China and the Historians.

• Author: Horner, Charles

THROUGHOUT the second half of the twentieth century, the study of modern China was informed by a "master narrative" whose climax was the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. All roads seemed to lead to Beijing's famous Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao's proclamation of China's new order. Of course, the historian cannot but tell the story this way, for he surely knows that this is how China's political struggles during the first half of the twentieth century resolved themselves. In this respect, the student of modern China is not much different from his fellows who are interested in other parts of the world; no matter any historian's claim that he seeks to understand the past on its own terms, his work is always conducted in full knowledge of how things actually turned Out. He becomes a determinist de facto, reading consequences back into causes, even as he struggles against it.

And yet new interpretations, reinterpretations and syntheses do appear. Sometimes, without anyone's planning it or even desiring it, the rewriting and reworking of history can provide a new framework for the consideration of contemporary questions. When the subject is a relatively exotic place like China--whose story is not very well known to begin with--the time lag inherent in this process will be that much greater than normal, and a change in the focus of even the attentive public will take that much longer. To this, one must add the ladylike and gentlemanly pace at which the study of China progresses, a reflection of the difficulty of the subject matter, but also a legacy of the careful, deliberate and unhurried way in which the Chinese themselves have studied their own history. And again, we must remember that conditions inside China during the past century and a half have hardly been conducive to the Western or Chinese study of the country's modern history. Inside, chaos and political repression have i nhibited the work; outside, foreigners have been constrained by these obstacles--and by a few of their own making, as well.

This said, during the past twenty years, at least three important trends in the investigation and presentation of modern Chinese history have been altering our view of contemporary China--and will therefore influence our stance toward it. There has been, first of all, a profound and revolutionary change under way in interpreting China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), with important implications for our understanding of the very meaning of even fundamental terms like "China" and "Chinese." There is also a comparable revisiting of the history of the first half of the twentieth century, focused more on comprehending both the complex China and the "greater China" we see before us today, rather than the Maoist China that monopolized our vision for so long. And there is a demographic change in progress: the previously dominant position of non-Chinese sinologists in the study and teaching of China around the world is gradually shrinking as greater numbers of Chinese, whether inside or outside of China, whether citizens of China or of other countries, become involved.

Manchus and Chinese: Whose Great Enterprise?

IN February 1912, Prince Chun, the regent acting on behalf of his five year-old son, the emperor of China, executed an instrument of abdication whereby the last Chinese dynasty came to an end. The Qing ("Ch'ing" in the older system of Romanization) dynasty had begun in 1644. It was not the creation of Chinese at all, but the work of a hitherto obscure inner Asian people, the Manchus, who had gradually come to prominence beyond the Great Wall. In the traditional Chinese sense of things, the Manchus' decision to attempt "the Great Enterprise"--that is, the conquest of all of China--was momentous, but far from unprecedented. Non-Chinese dynasties--dynasties of conquest, as they are styled--had governed China for about half its history. The one most familiar to us was created by the Mongols, whose dynasty was known to the Chinese as the Yuan (1260-1348); the emperor of China during Marco Polo's visit, Kublai Khan, was one of these Mongol rulers, a grandson of Genghis. Between the collapse of the Mongols and the ascendancy of the Manchus, China had been governed by the wholly home-grown Ming dynasty, whose rule began in 1368 and lasted for some 275 years.

The decay and decomposition of the Ming house, and how its empire was acquired by the previously unheralded Manchu invaders, is one of the great tales of Chinese history. It is the stuff not only of legend and literature. Chinese resistance to the gradual consolidation of Manchu rule throughout the country created a powerful political tradition of its own, for the Manchu ascendancy raised fundamental issues of loyalty and legitimacy for common folk and elites alike. The relatively tiny number of Manchu outsiders had to perfect a complex strategy of co-optation and intimidation, and then develop a governing style that would hold together their hard-won holdings. How they did this, who owed what to whom, and how to reconcile the initial grand successes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the catastrophic collapse of the nineteenth century--these issues of historical analysis have informed the debates about Chinese politics for the past century and a half.

How "Chinese" was Manchu-era China? That is the nub of the matter. Some Chinese who turned against the dynasty at its end for its failure to fend off the onslaught of the Western barbarians concluded that the country had been betrayed by the Manchus. They argued that, whatever their degree of "Chinese-ness", the Manchus were of a different race, and, therefore, were willing to collaborate with white imperialists against the interests of the Chinese as a people in order to protect "China" as a Manchu imperial possession. This racial aspect of things also served in some ways to further discredit the entire Confucian imperial idea as inherently opposed to the interests of the Chinese as a people; it fed the argument for junking the imperial system itself and substituting a modern republic in its place. The curious combination of revived racial consciousness (stoked by the "Social Darwinism" of the late nineteenth century), recollections of Ming dynasty loyalism, and different strands of Western political though t all came together in the anti-dynastic, pro-republican movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, famously led by Sun Yat-sen.

On the other hand, there was no denying the greatness of prior Manchu achievements. These had been known throughout East Asia, and also to literate Europeans from the reports of Catholic missionaries who had actually witnessed and described with great insight and detail the last days of Ming rule, and who had then over time gained important positions in the Qing court. Western sinology began here, and it was the inspiration for the West's future fascination with chinoiserie in all its forms...