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Arif Dirlik is Associate Professor of History at Duke University and author of The Origins of Chinese Communism (1989).

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Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937

University of California Press

"Marxism," a critical commentator has observed, "represents an historiographical turning point, the revolutionary effects of which we are only now coming to appreciate."1 When historical materialism (or "the materialist conception of history," as Marx described his view of history) entered Chinese thought in the second and third decades of this century, its impact on Chinese historiography was no less profound for its sources being exogenous to Chinese thought. In the Marxist theoretical system Chinese intellectuals encountered perhaps the most comprehensive "sociology of change" to issue from nineteenth-century European thought,2 one which unequivocally posited society to be the starting point of historical inquiry and sought in social processes the forces that shaped history. In its new context, Marxist historiography represented an unprecedented undertaking to root history in social structure, revolutionizing the conceptualization of China's past. The proliferation of socialeconomic history of an unmistakably Marxist bent by the 1930s pointed to the ascendancy of historical materialism in Chinese historical studies. This trend continues to the present in the People's Republic of China where, now under official aegis, the materialist conception of history monopolizes historical scholarship and, equally significantly, infuses the historical consciousness of great numbers of people. Historical materialism, in short, represents the counterpart in the intellectual realm to the

G. Leff, History and Social Theory (New York: Doubleday Anchor, (1971), pp. 141142.

L. Btamson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 21.

revolutionary changes communism has wrought in Chinese society in the twentieth century.

The radical reinterpretation of Chinese history made possible by the introduction of Marxist historical theory to China after 1919 provides the subject of the present study. The substantive portion of the discussion here is devoted to examining Marxist interpretations of the past in the years after 1927 when Marxist historians produced their first major historical analyses. While Chinese intellectuals became acquainted with Marxist historical theory as early as the 1910s, they initially displayed only a marginal interest in its application to Chinese history. Their grasp of historical materialism remained superficial through the early twenties, when knowledge of Marxist theory was derived largely from a spotty selection of primary and secondary, especially Japanese, sources. The few authors who applied it to the analysis of Chinese history at this time employed it eclectically, without clearly distinguishing the materialist conception from other socioeconomic approaches to history. For reasons to be discussed here, Marxist historiography did not appear as a distinct trend until after 1927 when, with the so-called "social history controversy," it emerged rapidly as possibly the most dynamic and stimulating current in Chinese historiography. Seminal works produced at this time left a visible imprint on historical work in the thirties; the questions they raised also laid the foundation for much of the historical inquiry Marxist historians in China have undertaken in subsequent years. In fact, Marxist historians were responsible for first demonstrating the importance of questions that have since come to serve the more social science oriented historians of China, Chinese or non-Chinese, as points of departure for the resolution of the most fundamental problems of Chinese history.

The present study departs from previous studies of Marxist historiography in China in regarding these questions as direct offshoots, rather than incidental correlatives, of the political and therefore historical consciousness Marxism engendered in China. Whether or not later research has upheld the specific conclusions of Marxist historians is not as crucial to the evaluation of the Marxist contribution as the simple fact that their

conceptualization of Chinese history from the perspective provided by historical materialism endowed them with a deeper awareness of the complexity of historical problems than had existed until then. This new awareness, moreover, reached beyond the realm of historical inquiry in its effects. Intense Marxist historiographical activity during the decade after 1927 disseminated Marxist sociohistorical concepts widely so that the materialist conception of history came to shape the views on the past, the present, and the future of significant numbers of Chinese intellectuals. Important as this problem is to understanding the mood of the Chinese intelligentsia in the thirties, it is beyond the scope of the present study, which takes account of it only marginally in speculating on the appeals of Marxism to Chinese intellectuals after 1927. The main task undertaken here is to analyze the origins and nature of Marxist interpretations of the past during the thirties, to elucidate the problems Marxist historians encountered in applying Marxist theory to Chinese history, and to examine the ways in which their preoccupation with broader questions of revolutionary change in contemporary China shaped their treatment of both theory and history.

