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Reconstructing World History in the People's Republic of China since the 1980s*
LUO XU
State University of New York College at Cortland
| Writing history has long been an important part of Chinese tradition. As early as the time of the Han dynasty, the great historian Sima Qian (145–86 B.C.E.) described many countries of the known world in his Historical Record.1 But writing world history from a global perspective was a relatively new endeavor of Chinese historians in the twentieth century. Up to the mid 1940s, there had been no "wofrld history"—only Chinese history and "Western history"—in the curriculum of China's secondary and tertiary education.2 Even though some historians labored to write world history, most of their works can only be defined as the "history of different countries."3 Not until the late 1950s and early 1960s was the first organized attempt made in China to depict world history in a universal pattern of development of human society. That collective effort led to the first multivolume, "official" world history text,4 which was published in 1962 and often dubbed "a milestone in the development of China's world history."5 The 1962 text followed the Marxist stages (universalized in Soviet historiography) of development from communal society through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, to socialism.6 Because the Marxist theory of social evolution drew on European historical experience, the Chinese text based on this model was bound to be Eurocentric and focused on the countries and events that best illustrated these orthodox five stages.7 Moreover, partly due to its concentration on demonstrating underlying laws of historical development, the text largely neglected horizontal development (interactions among different regions and cultures),8 and it excluded Chinese history.9 |
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Since the 1980s, partially responding to the diversification of Chinese society, more and more historians have called for a critical reevaluation of China's world history field and a reorientation in thinking and writing about the global past. A central part of their effort to reconceptualize and reconstruct world history "with Chinese characteristics" is to exclude Eurocentrism (or West-centrism) in interpreting the origins of the modern world and the course of modern history since 1500. During the 1980s and 1990s, in line with Deng Xiaoping's "reform and opening," many contemporary Western theories entered China and provided, interestingly, handy weapons to battle the West-centrism embedded in China's historical studies. Most importantly, Chinese scholars became increasingly aware of the global history approach prevalent among Euro-American scholars in recent decades.10 Mainly owing to the strenuous efforts of the prominent historian Wu Yujin (1913–1993), followed by others, the global history perspective was accepted and adopted by most people, almost becoming a new "guiding theory" in China's world history field. |
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