Wang Q.E. Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography

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coverage but also to its idea of working exclusively on a contempo-

rary event in the world; few scholars in the past made the same

attempt. The Prusso-France War began with a description of the

causes of the war, then proceeded to describing its process, and

ended with the postwar negotiation and settlement. It provided a

succinct yet comprehensive coverage of the war, which comprised

detailed descriptions about the operations of the respective political

systems, especially in Prussia, the military preparations of both

sides, the reactions of the people (Wang even translated La

Marseillaise into a traditional Chinese poem), and the diplomatic

maneuvering.

Wang Tao’s interest in current events paved the way for the

development of new subjects of learning. Indeed, as Paul Cohen

has noticed, Wang was also a pioneer in Chinese journalism.

his writings, Wang converged history with journalism. His novel

attempt was shown in what he wrote as well as how he wrote it. In

writing Prusso-France War, for instance, Wang adopted a form that

merges the chronicle and the biography. It allowed him to narrate

the prosecution of the war with continuity. His style thus consti-

tuted a stark contrast to Sima Qian’s multiple narrative style,

to borrow Grant Hardy’s term, which, in the so-called annals-

biographic form, mentioned an event many times in various biogra-

phies.

The annals-biographic form, adopted by most dynastic

historians, enabled one to focus on individuals’ deeds. At the same

time, it failed to present the wholeness in narration; descriptions of

the same event were scattered in many places. By contrast, Wang

Tao’s narrative account allowed the reader to read the story in its

entirety.

To some extent, Wang’s style also differed from Yuan Shu’s jishi

benmo style, which, for example, was used by Wei Yuan in com-

posing the Military History. Yuan Shu invented the style by re-

arranging the sections of Sima Guang’s Comprehensine Mirror and

provided a narrative for the events mentioned in Sima Guang’s.

However, his The Narratives from the Beginning to the End in the

Comprehensive Mirror of Aid for Government (Tongjian jishi benmo)

still followed biographic lines in structure. By comparison, Wang’s

style was rather event-oriented than individual-centered.

His

adoption of the narrative style suggested the Western inﬂuence,

indicating a change in historical thinking.

While receptive to Western inﬂuence, Wang Tao was not very

impressed by the accomplishment of Western historiography. The

narrative form, in Wang’s opinion, prevented Western historians

from offering reﬂections on historical change as well as detailed cov-

38 NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE

erage of the speciﬁcs in history. Without anecdotes, Western histo-

ries lacked literary allure. “It is unfortunate,” he remarked, “to see

that in their histories there were no reﬂections on the rise and fall

of political governments, there was no description on the change of

territory in states, and there was no effort made to trace the origins

of family history.” By comparison, Wang pointed out that Chinese

historians were interested in offering a comprehensive coverage of

the past and attempted to record things in different categories and

preserve the records. But their ambition to cover everything often

resulted in problems in historical accuracy. As a conclusion, Wang

stated that a good historian must overcome the deﬁciencies in both

Chinese and Western historiography.

Wang tried to become such a good historian. In writing the

General History of France (Faguo zhilue), he made an attempt to

unite the two historiographical traditions. The ﬁrst part of the

History of France followed the form of chronology (biao) in the

Chinese tradition to delineate the family line of the French royal

house, particularly its dynastic succession, hence contouring the

book’s content. Then he focused in the second part on the French

foreign expansions in the period, using the form similar to the “trea-

tise” (shu). Wang considered belligerence and militarism national

characteristics of modern France. In the third part, Wang described

political institutions, economic life, the war machine, and cultural

activity in France in the form of “monograph” (zhi). But in chapter

eighteen, Wang created a new form, “broad narrative” (guangshu),

and used it to offer a comprehensive coverage of the evolution of

French society.

This new form reﬂected his effort to incorporate

Western historiographical styles in his writing.

As said earlier, the change of style in historical writing can be

indicative of a change in historical thinking. In perceiving and

presenting Western history, Wang shared his thought about the

change of history and formulated a new understanding of the world.

In his analysis of the Franco-Prussia War, for example, he tried to

perceive its signiﬁcance in a global context. Although he believed

that Prussia’s better preparation, advanced military technology, and

effective tactics contributed to its victory over France, he pointed

out that the war outcome suggested a new trend in world history.