Marxist historiography is approached here through the perspective provided by intellectual developments in modern China, in other words, as a subject of intellectual history. In adopting this approach, I do not mean to reduce the work of Marxist historians to a mere datum of intellectual history that is devoid of historiographical validity; on the contrary, I believe that despite culpable defects in their scholarship, and their often crude handling of Marxist concepts, Marxist historians made lasting contributions to the study of Chinese history. Nevertheless, Marxist historiography was shaped by its intellectual and political context. For the same reason, it offers clues to understanding intellectual developments in China at this time; in its genesis and development, Marxist historiography was bound up with social and intellectual currents in the period following the New Culture Movement.

As I shall endeavor to demonstrate, it is essential to take note of the contemporary revolutionary scene that provided the

backdrop to the writing of history to fully appreciate the complexity of Marxist historiography or to assess its role in modern Chinese thought. History to the Marxist historians was neither a mere pastime nor a scholarly enterprise; it was both functional and eminently practical. Marxists wanted urgently to understand the past because it held within it, they believed, the secret of the dynamics of contemporary society, a society whose destiny they wished fervently to shape. For the same reason, the changes they envisioned for the future shaped significantly their views of history. In this particular sense, Marxists differed from their predecessors and contemporaries only to the extent that they announced openly the political intention underlying their historical efforts. Theirs represented the latest in a series of efforts dating back to the early twentieth century to rewrite Chinese history so as to bring it into conformity with the requirements of change in the present. It is not surprising to discover that as the problem of change assumed new dimensions, the shifts were reflected in modifications in the problem of history. The rise of the Marxist view of history, and its increasing popularity among Chinese intellectuals in the late twenties, suggests another such shift. On the one hand, I think, historical materialism owed a good deal of its appeal among Chinese intellectuals at this time not to its virtues as historical method, but to its relevance to the problem of revolutionary change, as that problem came to be perceived in the twenties. On the other hand, the spontaneous diffusion of Marxist historical theory in whole or in some attenuated form in the field of Chinese historical studies indicates that its appeal was not due merely to its political implications. Though history per se was initially only of secondary interest in Marxist historiography, the materialist conception of history offered a sorely needed methodology for rewriting Chinese history at a time when modernist iconoclasm had undermined the authority of traditional interpretations without, however, offering substitutes of its own. With all the defects in its application to Chinese history, therefore, historical materialism alleviated what was in effect a crisis in Chinese historical consciousness.

Three premises guide the evaluation of Chinese Marxist historiography in this study. These premises relate to the nature of the Marxist contribution to Chinese historical thinking, the relationship between politics and history in Marxist historiography, and the place of the materialist conception of history in modern Chinese thought. A discussion of these premises here will provide a better sense of the arguments to be pursued later and also will indicate the ways in which this study departs from earlier studies of Marxist historiography in China.

The Marxist contribution to history was primarily conceptual, even though the new conceptualization of the past had important ramifications for historical inquiry as well as for problems of methodology and explanation. The impact of Marxism on history is more readily appreciable if historical materialism is viewed as a "paradigm theory" as used by Thomas Kuhn in explaining the advance of scientific knowledge.3 Kuhn has argued that scientific inquiry does not proceed by the random accumulation of data but rather is organized in accordance with a paradigmatic theory that the scientific community takes for granted at any one time in formulating problems and selecting the means to resolve them. The scientific community, according to Kuhn, abandons a paradigm gradually, and with reluctance, only as mounting evidence reveals the existence of important problems that cannot be accounted for within the boundaries of the existing paradigm. The "crisis" in scientific thought created by repeated challenges to the accepted paradigm is resolved ultimately by a "scientific revolution," which is realized when a new paradigm is assimilated by a significant portion of the scientific community. The new paradigm accomplishes "the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact," as well as providing criteria for

T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). The relevance of the paradigm concept to political and social theory has been pointed out by Sheldon Wolin, who also identified Marxism as one of the paradigms in modern political theory. See Wolin, "Paradigms and Political Theories," in P. King and B. C. Parekh (eds.), Politics and Experience (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968).

"choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions."4 This is what the materialist conception of history achieved in the realm of history, both in the original context within which Marx formulated his theory and when it was applied to the analysis of China's past in the twenties.5

It might be noted that historical materialism owed its basic emphases, and even some of its essential concepts, to the expanded consciousness of the social roots of historical change, which was reflected in the increasingly sociological orientation of European historical thought in the nineteenth century. What distinguished historical materialism as a paradigm, however, was its bold definition of the relative significance of the sociological factors that went into the making of history and, therefore, its view of what constituted a significant historical problem: The materialist conception of history, more than any other contemporary theory of history, moved society to the center of historical inquiry and asserted the logical priority of those aspects of society which were most intimately linked to economic activity. The resulting conception of history yielded a radically different

Kuhn, Structure, p. 7.

I use the paradigm concept, mindful of the need to distinguish between the paradigms of natural science and the paradigms of social science with respect to their internal characteristics and their status in their respective realms. The distinction I would like to stress pertains to the sources and implications of the two types of paradigms. According to Kuhn, paradigm shifts in the natural sciences occur in response to crises in scientific inquiry and are of direct relevance only to the community of practicing scientists. The paradigms of social and political theory, however, are bound up much more closely with their social context. Major paradigm shifts within social and political thought would seem to be called forth by crises in the existing social system, rather than the challenge of new intellectual problems, and the new paradigms aim not merely to alleviate intellectual crisis but the crisis of the system as a whole. This "practical" dimension to the sources and consequences of social paradigms renders them much more susceptible to the influence of political ideologies, with consequences for their theoretical formulations. In the case of Marxism, while Marxism was a part of the general reorientation of European social thought in the nineteenth century, its revolutionary stance on the resolution of social problems infused its theoretical premises. While most other currents in social science since that time have taken for granted "the ensemble of practices and beliefs" (Wolin, "Paradigms") that characterized market society, Marxism adopted as its premises those elements relevant to revolutionizing (and dissolving) that society. The consequences of these premises for the materialist conception of history will be examined in detail in Chapter 8.

view of the interrelationship between historical phenomena and the dynamics of historical change than had existed until then.

In evaluating the significance of the impact of historical materialism on historical thinking in China, therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind the departure of the materialist conception of history from previous modes of historical thought. The radical break of Marxist historians with their predecessors becomes evident when their conceptualization of Chinese history is contrasted to the inherited view of history represented by the Confucian historical tradition which, though undermined by radical break of Marxist historians with their predecessors becomes evident when their conceptualization of Chinese history

The Marxist outlook on Chinese history inverted the traditional Confucian view of the past. While it is possible to draw parallels between the two views on the basis of their common aspirations to universalism and their perception of history in terms of its practical, political consequences, the more significant consideration is that the substance of the Marxist conception of politics and, therefore, history was the diametrical opposite of the Confucian, as is clearly evident in the different historiographical consequences of the two outlooks.

Chinese political theory regarded politics as a function of the virtues of political leaders; the evaluation of the performance of past leaders in order to provide present and future leaders with precedents from which "to extract political and moral lessons" was, therefore, a central function of history.6 History was for the most part officially sponsored and "served an essentially moral purpose 'for aid on government,' for guiding administrative action, encouraging virtue and deterring vice."7 The conception of history that resulted from this premise was individual-centered and one that visualized history not as an autonomous realm but as the field upon which eternal principles guiding human behavior played out their fate: "The reverence

L. A. Struve, "Uses of History in Traditional Chinese Society: The Southern Ming in Ch'ing Historiography," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974, p. 99.

