I. A New Category: “New Historiography”

After China's loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), and to some extent just before it, Chinese intellectuals were trying to ascertain the reasons for the late Qing political crisis. Some of these intellectuals went to Japan, Europe, and America, and, influenced by what they saw and learned, came to the conclusion that the question at hand was not only about the making of a modern army or the reform of administration. Rather, they interpreted China's loss as symptomatic of a major decline, the decline of the Chinese civilization as a whole, in contrast to the flourishing state of Western civilization. As Hu Shi (胡適, 1891–1962), one of the leading intellectuals of the New Culture Movement and a prominent historian, put it in 1933,

One remedy to China's problems was the perceived need to create a Chinese nation state. Yet in order to create a nation state, there was first the need to create the nation itself. This end was understood as one of the major tasks of the historian. Since the late nineteenth century and, more intensely, from the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals, informed by Western and Japanese historical writings, began producing what they called a “New Historiography” (新史學), which, at least in part, was designed for solidifying the Chinese nation. Instead of the (so-perceived) traditionalistic stance that former scholars had held towards the past, these new intellectuals thought of themselves as standing outside of tradition, conducting “modern” research about the past from an exterior position (see Duara Reference Duara1995; Wang Reference Wang2001; Wang and Iggers Reference Wang and Iggers2006).Footnote ³

One of the best examples of such an intellectual is Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873–1929) – a prominent reformer related to the 1898 Hundred Days Reform. He fled to Japan, studied and developed contacts there as he was influenced by Meiji-era (明治, 1868–1912) intellectuals, and became a leading intellectual thereafter. Liang published in 1902 an article titled “Xin shixue” (新史學, “New Historiography”),Footnote ⁴ and began the article explaining that “within all the disciplines current in the West these days, the only one that China intrinsically has is [the discipline of] history.”Footnote ⁵ History, continued Liang, was of utmost importance for nationalism, patriotism, and a sense of unity among the people, and the European case demonstrated this clearly for him (Liang 1984, 3). However, the history that Chinese historians had practiced theretofore – the “old history” (舊史) – was faulted, as it failed to achieve these results (nationalism, patriotism, unity). Why was it that with China's “thousands of years” of writing history, China still failed in this regard?

Liang recounted four reasons for the failure of the old historiography (ibid., 4–7):

1. (1) The old historiography dealt with the imperial court, not with the nation. Liang went as far as asserting that the old historiography was not history at all, saying “the twenty-four [dynastic] Histories are not histories! They are the genealogies of twenty-four clans and that is all.”Footnote ⁶ The historians of the past, he claimed, were only thinking in terms of how a dynasty rose to power, how it governed, and how it lost its power.

2. (2) The old historiography was an arena for individual heroes (英雄之舞臺), and did not consider social groups (羣體). A history of a group of people had the capacity to mobilize the individual, according to Liang, to spontaneously love the group, and want to better it. The absence of such history “was the reason that our national power, wisdom and virtue have never generated, and a [social] group was eventually not established.”Footnote ⁷ The most important group people were part of was their race; “if you discard race,” wrote Liang, “then there is no history” (舍人種則無歷史).

3. (3) The old historiography valorized the past and ignored the present. Liang lamented that when he and his colleagues tried to write the history of the Qing, there was not one book they could rely upon from that period. He further contrasted this situation with the writing of history in the West, and claimed that history had a major role in the making of the “modern men” (今世之人), through the consideration of current events and the import of the past on them, rather than gazing at the past while longing to remake it.

4. (4) The old historiography was obsessed with knowing facts (事實) but had no sense of the rationale (理想) of the historical narrative. Only by understanding the order of events, their relation to one another and their causes, could history “benefit the world” (益於世界). Liang quoted Herbert Spencer's claims about the uselessness of historical facts, if they had no applicability to the welfare of the nation.Footnote ⁸

Liang took these four reasons to point to two general problems of the historians of the past who had practiced “old history,” namely their incapability to make an informed judgment on historical data (不能別裁) and their incapability to be creative (不能創作), which he linked to Confucius’ famous dictum “I transmit but do not create” (述而不作, Analects, 7.1). Consequently, Liang Qichao urged a revolution in historiography, for otherwise, he wrote, “my country cannot be saved” (吾國遂不可救 Liang 1984, 7–9; see also Luo Reference Zhitian, Moloughney and Zarrow2011, 47).

The way to “save the country,”Footnote ⁹ and to pursue correct historiography, began for Liang with defining history in evolutionary rather than cyclical terms. This definition of history also drew from what was perceived to be a new notion of time as a whole, which, put simplistically, meant that time was regarded no longer as cyclical (or spiral, as the older view of time had been, and often is, considered), but as linear.Footnote ¹⁰ History was thus made a part of the discourse of nationalism, modernity, science, evolution, and progress. The underlying assumption within this discourse was that China had failed to produce all of these (i.e., a sense of nationalism, modernity, science, notions of evolution, and certainly progress), and it was the “task of the historian” to mend the situation. Within this complex discourse about the past, new types of histories were being written; histories of the nation – China – rather than the two-millennia style of dynastic histories.Footnote ¹¹

New types of periodization were suggested, informed by the evolutionary model, and in which each dynasty was not necessarily a fundamental time-unit. Thematic histories, such as the history of thought, philosophy, or religion were being produced, with the qualifier “Chinese” attaching the national vogue to them. At the same time the medium for historical discussions has been continuously changing, with periodicals and journals allowing for faster and more wide-spread communication among scholars; many printing presses were modeled after the Western model, and many books took the Western form.Footnote ¹²

Within the writing of such histories the Qing period received special attention, from Liang Qichao as well as from others. In a later work about Qing intellectual history (which will be dealt with in more detail in the sections below), from the early 1920s, Liang pronounced the new notion of the scholar's relation with the past as one of “emancipation,” Although, as Q. Edward Wang suggested (Wang Reference Wang2001, 12, 218 n.18), Liang Qichao did not mention “evolution” per-se in this later piece. Liang's treatment of intellectual “trends of thought” was very much in the line of evolution vocabulary, pronounced under the shroud of Buddhist philosophy. Liang contended that according to Buddhism there are four stages of transformation in human life: birth (生), life (住), differentiation or maturation (異), and cessation (滅). These stages could be used to discuss the changes (or – evolution) in the “life” of intellectual trends of thought (思潮), by rendering them as the stages of formation (or enlightenment, 啓蒙); proliferation (全盛); transformation (蛻分); and decline (衰落, Liang 1984, 187–88).

