Modernity and the Formation of New History Writing in China

In 1902, Liang Qichao who was in exile in Japan, published an essay called “New History Writing” in The New Citizen Journal (Xinmin congbao). In this essay, he adamantly promoted a “revolution in history” and in this way “New History Writing” entered the stage of Chinese history. There are many works on “New History Writing,” but these works usually either stop at summarizing the contents of individuals who are considered to be practitioners of “New History Writing” or attempt to understand New History Writing through a perspective that presupposes a binary opposition between the new and the old. These writings do not look at the goal of New History Writing or into the various conditions that gave rise to New History Writing, conditions which lie concealed beneath New History Writing’s idea of a historical methodology that stresses the development of an objective narrative based on an accumulation of facts. In this article, I would like to explore the formation and development of New History Writing through looking at three historians who were representative of New History Writing in various periods, namely Liang Qichao, Hu Shi and Guo Moruo. Moreover, I would like to make clear their interrelationships and their scholarly characteristics. However, I am not concerned to conduct a detailed and exhaustive study of their writings. Rather, I shall enter my study of New History Writing through examining the relationship between these author’s works and modernity. In other words, I take New History Writing as a topic in intellectual history. This means that because New History Writing is conditioned and shaped by its intellectual and political context, important clues to understand New History Writing stem from grasping the trajectory of modern Chinese thought.viIn this way, rather than presupposing the distinction between old and new or the methodology of seeking objective truth, I would like to see such conceptual maneuvers as grounded in the transformations of modernity