J. Needham, "Time and Eastern Man," in Needham, The Grand Titration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 241.

for history as a storehouse of precedent" went hand in hand with "the interpretation of history from a standpoint of permanence (rather than process)."8 Chang Hsueh-ch'eng, one of the few premodern Chinese thinkers to address directly what might be termed questions of the philosophy of history, regarded history as the account in time of the fate of the ultimate principles, the Tao. Tao was, in Nivison's words, "the basic potential in human nature for living an ordered, civilized life, a potential that gradually writes itself out in history, and actualizes itself in what man must come to regard as right and true."9

It followed from this attitude that the traditional evaluation of history was guided by the desirability of order and harmony and a distaste for chaos and conflict, for conflict represented an aberration, the breakdown of morality.10 The historical outlook that resulted from the confluence of these attitudes shaped the writing of history and the nature of historical explanations. The Chinese historian did not make an effort "to analyze and classify his facts for presentation in that logical sequence which shall seem to his individual brain best calculated to expose, not merely their order in time, but also the concatenation of cause and effect."11 Within the limits imposed by their outlook, traditional historians made an admirable effort to achieve accuracy and developed sophisticated methods of empirical investigation. The conception of history as a realm where individual behavior manifested the success or failure of morality, on the other hand, obviated the need to search for historical explanation within the inner workings of history. Even the writers of universal political and institutional histories (rather than the more common dynastic histories) did not supplement their recognition of change in history with explanation in terms of

J. Levenson, China: An Interpretive History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 49.

D. Nivison, The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 141.

J. P. Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 77.

C. S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 69.

historical process.12 Chinese historians in general stopped short of "binding events together in a causal nexus and treating them as connected wholes."13

The Marxist conception of history departed radically from this view. The premise that the dynamics of historical development could be discovered only in the interaction of forces immanent in the socioeconomic structure altered the scope of historical inquiry and expressed a new awareness of the complexity of historical explanation. Where previous historians had marked time according to political (whether individual, dynastic, or institutional) or intellectual changes, Marxist historians turned to transformations in the socioeconomic structure as the criteria for determining significant historical change. This new conception of historical time also transformed the scope of history, as it focused attention on the social space that bound and shaped political and intellectual phenomena. As long-term socioeconomic processes achieved primacy in the attention of the historian, explanations based on suprahistorical notions of morality gave way to explanations of history in terms of historical processes themselves; to the Marxists, historical explanation was valid only to the extent that it was able to take account of these basic processes. They saw history in terms of a series of dynamically related wholes which not only yielded a completely different picture of the past than the Confucian but also reduced individual behavior and morality to a mere component, or reflection, of the social whole. Society now emerged as an autonomous realm which contained within it the source of its own progress and shaped all other aspects of human behavior. Furthermore, the same conception stressed, even glorified, the

Ma Tuan-lin, one of the major institutional historians of traditional China, saw continuity in institutions from period to period but not in "history": "Each period has its own history and it is sufficient to cover in full the period from the beginning to the end of the dynasty without referring to other dynasties or attempting to draw parallels." In Win. Theodore deBary (ed.), Sources of the Chinese 'I'radition , Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 446.

E. G. Pulleyblank, "Chinese Historical Criticism," in W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (eds.), Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 152.

role of conflict as the prime mover of history. This view yielded a more dynamic and integrated explanation of the past than had been available in Confucian historiography. More important, it endowed society with a supreme status in historical consciousness as the starting point of history.

As I shall note in the next chapter and again in the conclusion, some of these ideas had gained currency in Chinese historical thought prior to the rise of Marxist historiography, as Chinese thinkers became increasingly aware of the complexity of historical change in the twentieth century. Historians from Wang Kuo-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao in the early part of the century to Ku Chieh-kang in the twenties had implicitly or explicitly challenged the sufficiency of the scope and/or the empirical basis of Confucian historiography. Without downplaying the importance of their work to the twentieth-century revolution in Chinese historiography, it seems fair to point out nevertheless that their contributions remained restricted to uncovering previously hidden or ignored facets of Chinese history or, as in the case of Ku, demolishing the claims of crucial Confucian traditions to empirical validity. While their work justifiably provided later historians with models of historical inquiry, they were unable to substitute for the Confucian view a comprehensive theory of history that could account for the interrelationship of historical phenomena or the dynamics of historical change. The materialist conception of history provided just such an urgently needed theory. It not only substituted for the Confucian vision of the past a secular view of history that recognized history as an autonomous realm, but also provided a theory that could serve as the starting point for achieving a longstanding dream of twentieth-century intellectuals: the creation of a "new history."