II. Remembering Qing Scholarship: An Overview

The thought of the Qing period, continued Liang, had witnessed this type of evolution, with each stage being characterized as emancipation from a previous era in the Chinese past. Thus, the first stage of this evolution consisted of liberation from Ming (明, 1368–1644) thought (i.e., from the thought of Wang Yangming, 王陽明, 1472–1529); then, liberation from Song (宋, 960–1271) Learning (i.e., Cheng-Zhu, 程朱, thought); next a liberation from Later Han (後漢, 25–220) Learning, and then from Former Han (前漢, 206 BCE-9 AD) learning; and, lastly, a liberation from Han Learning as a whole and a return to the “original” thought of Confucius. Only after the final stage was set in motion, was a complete emancipation from the past at hand. It was both an evolutionary scheme and a deterministic one: no stage – just like in human life – could be neglected or escaped, and it was in enabling the full process of emancipation from the past as a whole that Qing thought had its most important “contribution” to “China” (ibid., 188–91). Liang, of course, was part and parcel of the “full emancipation” stage, even if he did not say it in so many words, and this final stage also represented a positive intellectual development.

Like Liang Qichao, another prominent young intellectual at the turn of the twentieth century who had been in exile in Japan for several years, Liu Shipei (劉師培, 1884–1919) developed a fourfold scheme to analyze the intellectual history of the Qing dynasty, and, more specifically, of what was considered the main line of intellectual developments in the Qing – “Han Learning” (漢學, Hanxue). And like Liang (and most other intellectuals at the time), Liu saw Confucianism as the main representative of Qing intellectual history. But for Liu, the fourfold division did not represent a positive evolution (positive because of the final emancipation) but rather a negative deterioration. In his “Jindai Hanxue bianqian lun,”Footnote ¹³ published in 1907, Liu argued that the four phases or groups of Han Learning development in the two centuries or so theretofore included: “doubt” (懷疑);Footnote ¹⁴ “fact gathering” (征實);Footnote ¹⁵ “collecting and stitching” (叢綴); and, lastly, “empty slander” (虛誣). Liu applauded the first group of scholars for both thinking and learning (思而學), which he thought was similar to the notion of “getting rid of the old, and making way for the new” (除舊布新). He also granted the second group some importance in following the footsteps of the previous one, in continuing to “love learning” (好學) and to do so with “deep thought” (深思). But, toward the latter days of the second group, “learning came to an excess without sufficient thinking” (學有餘而思不足). Therefore, the third group ended up in “learning without thinking” (學而不思) at all, and the fourth group reached the worse stage of all: “thinking without learning” (思而不學). Of course, this description of the deterioration of Han Learning in the Qing dynasty as a series of sliding relationships between thinking and learning referred directly to Confucius' dictum in Analects 2.15: “If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger” (Analects, 13). “Sad indeed” (悲夫), ended Liu his essay, mourning in a very succinct manner this line of development of Qing thought.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the achievements and positive judgement that Liu passed on in some of the initial stages of that development in the early Qing, including some of the individuals involved, he seems to have been more than sad. It seems he was angry as well, for, in his final analysis of the “achievements and failures” of Qing Confucians as a whole, he concluded that “the learning of Ming Confucians was used in order to respond to [actual] matters; the learning of Qing Confucians was used to protect themselves. Ming Confucians were upright but stupid; Qing Confucians were wise but deceptive.”Footnote ¹⁷ This harsh judgement was part of Liu's understanding that Qing Confucians who cooperated with the foreign Manchu rulers betrayed their people, and that their type of learning represented escapism from dealing with actual matters and from taking responsibility. The background to Liu's attitude to the Manchus, in part, was related to the flowering new national zeal. Around 1905, and often by using Meiji neologisms such as kokusui 国粋 (“national essence”), Chinese intellectuals, including Liu, sought for China's own “national essence” (國粹),Footnote ¹⁸ “national character” (國性), “racial character” (种性)Footnote ¹⁹ or “national soul” (國魂) so as to build the Chinese nation by means of “national learning” (國學).Footnote ²⁰ The Chinese past was also considered by Liu through this new, national, prism, and hence was part of the denouncement for Qing Confucians collaborating with Manchus. Nonetheless, Liu also saw the Qing intellectual decline not just as a specific historical phenomenon, but also as related to a more general trend in Chinese intellectual history, one in which an accomplished dynasty (the Ming in this case) gave way to a problematic one (in this case the Qing). For Liu, the paradigmatic example of this process was the Zhou (周, 1046–256 BCE) to Qin (秦, 221-206 BCE) transition in the first millennium BCE, wherein the accomplished Zhou dynasty was overtaken by the faulted Qin dynasty (Liu 2004, 259–270).

It should be stressed that Liang Qichao, too, did not think of the intellectual history of the Qing as exceptional, but for Liang it was not exceptional in global terms, not just in indigenous Chinese historical trajectories.Footnote ²¹ Liang prompted the study of world history, and assumed that the Qing case was very much comparable to what he understood to be the intellectual history of Renaissance Europe. Through a similar process of emancipation from the past by a return further backwards into its history, Europe generated, eventually, modernity (Liang 1984, 188). Indeed, Liang's monograph about Qing intellectual history was also motivated by Jiang Fangzhen's (蔣方震, 1882–1938) request from Liang to write a preface to Jiang's own monograph about Renaissance Europe.Footnote ²²

Therefore, Qing scholars, many of them being regarded also as historians, were exonerated from Liang's former accusations against the “old” historians. Qing scholars simply could not escape the historical trajectories and predicaments of their own time, nor could there have been a quantum-leap in the development of thought; there was no “missing link” in its evolution.

