasty) by virtue of his surrender to the Manchu invaders, should be reevaluated for avoiding mass bloodshed that may have resulted had he not surrendered; Censorship and crackdown on dissenting views by the Qing ensured social stability despite certain limitation; The Manchu invasion promoted the integration of different ethnic groups, and the human loss it caused was inevitable. The Qing can be a touchy subject. I’ve occasionally riled people by (tongue ever so slightly in cheek) correcting their assumption that One new feature I’m trying to kick off here at The Granite Studio is an entirely biased and hugely subjective review of some of my favorite historians of China. These are the writers and scholars who influenced me when I began studying Chinese history and who continue to serve as inspirations as I continue my own career in the field. Given my research interests, I’m starting with Paul Cohen. It was a footnote in his first book, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Anti-foreignism, 1860-1870 that was the original impetus for my dissertation, and I still re-read Professor Cohen’s seminal work on the subject about once every six months or so. But of his many works, perhaps my favorite is a slim volume he published in 1984, not about Chinese history per se, but about the study of Chinese history in the American academy. To briefly and inadequately summarize, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past ambitiously breaks down the collective oeuvre of American academic writing on China since World War II into three distinct generations based on the predominant mode of analysis at the time: “China’s Response to the |
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