The overview of the book

The basic idea of this book is to refute the western-centered ways of learning Chinese history and advocate a new China-centered view.

The author thinks that the western perspectives will lead to an ethnocentric distortion by exaggerating or misconstruing the role of the West and he uses three parts of the book to explain why the frameworks of China’s response to the “Western challenge”, tradition and modernity, imperialism are not right. And in the last part of this book, the author introduced the China-Centered approach.

The first part – The problem with “China’s Response to the West”

“China’s Response to the West”, also called the impact-response, point that West played an active role in the recent China history was popular in 1950-960s.

The author introduces some books of this framework, Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank’s book China’s Response to the West(1954) and Paul H. Clyde and Burton F. Beers’s book The Far East: A History of the Western Impact and the Eastern Response.

This framework has some problems, it ignores the enigmatic and contradictory nature of the modern West. The modern West has changed greatly over time and “The West” is a relative concept. The “total West” never had an impact on other societies, for China, the transformation in line is only with a highly selective vision of what the West was all about.

The second part – moving beyond “Tradition and Modernity”

In this part, the author introduces the characteristic opinion of this framework, that is the modern West is the “norm” of the other societies so that China didn’t change in the past.

Johann Gottfried von Herder states that only Europe was human life genuinely historical, whereas in China, India and among the natives of America there was no true historical progress but only a static unchanging civilization. And other scholars also held the opinions that “China has no history”, “Chinese stationariness” and “eternal standstill”.

Although later in 1970s, there is some arguments about that China is not static.

And the end of this part, the author challenges the tradition-modernity framework with three problems. First, the pairing’s implied exclusivity forces upon us a rigidly bipolar view of reality. Second, “the assumption of conservation of historical energy”. Third, the neatly symmetrical to describe and explain realities that are fundamentally asymmetrical.

The third part – Imperialism: Reality or Myth?

The imperialism approach was inspired by Mao Tse-tung’s famous dictum that “the history of modern China is a history of imperialist aggression, of imperialist opposition to China’s independence and to her development of capitalism”. This approach also agrees that the industry modernity is a good for China. The author pays attention to the economy area and argues that the imperialism doesn’t affected China’s economy substantially. He also uses the elephant and the flea for metaphor.

The author also raised three problems about the imperialism. First, both sides ignored the proper political infrastructure which is absolutely crucial if successful economic change is to occur. Second, both sides seem to feel constrained to adopt the entire Chinese economy as the only unit to analysis. Third, application of this concept of imperialism to the Chinese case is confusing for China was never under full colonial domination.

The fourth part – Toward a China-Centered History of China

The author introduces the China-Centered approach with four distinct characteristics of this approach.

(1) It begins Chinese history in China rather than in the West and adopts, as far as human possible, internal (Chinese) rather than external (Western) criteria for determining what is historically significant in Chinese past;

(2) it disaggregates China “horizontally” into regions, provinces, prefectures, counties, and cities, thus making regional and local history possible;

(3) it also disaggregates Chinese society “vertically” into a number of discrete levels, facilitating the writing of lower-level history, both popular and non-popular;

(4) it welcomes with enthusiasm the theories, methodologies, and techniques developed in disciplines other than history (mostly, but not exclusively, the social sciences) and strives to integrate these into historical analysis.

The critiques To the China-Centered Approach

First of all, I agree with the second and third parts of the China-Centered approach that the history and society of China should be learnt both horizontally and vertically. I do know that people don’t pay enough attention to local or lower-level studies in China. And as China is a combination of very different places and cultures, almost everything in people’s daily lives are very different in different places. So overemphasizing on the general culture and history of China will lead to the lack of acknowledgement and content. So these parts are very important for updating the traditional method of Chinese scholars learning Chinese history.

However, the author tries to rebuild the framework of learning Chinese history, the new “China-Centered” approach which is raised by him would be more accurate not a China view but a West view which critiques the former West approaches.

For the first part of the China-Centered approach, the author stresses two things, the Chinese context and the Chinese problem that is all the problems happened in China are the problems Chinese experienced in China and it should be China , not the West, to determine what is significantly important.

He claims that China has its own storyline even though Chinese context has being impacted by the West. He was trying hard to avoid the ethnocentric distortion by claiming that the revolutions happened in China has already been in process before the impact of the West and they were considered as the self-updates of China rather than the response to the West.

But in my opinion, the revolutions before and after the West impact are totally different so that they cannot be considered as in the same branch of China’s storyline. The revolutions before the West impact are actually the same as them in the past, which has the kernel to maintain the feudal society. Most of them are about the problems like the organization of the government, the corruption and the education, the similar themes of 永贞革新、庆历新政、熙宁变法 in Tang and Song dynasties. And the results of these “revolutions” are the same, they all failed. But the revolutions after the West impact changed to a new branch of China’s storyline, they mostly focused on the society, trying to transform the feudal society to another society and their themes are about the construction of the society and the thoughts of people. And these themes are all based on the West culture, so at the beginning, the contents of revolutions were just copying from the West.

However the reason why China didn’t become a western country is that the colonialism pays attention to extraction interests but not to ruling the local and there were conflicts between the colonists. So this gave China an opportunity to transform to another branch or back to the former one.

The word modern society is a completely western terminology. To become a modern society is to become something like Western industrial society. And as the industrialization has the huge power to change a country’s productivity which deeply impacts the military, economy, politics, China didn’t choose to take the industry revolution, but was forced to it. So it’s not accurate to say that it’s China that determine what is problem and what is important.

And another point I disagree with the author is that he says people should empathetically rebuild the China’s history by Chinese own experiences. However, “empathetically” means that the author thinks China’s history is somewhat subjective. However, I agree with that the history of China is helical and objective. Although, sometimes maybe because of the lack of the materials, some details of the history will be missed or distorted, but it can always find the similar situations in the history for a particular period. Like the background and development of Wang Yangming’s Xin Xue are very similar to 程朱理学 and 魏晋玄学. That’s why I think the China-Centered approach is still in the West view for it still view China’s history as a straight line and focusing on the appearance of different revolutions or schools in a short time but ignore the kernel value system and society characteristics through the China’s history.

Thoughts after the report of the critiques

The West impact didn’t begin at 1840, and whether the revolution is before or after the West impact is not decided by the time but whether the people who led the revolution accepted the west thoughts.