Other scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Hu Shi, saw the Qing Puxue (樸學, “Plain Learning,” a term associated with Han dynasty scholarship and almost equivalent to it at the time) scholars as methodological forerunners of the “scientific spirit” of inquiry of the new historiography.Footnote ²³ Hu also accepted Liang's stance that this type of scholarship represented a break with earlier Ming/Song types of learning. Hu Shi specifically mentioned four areas of scholarship that Qing scholars excelled in and that became foundations of modern scholarship about ancient China. These areas were “philology” (文字學), “glossing of meanings by relying on evidence” (訓詁學), “textual criticism” (校勘學), and “higher criticism” (考訂學). Hu Shi likewise accepted the view that there was an important similarity between Qing scholarship and Renaissance Europe.Footnote ²⁴ What, however, did the analogy with the European Renaissance mean for Hu Shi?

For Hu Shi, then, the two most important facets of the “Chinese Renaissance” were “the revival of classical learning and art,” which was comparable to the European Reformation in its “desire to seek a superior authority whereby to attack the absolute authority of the Church,” and the “scientific spirit” of the period. By “scientific spirit,” Hu meant primarily the introduction of the inductive logical method.Footnote ²⁵ Hu wrote that while much of the work of Qing scholars “may be shown by a later age to be utterly useless,” “the attitude and method of seeking and testing evidence will live long and may furnish us the only valuable heritage with which modern China may feel a little more at home in this wonderful world of modern science” (Hu Reference Woodhead1924, 636–37).

Hu Shi also quoted Huang Yuanyong (黃遠庸, 1885–1915),Footnote ²⁶ one of the first intellectuals of the time to discuss the European Renaissance with regard to Chinese history, writing: “Have we not seen that historians regard the Renaissance as the foundation of the overthrow of mediaevalism in Europe?” (Hu Reference Woodhead1924, 643). For Huang, a Renaissance-like endeavor in China was to bring about nothing less than “fundamental salvation” (see Chow Reference Tse-tsung1980, 272, 338–42).Footnote ²⁷ The Renaissance was thus taken as a stepping-stone, or a crucial historical phase, on the way to modernity, in Europe, and hence also in China.Footnote ²⁸

Fu Sinian (傅斯年, 1896–1950) was another prominent intellectual who advanced the notion of the similitude of Renaissance Europe and Qing scholarship. Fu, however, was not partial to the use of terms such as Puxue or Hanxue in describing the entirety of Qing thought, which Hu Shi endorsed, and thought that these designations were concealing much of the multiplicity of voices during the Qing. Hence, in a 1919 article, he termed the Qing period as “the period of the revival of Chinese literature and arts” (中国的文艺复兴时代), trying to emphasize its similarity with European Renaissance. As this term, in Fu's words, was too convoluted and “not transmissible” (不能通行), he decided on a more general, and simple, term – “Qing scholarship” (清代學問). And in general, Fu saw Qing thought as a reaction against Song/Ming scholarship, and presented a series of juxtapositions to describe the difference between Song/Ming and Qing scholarship: Song/Ming was “subjective” (主觀的), “deductive” (演繹的), “intuitive” (悟的), “idealistic” (理想的), and “dogmatic” (獨斷的); while the Qing was “objective” (客觀的), “inductive” (歸納的), “evidential” (證的), “empirical” (經驗的), and “skeptical” (懷疑的). Therefore, Fu concluded that Qing scholarship had “scientific overtone” (科學的意味) and in all aspects it used the “scientific method” (科學的方法). However, as Westerners prioritized the research of nature while Qing scholars prioritized the study of “ancient things” (古事物), the similarity in method led to different results. Most significantly, as Western Renaissance scholars sought for “truth” (真理), Qing scholars sought for the “true sayings” (真話) of ancient sages like Confucius and Mencius and delved into classical studies instead of examining natural phenomena. So, although Qing scholarship had the right potential and spirit, it was not able to achieve the final ends of such potential (in the Western, scientific, line), and that was “truly lamentable!” (真可惜了) (see Fu 2003).Footnote ²⁹

To avoid confusion, one should note that some Chinese scholars did not use the framework of the European Renaissance to denote only or mainly the Qing period, or past periods (Hu Shi had in mind at least four past periods of Chinese Renaissance: the religious one in the Tang, the philosophical one in the Song, the literary one from the thirteenth century onwards, and only then the Qing Renaissance), but also used it to term their present endeavors in the early twentieth century. The “defect” of past Renaissances, in contrast to contemporary Renaissance, according to Hu Shi, was the “absence of a conscious recognition of their historical mission . . .: all of them were natural developments of historical tendencies and were easily overpowered or swept away by the conservative force of tradition against which they had only dimly and unconsciously combated.” Thus, continued Hu, pointing directly to the Qing, “the new critical scholarship of the last three centuries began as a revolt against, and ended as a refuge for, the fruitless philosophizing and the sterile literary education.” In contrast,

The notion that the Chinese should “feel at home in the new world and its new civilization” was an essential part of what Hu Shi understood as the greatest problem that China faced in its encounter with “the new world,” or what he called “the conflict between the old civilization and the new.” Hu Shi studied in the United States during the 1910s, and pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University under the guidance of John Dewey. In his Ph.D. dissertation, written in English in 1917 and titled “The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China,” Hu expressed this problem directly and linked notions of nationalism, modernity, and the relationship between old and new:

III. Modernization, Philosophy, and Qing Intellectual History

What the term “modern” or “modernization” meant, however, was not necessarily clear. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century (in some sense this is still the case) there had been no fixed term to denote the “modern” in Chinese. A host of terms carrying the basic semantic range of “now,” “recent,” “current,” or “new,” such as jin 近, xian 現, jin 今, or xin 新, were used to denote the modern, at times adding “time” or “era” (shi 時, dai 代) to them to indicate the modern period. The modern was understood to be a Western (European and American) phenomenon, that entailed new modes of governance and political forms and power, social and economic institutions, individualism and freedom, gender, fashion, and, most importantly, new philosophy and new science, representing a “new civilization” (many such terms, such as philosophy, science, and civilization were new – zhexue 哲學, kexue 科學, wenming/wenhua 文明/文化– and imported from Japan),Footnote ³¹ the basis by which Western countries became rich and powerful and their nations consolidated, the ultimate goal of these early twentieth-century intellectuals.Footnote ³² Yet, all these general understandings of what the modern or being modern meant still left the concrete procedures of how to bring about modernity (modernize, modernization, xiandaihua/jindaihua, 現代化/近代化) in and to China somewhat vague. Sixteen years after Hu Shi wrote his dissertation, in 1933 – a decade and a half after the end of the World War I and the flourishing of the New Culture Movement, over two decades after the fall of the Qing dynasty, and almost four decades after China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war – Chinese intellectuals were still debating the meaning of “modernization” (現代化, xiandaihua).Footnote ³³ A special issue of the journal Shenbao yuekan (申報月刊) of July 1933 was dedicated to the theme of modernization, and after its publication Hu Shi recalled a conversation with a friend, Meng Sen (孟森, 1868–1938),Footnote ³⁴ himself a reputed intellectual and one of the foremost historians of the Qing at the time, in which Meng had asked defiantly: “Nowadays everyone says that China has to modernize, [but] what exactly does ‘modernization’ mean?”Footnote ³⁵ Meng Sen published his own views on modernization in November (of 1933), in an article entitled “Modernization and the Urgency of Putting Things First” (現代化與先務急, Meng Reference Sen1933). There, Meng complained over the sweeping modernization of the nation, quoting from one of the most important classical works, the Mengzi: “[Even the great sage-emperors] Yao and Shun did not use their wisdom on all things alike.”Footnote ³⁶ Meng Sen explained that the meaning of this sentence was that “one had to examine himself what works for the state and only then put it into practice,”Footnote ³⁷ rather than simply absorb anything deemed “modern” into China.

Hu Shi was also critical over the multitude of voices concerning the question of what modernity, or modernization, was. The variety of views over these issues, represented in that special issue, Hu called “those hundred-thousand characters of discussion” (這十萬字的討論). These views presented China as a unique case in the world, for which neither capitalism nor socialism would fit. Hu Shi's own view was presented in the form of rhetorical, pragmatic, questions, aiming at mobilizing the Chinese rather than philosophizing over the term “modernity”:Footnote ³⁸

The phrase “fulfill man's aspirations,” in this specific choice of words, appears in several places in the traditional Chinese literature, most importantly, perhaps, in the writings of the famous Song dynasty thinkers Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200) and Cheng Yi (程頤, 1033–1107). That both Meng Sen and Hu Shi – ardent revolutionaries, reformers, and supporters of Chinese modernization (as they understood the term, of course) – chose to use highly traditional terms, examples, and exemplars to speak about modernization demonstrates that for them tradition and modernity (terms that they used), or old and new, were intertwined.

The intertwining of old and new and the implication of the practical and selective attitude of the two intellectuals towards modernity also illustrate their ambivalence to modernity as a whole. One of the main reasons for this ambivalence was the consequences of World War I, which Hu Shi and others, such as Liang Qichao, had witnessed firsthand, and which Hu often mentioned. One of the great fears of these intellectuals, especially because of the War, was “modernity's barbaric nature” (現代的精神蠻性).Footnote ⁴⁰ Others tried to justify what they perceived as China's backwardness, compared to Japan in particular, by claiming Chinese culture to be the richest and most ancient, and hence one more difficult to change. Japan, which some intellectuals deemed had only imitated China and the West throughout its history, was thus not a good model for modernization, and the question of how to integrate China, with its rich culture, into the modern world continued to be debated.

Generally speaking, however, modernity was understood as closely related to science; the Chinese term for science changed during the nineteenth century and stabilized as kexue 科學, a borrowed term from Japan, at the turn of the twentieth century. What kexue meant for the intellectuals under discussion here, however, was, more often than not, much broader than some Western notions of science – linking science narrowly to exact/nature/life sciences etc. – may imply. First and foremost, the term and its inflections (e.g., scientific, kexue de 科學的), implied for those intellectuals a way of thinking and a way of practicing scholarship. This way consisted in trying to understand both natural and human phenomena through an ordered methodology, systematic thinking, objective judgements, the search for facts and truth, and, above all perhaps, doing so using logic, inductive logic (帰納), which was understood as the basis for all the sciences and for the scientific method (see Kurtz Reference Kurtz2011).Footnote ⁴¹ Science was also understood as unified and universal knowledge, a sign of and a means for progress, and hence it became an ultimate authority in broad discussions and a means to “save the country,” and as such science was also tightly linked to nationalism.Footnote ⁴² As a broad term, the intellectuals engaged in history advocated, for example, the pursuit of scientific history and the search for evidence of Chinese science in China's long history.Footnote ⁴³

The rise of modern science and the scientific revolution were understood in the early twentieth century by many intellectuals to be derived from early-modern European changes in philosophy. Philosophy, from the late eighteenth century in the West, and later in Japan and China, was understood as the “scientia scientiarum” – “the science of all sciences” – thus rendering it superior status. Modernity was also linked to new forms of governance and economy, the nation state, and nationalism as a whole, again with the philosophies that generated these notions at the center. Furthermore, philosophy became a criterion for civilization as opposed to barbarism, with all except Europeans considered barbarians (or semi-civilized, at best, see Haakonssen Reference Haakonssen and Haakonssen2006, 3–25; Verga Reference Verga2008; Duara Reference Duara2001; Mazlish Reference Mazlish2004). As Japanese scholars learned more about philosophy in this manner, they came to appreciate its significance and to apply it in their quest for “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika, 文明開化). At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals, many of whom learned from the Japanese about philosophy, duplicated this attitude. Philosophy thus became one of the crucial categories of knowledge discussed and employed by Chinese intellectuals, and, at the same time, the new category of philosophy also conditioned the production of historical knowledge about the intellectual history of China, and the Qing in particular.Footnote ⁴⁴