An important reason was that Prussia was a young country in

incline whereas France was in decline and that the rise and fall of

powers constituted the course of human history. Thus viewed,

France’s defeat became almost inevitable. Wang predicted that as a

result of the Franco-Prussia War, European powers would lose their

balance and the next dominant power could be Russia. Russia,

NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE 39

Wang warned, would either challenge the powers in western Europe

or expand toward the east to attack China.

Wang’s forecast about Russia’s future was based on his basic

understanding of the movement of history. He maintained, analo-

gous to Wei Yuan in this regard, that the competition among dif-

ferent states was the norm of history and that the situation in

Europe was similar to that of the Spring and Autumn period

(722–481, B.C.E.) in China. In this comparison, Russia was suppos-

edly playing the role of the State of Qin, which, as happened in

China two millennia earlier, would eventually take control of

Europe and dominate the rest of the countries. Yet what really con-

cerned Wang was the threat of this stronger and ambitious Russia

to China. In analyzing the consequence of the Franco-Prussia War,

Wang wasted no time to caution his readers about Russia’s ambi-

tion in Asia. All these predictions were based on his theory that the

Franco-Prussia War changed the balance of power that would affect

both Europe and Asia. While the war was nothing but a single

episode, it signaled the change of history in the world.

What is interesting was that Wang formed his theory mainly

with his knowledge of ancient Chinese history, rather than to base

it on his observation of the Franco-Prussia War. Wang chose to work

on a contemporary event in European history, which was unusual

at his time, but he applied the principles that he drew from his

readings of Chinese history in explaining both its cause and

outcome. This kind of sinicization, of course, appeared to be

ethnocentric; Wang regarded world events simply as replicas of

the Chinese precedents. But by drawing comparisons between

European and Chinese history, Wang was able to form his new

worldview, which was essentially different from the traditional

notion. If Wei Yuan had already distanced himself from the “central

kingdom” myth, Wang went even further to explain why China

was no longer the center and identify where the new centers of

the world would emerge.

More important, Wang reached this worldview through his com-

parative studies of both European and Chinese history. Wang’s ideas

of history, especially his explanation for the change of history, seem

to derive from a fundamental belief in historical recurrence, an

ancient notion found in both China and the West. Wang intended to

compare in his works Chinese and European history and stressed

that historical events resembled one and another. He then formed

a generalization to explain the histories of different regions in the

world. In his History of France Wang asserted: “[All countries], when

they reach the pinnacle of success, will begin to decline. Such change

40 NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE

is governed by laws as constant as those which cause the sun to go

down after reaching its zenith or the moon to darken by degrees

after it has passed through its full phase.”

Wang’s belief in the cyclical movement of history prepared him

to perceive the role of the West in world history. For him there were

laws in human history that remained essentially the same and

never changed, such as the gangchang, or the basic relationship in

human society. In the meantime, there were some social institutions

that could and should transform themselves in response to the need

of the present. This need for change arose primarily from the change

of the times. Like Wei Yuan, Wang acknowledged that reform in

China was necessary for the world had fundamentally changed. But

in contrast to Wei who thought that the strength of the West lay

primarily in some “advantageous skills,” Wang perceived the West

as a civilization, sustained by its own history and culture. In order

to understand the rise of the West and comprehend the change of

the world, one thus needed to discover what was beneath the mili-

tary prowess of the West. His An Inquiry into the Beginnings of

Western Learning (Xixue yuanshi kao), for example, suggested his

intention to address this need.

But since Wang believed that there were certain perpetual laws

in a culture that could not only endure the change of history but

could distinguish it from the other counterparts, he did not believe

that the fundamentals of Chinese culture had become outdated, and

he did not think what had worked for the West could also work for

China. In his opinion, China was known for its study of meta-

physics, whereas the West was known for its study of technology.

This fundamental difference determined that the spiritual founda-

tion, or Confucianism, of Chinese culture and politics was irre-

placeable.

Wang did not formally use the substance (ti) and

function (yong) dichotomy to deﬁne the relationship between

Chinese and Western culture, but his line of thinking was similar.

To Wang, as well as to Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) who championed

the ti-yong idea in the late Qing, China’s quest for wealth and power

could be achieved by combining Chinese and Western culture. In

such a combination Chinese learning was the substance and

Western learning was the function.

