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Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. By Q. Edward Wang. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 304. Reviewed by Caroline Reeves Williams College
There is a growing interest in and literature on the establishment of the Academy in twentieth-century China. Q. Edward Wang adds to this important body of knowledge with his book Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Wang explores the birth of the modern Chinese discipline of history, whose development he traces from the early nineteenth century through the 1960s. In so doing, he also examines the lives and works of a number of well-known and less well known liberal Chinese intellectuals, predominantly professional historians, as they grappled with reconciling China's traditional past with their visions for China's future. Wang does an admirable job of sketching the professional (and sometimes personal) lives of Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Fu Sinian, He Bingsong, Yao Congwu, Luo Jialun, and Chen Yingke to show how their cross-cultural experiences both informed and complicated their approaches to history and their understanding of Chinese modernity.
Wang starts his book with a review of some of the Western literature on Chinese historiography. He includes works by Joseph Levenson, Laurence Schneider, Arif Dirlik, Prasenjit Duara, Tang Xiaobing, and Lionel M. Jensen. While the selection may seem rather scattershot, this review is helpful to situate the reader vis-a-vis Wang's own theoretical concerns. Wang suggests that some of these earlier scholars have overlooked a development within the discipline of historical scholarship in modern China and underestimated its significance. Liberal historians in the Republican period were criticized mainly because they failed to promote liberalism more successfully in China. That kind of teleological observation blamed Chinese intellectuals for a "failure" that had more to do with the extreme circumstances, that is, the Anti-Japanese War, than with any supposed "fallacy" in their political and academic pursuits. Consequently, it failed to give full credit to the role these intellectuals played in causing the transformation of historical study in China.... [History] was transformed from a subject auxiliary to the study of Confucian classics (jing) to an autonomous discipline of modern scholarship. (p. 10)
Wang himself is particularly interested in examining the relationship between what he calls...