And it was with this new category in mind that Chinese intellectuals began writing the “new history” discussed at the outset of this paper. The implications the new histories produced were, simply put, a reconsideration of what was important in the history of Chinese thought: what kind of ideas should have received attention? What kind of people should have been studied? What in the Chinese past should have been valorized? Not dissimilar from the “sprouts of capitalism” (see, e.g., Dirlik Reference Dirlik1982, 105–32) theory which ensued later, this “sprouts of philosophy” quest thus focused on what could fit the category.Footnote ⁴⁵

This development implied changes in the evaluation of Qing scholarship. In 1902, Liang Qichao published his Lun Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi (論中國學術思想變遷之大, Essay on the General Trend of Changes in Chinese Thought and Learning). His assessment of Han Learning as a whole was very negative and basically rendered it “useless” (無用, Liang Reference Ch'i-ch'ao1999, vol. 2, 614). But it was worse than simply useless. Liang asserted China's eminence in world history until the modern period, saying, “in the thought and learning of antiquity, my China was the best; . . . in the thought and learning of the middle-ages, my China was the best.”Footnote ⁴⁶ However, “only in modern times, it became inferior, and I blush with shame.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The fault for China's new inferiority Liang thought was with the Han Learning school of the Qian-Jia era (乾嘉, 1735–1820). “This Learning,” wrote Liang, “has destroyed China for a long time!” (斯學之敝中國久矣), for although among its better qualities this school of thought “possessed the spirit of science” (有科學之精神), in the end the school was useless in bringing about modernity, and even worse, morally degenerating. And within this school, the main target for Liang's 1902 attack was one of the most esteemed eighteenth-century scholars, Dai Zhen (戴震, 1724-77):

Thus, on the one hand, Dai Zhen was considered a philosopher, albeit not exactly with admiration (Liang was at the time much more inclined toward German Idealism), while on the other hand Liang's terminology presented Dai as nothing less than a criminal. Fundamentally, this was one of the final reiterations, perhaps a culmination, of the nineteenth-century discourse about the eighteenth century (as discussed below), only in Western terms. Eighteen years later, Liang displayed a very different attitude towards Dai Zhen, even if the general mood toward eighteenth-century scholarship as a whole remained almost unchanged. Between 1902 and 1920, however, other scholars had already written favorably about Dai Zhen, with “philosophy” as the main reason for upgrading his historical status.

One such scholar was Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培, 1868–1940), who had studied in Germany and France, served as an official for the Republican government, and as President of Peking University from 1916 until 1922. In his Zhongguo lunlixue shi 中國倫理學史 (History of Ethics in China) of 1910, he wrote that “After [Wang] Yangming, only Dai Dongyuan [Zhen] mourned about the Song Learning abuse of the inborn heart as harmful to government, and elaborated on Mengzi's explanations in order to rectify it [the Song Learning position] . . . . [He] was also able to prove [his rectification] by means of the method of logic” (Cai 1966 142–43).Footnote ⁴⁹ Dai Zhen was thus a nonconformist, fighting the establishment, and using logic in order to do so. Furthermore, Cai explained that Dai Zhen's thought could be interpreted in new ways and terms that included psychology (心理), utilitarianism (功利), individualism (人各) and freedom (自由, ibid., 145–146).Footnote ⁵⁰

And, indeed, the very reason for Dai Zhen's significance lay in his being an exemplar of Chinese thought that could correspond to Western notions.Footnote ⁵¹ Furthermore, the sources for Dai Zhen's “philosophy” were only the Yuan shan and the Mengzi ziyi shuzheng (not unlike Fang Dongshu almost a century earlier), which were the exception in Dai's writings rather than the rule. Dai's many essays and books dealing with evidential research subjects (about philology, astronomy, mathematics, etc.) were hardly even mentioned.

The same – emphasis on the Yuan shan and the Mengzi ziyi shuzheng – can also be found in Xie Wuliang's (謝無量, 1884–1964) Zhongguo zhexue shi (中國哲學史, History of Chinese Philosophy), published in 1916. Xie's description of Dai Zhen was somewhat more nuanced than Cai's. Xie mentioned Hui Dong's and Jiang Yong's influence on Dai, as well as Ruan Yuan and Jiao Xun as Dai's followers. However, Xie mostly gathered a few quotations of texts written by Dai Zhen and barely analyzed Dai's thought (Xie Reference Wuliang1930, pian 3 xia, 37–39).

Xie's general view of the Qing dynasty was that this was the period in which “philosophy was the least invigorated,”Footnote ⁵² when “only evidential research flourished, while philosophy, on the contrary, declined” (ibid., 21).Footnote ⁵³ Indeed eight out of the ten Qing personalities he examined in this section were born during the Ming, the other two being Dai Zhen and the Buddhist Peng Shaosheng (彭紹升, 1740–96).Footnote ⁵⁴ Soon, however, the brief general statements and long quotations with little analysis (much in the line of Qing style biographies) gave way, and special essays and monographs detailed the “philosophy” or “thought” of Qing personalities. This new way of analysis was often done as part of the quest for “reordering of the Chinese past” (整理國故) that had been gaining power since the late 1910s.