In fact, not only were Wang Tao’s ideas very much in vogue with

the intellectual trend of the late Qing, he was also its inﬂuential

spokesman, especially through his numerous publications in history

and journalism. Indeed, in regard to the knowledge of the West,

Wang was one of the most learned men of his time. As a proliﬁc

writer, he campaigned for the unity of the two cultures and

NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE 41

experimented with it himself, shown in his new style history. In

perceiving the world, he relied mainly on the traditional belief in

the three-age theory, believing in historical recurrence and attempt-

ing to use it to explain the change of the world. But Wang was no

conservative. Even if he resorted to past experience, he also under-

stood quite well the present situation and pondered on the future

of mankind. He maintained that histories of all nations would

eventually converge into an age of universal peace (taiping), in

which the world would reach a great unity (datong). In that unity

Chinese Confucian culture would absorb Western technology into

its own system, namely the ti would imbibe the yong.

Hence,

although Wang witnessed many violent changes in the world and

appreciated the strength of Western culture, he never lost his ﬁrm

belief in the validity of the Chinese cultural tradition. Instead, as

Paul Cohen puts it, “It could be argued that it was precisely the

security afforded by this immersion in the past that permitted him

to entertain certain highly untraditional notions without experi-

encing the shock of cultural dislocation.”

This assessment proved

quite insightful. Of course, in the early twentieth century when

China experienced even deeper national crisis, not many intellec-

tuals could feel the same “security” that Wang did by looking at the

past. But like Wang Tao, they immersed themselves in the study of

tradition, or history, to search for solutions (if not security). It was

this strong bond to tradition that characterized the endeavors of

Chinese intellectuals, even the iconoclasts, to seek modernity in

China.

China’s repeated losses in confronting the Western military chal-

lenge had forced historians in the nineteenth century to incorporate

the Western world into Chinese historical narratives. But it was the

outcome of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 that ultimately

prompted Chinese intellectuals to search for a new understanding

of tradition by rewriting Chinese history. As China’s defeat to the

Western powers had proved to them that China had lost its “central

kingdom” position in the world, its further defeat by Japan taught

them that China was no longer a leading nation in Asia. In 1898

when the news of the Treaty of Shimonosaki that had ended the

Sino-Japanese War reached the capital Beijing, anxious students

like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao petitioned the court for reform

and gained temporary endorsement from the young Emperor

New Historiography

42 NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE

Guangxu. Although the Reform of 1898 ended in a failure in slightly

over a hundred days, Kang and Liang in their writings, inter alia,

addressed the need to overhaul the tradition of Chinese culture,

including its historiographical heritage.

In doing so, they con-

tinued the cause pioneered by Wei Yuan and Wang Tao to seek a

better understanding of the West and the world.

Liang never learned any Western language. But he read many

Western books in Japanese and Chinese translations.

Liang’s ﬁrst

contact with Western books dated back to 1890 when he failed the

metropolitan examination and on his way back to Guangdong, had a

brief sojourn in Shanghai. He found several Chinese translations of

Western books and learned for the ﬁrst time that there were ﬁve

continents in the world.

While leading the 1898 Reform, Liang

associated closely with two European missionaries, Timothy Richard

and Gilbert Reid; the latter formed the Christian Literature Society

for China, which had been designed for introducing Western science

and technology to China. During the Reform, the society played

a visible role in China’s political arena extending support to the

reformers. Besides his contact with these missionaries, Liang at the

same time befriended Yan Fu (1853–1921), a renowned translator

and social thinker. Educated in nineteenth-century Britain, Yan

translated Thomas Huxley’s Ethics and Evolution in 1896, which

exerted a revolutionary impact on the Weltanschauungen of Chinese

intellectuals.

Liang also read Yan’s other translations, sometimes

in manuscript form. Ever since that time, social Darwinism seemed

to have left a strong imprint on Liang’s mind; he embraced the

principle “survival of the ﬁttest” and used it to argue for the need of

political and cultural reform. He was convinced that only through

social and political metamorphoses might China be able to resume

its power in the world and fend off the aggression of foreign powers.

This mixture of nationalism and social Darwinism characterized

Liang’s approach to historiography.

Although Liang’s interest in Western culture began in the

reform years, it was after the reform that he had an opportunity to

engage in a serious study of Western learning. His memoir tells us

that in his exile in Japan Liang was able to study systematically

different cultures and ideas in the world through Japanese trans-

lations. “After one year residence in Tokyo, I can read Japanese and

my thoughts have changed accordingly.”