The methodological consequences of this new conception were evident both in its implications for the critical treatment of historiographical problems and in the potential it offered for systematic inquiry into the past. The application of Marxist socioeconomic theory to China's past instigated changes in Chinese historiography not dissimilar to the impact of Marx's formulations on the development of the modern sociological

approach to history in the West. In both cases, the result was to expand consciousness of the forces that went into the making of history, which led to the fundamental reformulation of historical problems and stimulated efforts to devise new methodologies and concepts to cope with a whole range of basic problems that had been at best of marginal concern in earlier historical thought.

From their new perspective, Chinese Marxist historians redefined the relative significance of historical phenomena and turned to the reexamination of historical sources to uncover data relevant to the understanding of the economic and social forces that had operated in Chinese history, to clarify the significance of the interaction between economic and social institutions and their implications for political and intellectual phenomena. Their assumption of a hierarchical relationship among historical phenomena (ranging from basic economic to cultural phenomena) engendered a critical attitude toward the treatment of facts and explanations in history. It is quite obvious in their interpretations of Chinese history (and in their theoretical statements) that they considered it insufficient to simply determine the accuracy of historical facts and to arrange them along a temporal and/or spatial dimension to get at the truth of history; it was also necessary, they believed, to take into account the relative significance of different facts relevant to the explanation of an historical phenomenon. They introduced into Chinese historiography, in effect, the fundamental sensitivity of the Marxist theory of history to the ideological determinants of the choice of facts and, therefore, explanations in history. It is not difficult to argue, as I shall do in the analysis of their works, that the Marxist historians themselves cavalierly ignored data that did not fit in with their preconceptions, and were so infatuated with their new explanations as to dismiss the need to utilize different kinds of data and conceptions to deal with different kinds of historical problems. Such defects in their treatment of history were partially consequences of ambiguities within Marxist theory, and partially due to the interference of extrahistoriographical considerations with their use of history; but these defects only point to ways in which Marxist historical

theory and its application require qualification, they do not negate its seminal insights into problems of history or the potential for critical inquiry which is worked into its basic assumptions. With all its defects, the Marxist historians' awareness of the complexity of historical explanation was certainly a great deal more sophisticated than the naive positivism of contemporary academic historians who believed, in the words of Fu Ssu-nien, then president of the Institute of History and Philology of the newly founded Academia Sinica, that it was sufficient "to put materials in order for facts to become naturally evident"; Fu, in fact, denied the process of interpretation a place in history, the scope of which he limited to textual criticism and collation.14

On the positive side, the materialist conception of history offered a methodology for the writing of universal histories (t'ung-shih ), which Chinese intellectuals, beginning with Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Chang Ping-lin around the turn of the century, had deemed essential to the creation of a "new history." The universal history was, of course, not a new form in Chinese historiography, but its modern advocates demanded the devising of causal explanations to reveal historical processes which differentiated their idea of universal history from the stringing together of historical facts that had characterized, they believed, traditional universal histories.15 They themselves were unable, however, to offer a viable methodology for writing universal histories mainly because their approach to the problem was overly inductive. Their plans assigned priority to the accumulation of monographic studies which would ultimately provide the building blocks for universal history.16 What they failed to provide was a well-defined starting point and a coherent principle of organization that could guide investigation and

Fu Ssu-nien, "Li-shih yu-yan yen-chiu suo kung-tso chih chih-ch'u" (The Direction of the Work of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica), October 1928, pp. 8, 9.

For a discussion of the early expressions of interest and ideas on t'ung-shih , see Chin Yu-fu, Chung-kuo shih-hsueh shih (History of Chinese Historiography) (Taiwan reprint of 1944 ed., Taipei, 1968), pp. 296326.

