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Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing . By Huaiyin Li . Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press , 2013. xii, 338 pp. $52.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--China
Modern China has been reinvented numerous times and will no doubt go on being reinvented. Huaiyin Li contributes to our knowledge of Chinese historical writing on two levels: first, as a summary of major historical currents across the twentieth century, and second, as a critique of all the things that can go wrong with narrativizing history, even while Li ultimately calls for a new and better "master narrative." Indeed, Li argues that the failure of master narratives today has left Chinese historians in an empirical morass, unable to clarify the relationships among events.
Li begins with a brief look at the "new history" of the late Qing and early Republic, when narrative history first began to be practiced, replacing chronicles and annals. But his real interest is the development of two master narratives--modernization and revolution--from the 1930s to their final collapse at the end of the century. Here, Li provides something of a master narrative of his own, identifying four successive historiographical waves. First, modernization, focusing on elite reform movements and China's failure to "catch up." Second, revolution, focusing on popular or class struggle against...