Following the Japanese

example in adopting Western ideas of history, he began his search

for a new history. Like his Japanese counterparts, his interest

in new history led him to depart sharply from the tradition of

dynastic historiography.

NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE 43

Exposed to Western inﬂuence, some Japanese historians

launched a reform in the mid-nineteenth century to rid themselves

of the inﬂuence of traditional historiography patterned on the

Chinese model. Inspired by the example of H. T. Buckle’s History of

Civilization in England, and F. Guizot’s General History of Civi-

lization in Europe, two of the earliest Japanese translations of

Western historical books, Japanese historians attempted the

writing of a new history known as “histories of civilization” (bum-

meishiron). The main exponent of the bummeishiron was Fukuzawa

Yukichi (1835–1901), an inﬂuential intellectual in Meiji Japan.

Fukuzawa criticized the traditional approach to historiography for

its emphasis on moral education and on the feats of a few “great

men.” Looking for an alternative, he advocated a history of civi-

lization that was to include the lives of ordinary people; common

people, Fukuzawa believed, played a major role in making history.

Fukuzawa’s ideas of history and the bummeishiron school provided

a new perspective for Liang to understand China’s historical past.

Liang’s interest in historiographical issues was closely related

to his ideas of political reform, or the nation-building project he and

others were involved in. During the period when Liang was in

Japan, he published a revolutionary paper called Journal of Disin-

terested Criticism (Qingyi bao). According to Liang, the paper should

serve the following goals:

1. to promote human rights;

2. to study (Western) philosophy;

3. to purify government;

4. to emphasize national humiliation.

All these goals were aimed at building a modern Chinese nation.

In order to build such a nation-state, Liang embarked on the

task of citizenship education. His main contribution to the Journal

of Disinterested Criticism consisted a series of essays he wrote based

on his readings of Western political philosophy. In addition to the

social Darwinist theory with which Liang had been familiar, other

theories that appeared in modern Europe caught his attention as

well, such as the works of Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Bacon,

Descartes, Darwin, Montesquieu, Bentham, and Kant. To promote

citizenship education, he edited another newspaper called New

Citizen Journal (Xinmin congbao) in 1902, in which he proposed the

idea of educating “new citizens” for China with selected Western

political ideals and values.

44 NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE

To be sure, the term xinmin (new people) appeared originally in

the Confucian classic Great Learning (Daxue), but Liang borrowed

it to introduce the idea of citizenship, based on his understanding

of Western liberalism. In discussing the concept of the new citizen,

Liang quoted extensively passages found in the works of Jeremy

Bentham and John S. Mill. He was especially impressed with

Bentham’s principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest

number,” which was quoted most frequently by him at the time.

Liang’s political ideal, therefore, was colored strongly by the idea

of modern nation-states, as formulated by the thinkers of social

Darwinism, utilitarianism, and liberalism. In his attempt to

construct a modern Chinese nation, he came to discover history. In

1902, the same year he launched the New Citizen Journal, Liang

penned an important text in modern Chinese historiography, the

New Historiography, which was serialized in the journal.

Thus, although the New Historiography was one of Liang’s ear-

liest historical publications, it was an integral part of Liang’s

nationalist search for a modern China.

It pioneered and exempli-

ﬁed the nationalist approach to the writing of history in China,

hence ushering in a new phase of Chinese historiography. From this

nationalist perspective, Liang launched his attack on the ofﬁcial his-

toriographical tradition in China. He stated that though about sixty

to seventy percent of Chinese books were historical works, includ-

ing dynastic histories, chronologies, bibliographical books, biogra-

phies, and local gazetteers, almost none of these books could offer

any help to the country and its people. Traditional Chinese his-

toriography had perilous fallacies which, Liang claimed, constituted

obstacles to China’s search of wealth and power (fuqiang) in modern

times.

The ﬁrst problem was that Chinese court historians only paid

attention to events that happened in or were related to the royal

court. Mistakenly identifying the royal family with the entire

country, they failed to understand the concept of nation. As a result,

the twenty-four dynastic histories were just twenty-four genealogies

of royal families. Since history was written to provide lessons for

the ruler and help prolong his reign, court historians showed little

interest in the lives of the ordinary people.