See the supplementary volume in Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Chung-kuo li-shih yen chiu fa (Method of Researching Chinese History), (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chu ed., 1968). Chin also gives Chang Ping-lin's plan for universal history.

explanation. Again, the Marxist view of hierarchy among historical phenomena helped resolve the problem: Historical materialism pointed to socioeconomic phenomena as the starting point of analysis and revealed in social-economic processes the links which joined together vast stretches of history, thereby providing a foundation upon which to build universal history. Chinese historians did indeed produce a number of important universal histories in the thirties. It is difficult at this point to tell the extent to which Marxist methodology can claim credit for the achievement, for the writers of universal histories included non-Marxists as well. But Marxist historians were prominent among the authors of the most impressive universal histories, and almost all important Marxist work took this form. These works served to organize the multifarious data of Chinese history into coherent and systematic analyses and opened new channels of inquiry into China's past.

The second methodological problem relevant to the analysis of Marxist historiography in this study concerns the relationship between history and politics in Marxist historiography. The basic political motivation underlying historical materialism has led many to reject its validity as a theory of history. There are, of course, other reasons for objection to historical materialism, especially among historians. The most important of these is the professional historians' disdain for generalizing approaches to history. It should be obvious from my preliminary remarks here that only historians who agree with E. H. Carr's statement that "the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both,"17 would be willing to consider the value of Marxist historiography. This problem, which involves definition of the tasks of history, is not peculiar to historians' reactions to historical materialism but rises out of attitudes on the general question of the relationship between history and the other social sciences. It need not be dwelt on, therefore, except to note that such objection has become less tenable as the social scientific approach to history has demonstrated its usefulness in explaining the dynamics of historical change.

E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 84.

The more telling criticisms leveled against the materialist conception of history have focused on the explicitly political intention which guides its treatment of history. Marxists, of course, have never denied that political assumptions, theirs or other historians', shape historical interpretation. It does not follow, however, that the materialist conception of history posits a uniform relationship between politics and history. Marxist historiography has, on the one hand, treated history simply as an extension of politics, the passive legitimizer of a predetermined notion of political change, or even of a short-term political policy. This has been the case especially when history has been subjected to the needs of political movements or Communist regimes in power. In these cases, historical interpretation has also tended to stress the teleological conclusions and the deterministic view of history which Marx himself imposed on his historical theory to support his political assumptions.18 On the other hand, however, history is equally important in historical materialism as the source of a critical perspective on the present and as an autonomous field of forces in the interaction of which the revolutionary discovers the guide to correct political action. In this case, the Marxist political outlook has demanded that historical analysis, armed with critical judgment of the present, dig beneath the surface phenomena of history to grasp its dynamics. The political motivation is central in either case, but it is nevertheless important whether the Marxist historian, starting from the critique of existing society, turns to the examination of its contradictions to demonstrate its inevitable demise or transformation, or whether the same historian seeks to prove the legitimacy of the political goals of particular movements or regimes; in the one case, the result is the critical comprehension of history, while in the other, it leads to the molding of history in the image of political goals and assumptions. As these questions are of crucial significance both in the evaluation of Marxist historical theory and its applications in China, they will be examined in detail in Chapter 7 within the context of Marxist historiography in the thirties, which provides insights into the

K. Marx, Letter to J. Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852), for his description of his theoretical contributions. Selected Works of K. Marx and F. Engels, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 528.

effects of Marxist political assumptions on the interpretation of history. Suffice it to note here that this study presupposes a more complex relationship between politics and history in Marxist historiography than has been assumed in previous studies, which have concentrated on past-1949 historiography and therefore have judged the Marxist contribution to Chinese historiography by its manifestations under the Communist regime. How this choice has colored the evaluation of Chinese Marxist historiography is evident in the following statement from one of the most influential studies to date on Marxist historiography in China.19

Yet it was recognized that there was promise in the new methodology as well, for behind the egregious claptrap of Marxist ideology and language is evidence of an acceptance of new ideas, new techniques in the writing of history. It has been through Marxism-Leninism, in fact, that, sometimes in a blurred form to be sure, much of the new historical technique and methodology developed in the modern West came to China. Notwithstanding its cramped ideological boundaries, Marxism does in some directions border upon the modern social sciences, the fruits of which illicitly but undeniably penetrate into her confines.

