This is a useful and gracefully written addition to our knowledge of Chinese historiography—the formation of the modern discipline from the late Qing to today—and to the larger question of Chinese intellectual life across the long twentieth century. Fan discusses the major figures in the field of world history, their networks, their institutions, the political contexts that shaped their work, and, not least, their ideas. World history has meant both the history of places that are not China and the history of an integrated globe. World historians in China have variously treated their own country as one case of shared patterns of human development (whether ahead or behind other places) and as a unique culture (whether uniquely unique or simply unique as all are unique).
Overall, Fan describes a process of professionalization, though this process saw two great interruptions: nationalistic distortions during the Sino-Japanese War starting in the 1930s and the restrictions placed on scholarship during the period of high Maoism from the late 1950s. Yet looking at the highly professionalized production of historical knowledge today, Fan also asks whether excessive specialization means a reluctance to tackle major issues.
There are four important take-aways from this book, at least for me. First, the uncanny ways certain Chinese world historians were able to critique Eurocentrism from an early stage in the development of the field. This might not seem surprising from people located “outside,” but Fan shows not cultural defensiveness but insightful analysis. There were also sophisticated discussions of whether we should understand different cultures as interrelated variations on common themes or as distinct path-dependent trajectories. Second, the interplay between submission and resistance to party-state orthodoxies—this is hardly unique to Chinese historiography but was or is especially stark in China's case. Third, the generational dialectic that marks so much of historiography around the world, which Fan politely refrains from terming patricide, also seems especially marked in the Chinese case. And fourth, the interplay between cosmopolitanism and “academic nationalism” (7).
The study of ancient world history is particularly difficult, because it simply is not clear whether there is any such thing. Yes, long-distance trade, population movements, and the diffusion of ideas and technologies are found from the beginning of time, but distinct regions developed distinct cultures and may not be best viewed as an integrated whole. Or can world history trace how these cultures followed the same fundamental pattern of development (or failed to do so)? This pattern might refer to moving from antiquity to medieval, or to the Marxo-Stalinist primitive-slave-feudal-capitalist-socialist scheme. Fan highlights the dilemma here: if there is a common pattern of development, distinct cultural phenomena are mere superficial epiphenomena; but if cultures are truly unique, then there is no universal pattern (and what does that leave for world history to do except compare and contrast?).
What was the use of world history in China? One profound effect was simply to decenter and secularize any understanding of China. Fan points to the need felt by late Qing literati to understand the new threats of the nineteenth century. This is a largely familiar story of such men as Guo Songtao, Wei Yuan, and Kang Youwei, but also the lesser-known Zhou Weihan. Zhou was also representative of a network of scholars centered around Changzhou who made use of new printing technologies. If I understand him correctly, Fan treats Zhou's An Outline of Western History as a kind of transitional work rooted in traditional statecraft concerns but trying to synthesize Chinese and foreign temporal change. Zhou's belief in historical progress led him to treat China's classical Three Dynasties as an early stage of development rather than a lost golden age, a view which in no way led him to question Confucianism.
The late Qing literati view, however open to new possibilities, was not yet world history in the sense of an effort to understand truly global processes, but this changed by the early Republic. Historians who had received some of their education abroad found new academic homes and professional associations. Many were liberal cosmopolitans, others were more nationalistic, but “the greatest contribution of world historians in the Republic period to the general field of historical studies was to open up debates on the place of China in a world-historical context” (61). Lei Haizong was the first to offer a thorough-going critique of Western historiographical categories, including the very idea of the “West” and the notion of temporal stages. He also critiqued the practice of national history as anachronistic, though we might ask whether Lei's proposal to study the histories of “cultures” instead entirely solves the problem. Understandably, Fan calls Lei a cultural conservative, but if his conservatism was unmistakable by the late 1930s, the overall nature of this conservatism needs greater explanation.
In the early period of the People's Republic, world historians continued to work mostly with secondary sources and write textbooks. A sharp split emerged between the older generation and a younger generation happier to use historical materialism as method. Fan points out that many of both generations of world historians were forced into the field by the academic work-unit system—students, too, were assigned majors based on test scores and quotas, not interest. Canonical ancient history (Greece and Rome) was at least supplemented by Babylonia, India, and Mexico, while the main source of knowledge was Russian scholarship. Marxist orthodoxy was troubled, however, by two main problems. First was the inability of many historians of China (and others) to fully accept the Stalinist five-stage theory of historical development. Second was the vexed problem of Marx's own brief reference to some “Asiatic mode of production.” If the AMP itself is a profoundly uninteresting piece of orientalist nonsense, Fan nonetheless reminds us that efforts to make sense out of it tell us a lot about modern Chinese intellectual life.
In sum, the PRC state provoked fear and limited intellectual life, but ultimately had “only a limited ability to control people's thoughts” (126). Fan argues that debates in the 1950s like those over AMP “allowed Chinese scholars to ask new and meaningful questions on Chinese and world histories despite the ideologically charged language” (149), but to me this also suggests that historians had to wait until the 1980s and a “return to normalcy” (155) to find productive answers. Once again professionalization came to the fore, along with greater contacts with Western historians. Yet now seeing themselves as part of the Four Modernizations, world historians such as the once-Marxist Lin Zhichun emphasized the relationship between world-historical knowledge and the revival of the Chinese nation. Fan draws a link between the abandonment of Marxist frameworks and the rise of nationalist ones, seen for example in a “blind belief in the continuity of Chinese civilization” (183). Cause and effect remain to be explored however, as is the relationship between increasing professionalization, specialization, and nationalism.
In spite of a firm institutional basis, the place of world history in the Chinese historical profession today is marginal (as it is, we might add, in most places). However, what Fan calls the discourse of cultural difference is of course far from finished, any more than debates over periodization and teleology. His book offers a rich portrait of persons, ideas, and institutions.