Hu Shi, who was one of the pioneering intellectuals to promote the “reordering” project, articulated in 1917 the problem China faced as a problem of assimilation between the new, modern, civilization and the older Chinese civilization. Hu thought that the responsibility to solve this problem rested in the hands of the “intellectual leaders of New China”; they had to “connect the best in modern civilization with the best in our own civilization,” thus establishing “historical continuity” and “an internal assimilation of the old and the new.” Within the old and the new “bests,” those of the indigenous Chinese and those of the foreign Western, the elements most important to revive, according to Hu, had to do with philosophy and science:

The solution, then, to the “assimilation” problem was grounded in China's past, not in dispensing with it. Nonetheless, despite Hu's stress on “assimilation,” his project was not assimilative in essence: it was a project of transformation, the transformation of the past according to his present (terminology and needs), transformation of “the old” into new history, not into a living, mutual part of his sense of “modern civilization.” Yet, without tradition-as-history (the old), Chinese modernity (the new) had no footing to stand upon. Hence the urgency in Hu Shi's call to “reorder the nation's past” rather than either accept it uncritically and live by its precepts or get rid of it completely (see Xu 2003, and Eber Reference Eber1968, 169–207). The past, and tradition, was recast as history. Within the past, the search was on, as Hu wrote, for “precursors.” And precursors he found.

Most of the scientific or philosophical elements were to be found in the philosophies of the fifth to third centuries B.C.E., and especially in non-Confucian philosophies, since Confucianism has not only “long outlived its vitality,” according to Hu Shi, but was in fact “long dead.” Although, Hu claimed, Song and Ming philosophical schools attempted to “rejuvenate” the “long-dead Confucianism,” their methodology was flawed. Wang Yangming's “logical theory” was “wholly incompatible with the spirit and procedure of science,” and Song philosophers – even though “right in their interpretation of the doctrine of “investigating into things” – ended up “fruitless.” The reason for the latter failure was due to three factors: “lack of experimental procedure”; “failure to recognize the active and directing role played by the mind”; and “its construction of ‘things’ to mean ‘affairs’.” The Qing was mainly useful in its “scientific method” (in textual studies), but not in philosophy, although exceptions – such as Dai Zhen – invited attention (Hu 1922, 7–8).

The search for philosophy in the Chinese past was thus not dissimilar to those who wanted to find the sprouts of the West in the East and those who wanted original, authentic, Eastern or Chinese “philosophy.” And it was with this type of search that the intellectual history of various periods in China's past, including the Qing, was written, and also transmitted to the West.Footnote ⁵⁵

A year after he completed his dissertation, in 1918, Hu Shi wrote his Zhongguo zhexue shi dagang 中國哲學史大綱 (Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy), published in 1919, and then his “Qingdai Hanxuejia de kexue fangfa” (清代漢學家的科學方法, “The Scientific Method of Qing Dynasty Han Learning Scholars,” published in three parts in the journal Beijing daxue yuekan from 1919 to 1921.Footnote ⁵⁶ In these writings Hu emphasized that “among the achievements of the Han Learning of the Qing period, the examination of the phonology within paleography was the greatest.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Hu concluded that the use by Qing scholars (since Gu Yanwu 顧炎武, 1613–1682, and culminating with Qian Daxin 錢大昕, 1728–1804, according to Hu) of both deductive and inductive logic comprised the basis of modern phonology, since the “method” and the “spirit” were equally “scientific.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Among Qing scholars however, Hu's attention was directed primarily toward Dai Zhen. Dai Zhen, according to Hu Shi, “would not submit merely to being an evidential scholar; he wanted to be a philosopher.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This Hu Shi took as an exception to the rule among Han Learning or evidential research scholars in the Qing, who “as a whole did not discuss philosophy” (大家都不講哲學了). Dai Zhen, however, according to Hu, was to be taken as the one who revived philosophy (哲學的中興), in what was considered Dai's most important philosophical work, the Mengzi ziyi shuzheng (Hu Reference Yingshi1988a, 229–240). Hu thus regarded Dai as the greatest thinker and philosopher of the time.Footnote ⁶⁰

The four main accomplishments of Qing scholarship at large, according to Hu, were “(1) Historical perspective; (2) Discovery of [Historiographical] tools [such as phonology and paleography]; (3) Inductive research; (4) [and,] prioritizing evidence.”Footnote ⁶¹ Philosophically, the Qing saw what Hu called the “revivalist philosophy” (中興哲學) and the “establishment of a new philosophy” (建設新哲學). Although the “revival” and “establishment” began with Yan Yuan (顏元, 1635–1704) and Li Gong (李塨, 1659–1733), they did not succeed in spreading it and so Dai Zhen had another attempt at reviving and establishing the new philosophy of the time (ibid., 14–15). Nonetheless, the project did not get very far:

A year after Hu Shi wrote the “Qingdai xuezhe de zhixue fangfa,” in 1920, Liang Qichao (who consulted Hu Shi before having the work printed) published his own narrative of Qing intellectual history, the Qingdai xueshu gailun (清代學術概論, Outline of Qing Period Scholarship).Footnote ⁶³ Liang generally thought eighteenth-century scholars – whom he classified as “the Orthodox School” (正統派) – had “carried on empirical research for the sake of empirical research and studied Classics for the sake of Classics.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This “trend” he contrasted with the scholars of the seventeenth century who used their learning for practical aims and issues of political import (Liang Reference Ch'i-ch'ao1999, 189; Hsu's translation in Liang Reference Ch'i-ch'ao1970, 23).

Liang considered Dai Zhen as one of the two most important representatives of this orthodox school along with Hui Dong (惠棟, 1697–1758), yet he differentiated between them: “the former [Hui] was inclined to be inclusive and erudite and the latter [Dai] profound and incisive. Hui was only a “transmitter” [of knowledge], whereas Tai was a “creator”; . . . Therefore Tai [Chen] must be credited with the hegemony of the Orthodox School.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In eighteenth-century terms, and for a scholar such as Dai Zhen who was so intent on discovering what was lost from the past, to invent anew, to be called a “creator” (作者) was a problematic compliment, perhaps even an insult; but these were twentieth-century terms.Footnote ⁶⁶ Hu Shi's harsh judgment on Qing scholars, especially on Dai Zhen's peers and those who followed them, combined with Liang Qichao's conclusions mentioned earlier, left no room for doubt: Qing scholars simply lacked the capability to understand Dai Zhen's “philosophy.” The question of whether people like Qian Daxin were reluctant to embrace Dai's agenda because they had one of their own – other than “splitting threads and mending cloth,” and which conflicted with Dai's agenda or proposed an alternative – was not an option.

