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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. US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-82448-3608-5.
One of the refreshing things about UT-Austin Professor Huaiyin Li's latest book on historical writing in China, Reinventing Modern China, is that roughly three-fourths of the more than four hundred references cited are from Chinese publications, many of them written by members of Li's own cohort (Chinese social scientists and historians who didn't enter academic circles until China's economic reform era in the 1980s). The rest of Li's Chinese sources cover a wide range of scholarship from the early twentieth century to the present. Not that he ignores Western scholarship on the subject; far from it. He delves deeply into Western accounts of modern China and theoretical works on history-writing to elucidate cross-cultural influences and contrasting interpretations of historical events.
Welcome too is the tight, logical organization of his arguments that Li offers. What could look like an unfathomable tangle of views and interpretations is made crystal clear, so that the specialist and generalist alike can grasp the arguments with ease. This clarity is achieved in part through what some might call too much repetition, but I took it rather as an opportunity to "review as I went along."
Professor Li's overarching argument revolves around the construction of "grand narratives" about modern Chinese history over the course of the twentieth century, and the need to fashion a more balanced and nuanced narrative for the future, if we are to better understand the continuing development of modern China in the age of globalization. Simply put, the book may be read as a history of historiography in (and of) modern China, and a call to continue the project by adopting a more objective approach that is...