Court historians also centered their attention on a few

prominent ﬁgures in their historical accounts; their individual-

oriented approach amounted to the second problem in Chinese

historiography. Liang believed that when great attention was

paid to a few individuals, historians would not be able to see the

people as a group, let alone the nation. Thus, Liang challenged

the age-old annals-biographical form in ofﬁcial historiography. He

NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE 45

explained that the form presented history as an assembly of various

biographies of heroic ﬁgures, including the biographies of every

reigning emperor. It did not present the history of the Chinese

people.

The third problem, Liang found in Chinese historiography, was

its emphasis on ancient times. As a result, the earlier the history

was, the more writings were done about it. Few historians wrote

histories of their own age for they were afraid that the ruler might

consider their writings harmful to his reign. Because of the politi-

cal risk, historians felt safer to write a history of ancient times. This

focus on the past rendered Chinese historiography irrelevant to the

people’s lives at the present.

The fourth and the last problem in Chinese historiography,

according to Liang, was its lack of theoretical contemplations on the

nature and movement of history. Liang was particularly concerned

with the fact that most traditional Chinese historians did not study

historical causality in their research; they merely accumulated and

scrutinized facts. Historical knowledge preserved in their accounts

thus offered no real help for the need of the present.

Due to these problems, traditional historiography was bogged

down by two major fallacies:

1. There was only description but not novelty.

2. There was only conventionality but not creativity.

These two problems had made history unaccessible to ordinary

people. First of all, readers were intimidated by the enormous

quantity of historical works. Second, though historical writing in

imperial China experienced several changes in its form and method-

ology, few histories were interesting enough to attract common

readers. In fact, because of an almost nonexistent demand, few

copies of those multivolume dynastic histories were printed after

their completion. Third, because of their repetitious content, people

usually found it difﬁcult to draw any useful and inspiring thoughts

from reading history. All of this renders traditional historical schol-

arship an impractical form of learning.

If traditional historiography was impractical as a knowledge,

hence inadequate for helping the nation-building goal, what kind of

a new history was Liang looking for in the New Historiography?

Like his Japanese counterparts, Liang was interested in a people’s

history, which, in his opinion, should be responsive to the need of

the present. For him history should serve the interest of the present

46 NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE

society, especially the interest of the people. On this score, Liang’s

New Historiography was largely patterned on the works of the

Japanese bummeishiron historians.

Liang’s interest in updating and improving the method of

history also made his New Historiography comparable to James H.

Robinson’s same-titled The New History, written ten years later.

Indeed, Liang and Robinson had much in common in challenging the

heritage of traditional historiography in their culture. For example,

they were both very critical of the elite-centered approach in histor-

ical writing and campaigned for expanding the scope of historical

study and making history relevant to everyday life.

In addition,

both Robinson and Liang showed a great interest in introducing new

methods, although they pursued their interest in a different context.

Liang’s main concern was how to learn from his Western and Japan-

ese counterparts; his New Historiography was thus regarded as a

landmark in the practice of scientiﬁc history in China.

In the 1920s

when Liang had a chance to teach history, he continued his search

for methodological innovation and produced Historical Methods, a

major work in studying the method of history in modern China.

In writing the New Historiography Liang also extended his

criticism of traditional historiography to some speciﬁc issues. One

of these was the “legitimacy theory” (Zhengtonglun), which involved

the legitimacy question in dynastic succession

and therefore

related to the moral function of traditional historiography. Histori-

ans pronounced morality by adopting a certain “writing style” (bifa)

in their writings. As shown in the Spring and Autumn the author,

who was thought to be Confucius, passed his judgment on histori-

cal events through different descriptions, hence the “Chunqiu bifa”

(the writing style of the Spring and Autumn Annals). For example,

if a legitimate prince was murdered by his minister, the historian

would ﬁnd a way to tell his readers that the death was abnormal;

say, using the verb assassinate instead of the verb kill to emphasize

his moral disapproval. Following the example of the Spring and

Autumn, most people in imperial China regarded maintaining

morality in historical writing as a paramount duty for a historian.

However, Liang did not think making moral comments a crucial

issue in historiography. For him upholding morality in historiogra-

phy was rather trivial in comparison with the attempt to write

national history, which entailed a broad understanding of history.

Without such a grand vision, Liang argued, the historians’ moral

concern could be misplaced.

Despite his limited understanding of the Western tradition in

historiography, Liang, in his New Historiography, attempted to

NEW HORIZON, NEW ATTITUDE 47