IV. Nineteenth-Century Continuities

This, however, was not the first time that the intellectual history of the Qing took shape.

During the Jiaqing 嘉慶 and Daoguang 道光 reign periods (1796-1850) scholars reflected upon the intellectual heritage of their dynasty's predecessors. At that time, several works were written that attempted to formulate, assess, and evaluate the intellectual contributions of Qing scholars. Such works – although not necessarily sharing the same premises and assumptions – were often connected to prominent scholar-officials such as Ruan Yuan (阮元, 1764–1849) via sponsorship, patronage, or authorship, and included the following: Ruan Yuan's project, the Guoshi Rulinzhuan (國史儒林傳, Biographies of Ru for the Dynasty's History), initiated in 1810; Jiang Fan's (江藩, 1761–1831) Guochao Hanxueshi chengji (國朝漢學師承記, Records of Han Learning Masters of the Dynasty), Guochao jingxue shicheng ji (國朝經學師承記, Records of Classical Learning Masters of the Dynasty), and Guochao Songxue yuanyuan ji (國朝宋學淵源記, Records of Song Learning Sources of the Dynasty), written in 1810, 1811, and 1822, respectively; the 1826 rebuttal of Jiang's notions in the Hanxue shangdui (漢學商兌, An Assessment of Han Learning) by Fang Dongshu (方東樹, 1772–1851); Wei Yuan's (魏源, 1794–1856) compilation of the Huangchao jingshi wenbian (皇朝經世文編, Collected Essays on Statecraft of the Glorious [Qing] Dynasty), finalized in 1826; Ruan Yuan's compilation of the Huang Qing jingjie (皇清經解, Glorious Qing Exegesis of the Classics) during the second half of the 1820s; and Tang Jian's (唐鑑, 1778–1861) Guochao xue'an xiaozhi (國朝學案小識, Condensed History of Scholarship in the Qing), published in 1845.Footnote ⁶⁷

Other works, that encompassed the intellectual legacy of both the Qing and other periods, such as the Chouren zhuan (疇人傳, Biographies of Mathematicians-cum-Astronomers) of the late 1790s, were also of significance during the nineteenth century. Throughout that century more compilations – using turn of the nineteenth-century works and appending more (often more up-to-date) materials to them – appeared, scholars published sequels to some of the abovementioned works; and these works were circulating widely, reprinted, and discussed all the way to the early twentieth century. That is not to say that the authors of such texts (diachronically and synchronically) did not differ in their assessment of the past or their concept of their present, nor did such texts present a monolithic image of the past; they did share, nonetheless, the notion that they were all engaging in a similar discipline and within a common culture.

Ways of writing about China's past in general, about its intellectual heritage, and that of the Qing in particular, began to change, and scholars were often mindful of the change and declared its importance at the turn of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, I argue that the change was a dialectic process, involving both older (‘traditional’) and new (‘modern’) practices and discourse. Although it may seem that twentieth-century intellectuals changed the historiographical “game” completely, upon deeper examination one finds three aspects in which significant continuities from the nineteenth century can be discerned: first, while some of the terms (and, of course, categories) have been dramatically altered, other terms kept their prominence well into the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first century; second, the titles and structure of several works lingered; and last, some of the contents, judgments, and analysis of nineteenth-century scholars persisted – haunted, perhaps – in the new historiographical discourse.

A few examples serve to illustrate these claims. From the 1810s and 1820s the use of the terms Hanxue 漢學 and Songxue 宋學 to describe Qing scholarship gradually solidified. Jiang Fan and Fang Dongshu, mentioned above, contributed greatly to such use of these terms, and at the turn of the twentieth century, scholars – although offering other options – retained these two terms.

Fang Dongshu had criticized Hanxue for “turning the Way into chaos” (亂道, Fang 1937, 84). In the preface to the Hanxue shangdui Fang fiercely attacked the Hanxue scholars of the Qing, saying:

Fang, enraged over Hanxue scholars' attack on Zhu Xi, used some of the same argumentation that Jiang Fan and others had indeed used to attack previous scholarship, which he later dismissed or ridiculed (for Jiang's writing on the subject see Jiang 2008). Fang's main point of attack was the Hanxue scholars' neglect of the moral precepts which emerge from “meanings and principles” (義理), as well as the “meanings and principles” themselves, as Elman showed (see Elman Reference Elman2001, 280–83). Fang Dongshu's major target in the Hanxue shangdui was Dai Zhen (attacks on Dai Zhen constitute more than one quarter of the book, and the book has discussions of scholars all the way from Gu Yanwu and Yan Ruoju [閻若璩, 1636-1704], to Ruan Yuan).

At the turn of the twentieth century, Fang's attack on Dai Zhen was one of the first issues to be discussed, and indeed in 1900 another edition of his Hanxue shangdui was published.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Western categories of knowledge, as well as the Western “scientific method” of producing knowledge, became the vogue alongside the “new historiography,” scholars reevaluated the historical role and significance of the “Han Learning” scholars; they used Fang Dongshu, but according to a different agenda than Fang's. In fact, when, in 1919, Fu Sinian decided to recommend three books for the initial study of Qing scholarship, two of the books he recommended (with reservations) were Jiang Fan's Hanxueshi chengji and Fang Dongshu's Hanxue shangdui. The third was Chen Li's (陳澧, 1810–1882) Dongshu dushu ji (東塾讀書記, Record of Chen Li Reading Books [Fu 2003, 231]). As we have seen in the beginning of this paper, the evolutionary model, along with European historical precedents, were among the important factors informing Chinese scholars’ reevaluation of the Qing period. Qing scholars thus reentered the historiographical stage, yet it was a different show, based on a Western storyline rather than a Cheng-Zhu script (as was the case for Fang Dongshu). Qing scholars were compared not to the standards of Chinese (Cheng-Zhu or other) antiquity but to Western modernity.

Still, the image of Dai Zhen – one of the most important scholars discussed at the time as well as by Jiang Fan and Fand Dongshu – was not positive at first:Footnote ⁷⁰ in 1902 Liang Qichao published his Lun Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi (論中國學術思想變遷之大勢, Essay on the General Trend of Changes in Chinese Thought and Learning). In it Liang discussed Fang Dongshu's book, and said that “[Fang] assailed [Han Learning] sparing no pains, his language striking, his discussion sharp and acute, and what he attacked was the crux of the matter.”Footnote ⁷¹ Nonetheless, when Liang compared Han Learning with what Fang Dongshu's Tongcheng School (桐城) had to offer, he concluded that both schools were “equally useless” (等無用也, Liang Reference Ch'i-ch'ao1999, vol. 2, 614). Although, later on, Liang, like many others, became much more appreciative of Dai Zhen, the focus on Dai and on specific works by Dai Zhen were direct heirs to nineteenth-century scholars' views.

Another example is Gu Yanwu's image. Gu has been famous in modern historiography for his scholarship in two – considered to be distinct – fields: political thought and philological inquiry. Gu's fame in the twentieth century rested on his “nationalistic” or pseudo-modern political arguments and on his “scientific” philological methodology. Between the two, however, it was the first – politics – that made him particularly appealing to late Qing and early Republican era intellectuals. Gu Yanwu's “statecraft” (經世, jingshi) persona has been on the rise since the early nineteenth century, and here, again, we see how nineteenth-century priorities, assessment, and terminology served twentieth-century discussions, with major twists and turns.

In the 1826 Huangchao jingshi wenbian, of which Wei Yuan was the chief compiler, Gu Yanwu towered above the rest of the scholars (see Delury Reference Delury2007, 7; Bartlett Reference Bartlett and Link2009, 181–206, esp. 185; Rowe Reference Rowe2001, 142–43; Guy Reference Guy1984). In 1843, Wei Yuan, following Zhang Mu (張穆, 1805–1849), was among the founders of an association to promote the building of a Gu Yanwu shrine in Beijing, and a year later the first ceremony was held there; until 1873 ceremonies took place at the shrine three times a year (in the spring, autumn, and Gu's birthday), annually. It was in the same year – 1844 – that Zhang Mu also completed a detailed biography of Gu Yanwu, the Gu Tinglin xiansheng nianpu (顧亭林先生年譜, Biography of Mister Gu Tinglin).Footnote ⁷²

Lü Wenli (吕文利) pointedly suggested that the shift from worshiping Zheng Xuan, that marked the earlier nineteenth century, to worshiping Gu Yanwu in the 1840s symbolized a more general scholarly turn to statecraft, especially after the Opium War (see Lü 2007, 75–85, esp. 79–80; see also Guo 2009, 39–44). Moreover, there was also a change in Gu Yanwu's own image: the statecraft-oriented image of Gu Yanwu differed from the Ancient-Learning, philologically-oriented, image of Gu that eighteenth-century scholars had promoted earlier (Qian 1989, 24, 390–91). On the other hand, we should also be reminded that Gu Yanwu's image in the 1840s was not “just” statecraft. One may also question what was meant by “statecraft” (經世) in those decades: part of that was certainly a philologically-minded search for ancient prescriptions for the dynasty's well-being, even if the ancient texts to be relied upon have changed.

Huang Rucheng's (黃汝成, 1799–1837) authoritative exegesis of Gu's Rizhi lu, finalized during the 1830s, accepted the statecraft image of Gu Yanwu, but Huang was not satisfied with this image alone, and presented Gu as an accomplished scholar in a variety of fields, claiming that “indeed, he was equal to the great worthies” (固已合於大賢). Huang counted Gu's success in elucidating “the subtle words and great meanings of the Classics and Histories” (經史之微文大義), philology, laws, governance, rituals and music, field measurements, monetary issues, irrigation, waterways, grain transport, and much more (Huang 2006, 1–3).

Statecraft, or practical learning, for Huang as well as for Wei Yuan a decade or so earlier, was closely intertwined with “classical learning (經學, jingxue) or “evidential learning” (考證學, kaozhengxue). That had also been the case for Gu himself, as Thomas Bartlett, who wrote on the nexus of politics and philology in Gu's scholarship of the seventeenth century, successfully demonstrated (Bartlett Reference Bartlett and Link2009). Early twentieth-century intellectuals, however, understood statecraft (經世) as separated from philology, so that we find that there are those who glorified Gu for political thought quite apart from his philological inquiries, and there are others who treat his “scientific” philological inquiries with great respect, but keep them at a distance from questions of politics.

Lastly, I shall only briefly point out that during the first decades of the twentieth century traditional-style studies were composed and published, with, perhaps, the 1928 publication of the Qingshi gao (清史稿, A Draft History of the Qing Dynasty) being a prime example (also of criticism on such projects). One might note the turn of the twentieth-first-century Qing History (清史) project that aims, among other things, to replace the critiqued Qingshi gao, as a further link to our own times (see Chen Reference Hsi-yuan2004; Zhao 2008, 120–145; Dong Reference Dong, Hon and Culp2007). The monumental project, led by Xu Shichang 徐世昌 (1855-1939) and published in 1938, the Qingru xue'an 清儒學案(Records of Qing Scholars), is another prime example of a work that also explicitly aimed to continue earlier traits, in this case to emulate Huang Zongxi's (黃宗羲, 1610–1695) seventeenth-century research of Song, Yuan, and Ming traditions (see Xu 2008).