The portrayal of Marxist historiography in this passage, which begrudgingly recognizes the Marxist contribution to Chinese history only to explain it away as incidental to Marxist theory, may be unusual in tone but is otherwise indicative of the attitude of many historians on this question.20 In evaluating this attitude, it behooves us to ask how much "modern social science" existed when Marx and Engels formulated their theory; it is also noteworthy that seminal figures in social science as well as prominent social scientists, and not just leftist ones, have acknowledged the debt of their disciplines to the challenge of Marx's ideas on historical change.21

A. Feuerwerker, and H. Kahn, "The Ideology of Scholarship: China's New Historiography," in History in Communist China, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969), p. 6.

Ibid., p. 1, footnote, states that the views expressed in this article (but not the form) represented the consensus of the participants in the conference on Chinese Communist historiography, held in Ditchley Manor, Oxford, September 612, 1964. The participants, it must be noted, included some of the most prominent Western historians of China.

See H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 4650, for the influence of Marx on Weber, and S. M. Lipset,Political Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1963). pp. xxxxi, for Marx's influence on American sociology. A comprehensive discussion of Marx's impact on sociology is provided by T. B. Bottomore in his introduction to Karl Marx; Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 2948.

The more immediate question here concerns the ideological affiliations of historical materialism which, though undeniably a component of Marxist historical theory, bear a more complex relationship to history than is suggested by statements such as the one quoted here. The political motivations of historical materialism, while they have invited abuse by its practitioners, have also been a source of the critical attitude which pervades Marxist historical theory. On the whole, however, studies of Marxist historiography have concentrated on the former to demonstrate the subjection of Marxist historiography to rigid political ends and to denigrate the Marxist contribution to history. In the case of China, the neglect of pre-1949 Marxist historiography has had two negative effects on the evaluation of the impact of historical materialism on Chinese history. First, it has obscured the contributions of historical materialism to Chinese historiography. The most original contributions of Marxist historians to Chinese historiography predated the establishment of the Marxist orthodoxy in historical studies after 1949. Marxist historians continued to make contributions to the study of Chinese history after 1949, but their task was now of a more pedestrian nature, involving the elaboration, refinement, and revision of questions that had been raised earlier. Second, concentration on post-1949 historiography has created the impression that Marxist historiography in China is significant chiefly for the political function it performs. Since 1949 an officially promoted view of history has narrowed the range of interpretations available to historians. By contrast, the study of Marxist historiography in the thirties, when history was free of official direction if not oppression, reveals considerable diversity in the understanding of the materialist conception of history and its application to Chinese history. While the political and ideological commitments of Marxist historians were crucial in shaping their analyses, the interplay between politics and history was a great deal more complex than after 1949, and so were the implications of politics for historical work.

The third, and final, problem to be addressed in this study concerns the evaluation of the appeal of the materialist conception of history to Chinese intellectuals and its consequences for twentieth-century thought. The significance of historical materialism in the evolution of the modern Chinese historical outlook was first pointed out by J. Levenson in his highly stimulating study of the problem of history in modern China.22 Levenson regarded Marxist historicism to have provided the means whereby Chinese intellectuals resolved the tension between "history and value" created by the Western intrusion into China. Marxist historicism, in his view, enabled Chinese to come to terms with the need to abandon the basic values of traditional culture by historicizing those values (thereby salvaging them as historical relics); at the same time, it alleviated the sense of inferiority before the West which this situation created by demonstrating the equally time-bound nature of modern Western values (now reduced to bourgeois values).

The interpretation offered here differs from Levenson's by stressing the social, revolutionary implications of the materialist conception of history. Although the problem Levenson identified was a crucial one, he wen. t too far in treating ideas qua ideas, abstracted from their historical context, which in turn reflected his conviction that Sino-Western cultural confrontation provided the ultimate datum of modern Chinese history. The function of historical materialism, however, was not simply, or most importantly, to alleviate the psychological-intellectual crisis created in China by the clash between Western and Chinese values. This clash was serious enough, but undue emphasis on values ends up disguising, whether or not so intended, the material roots and consequences of the confrontation between China and the West  the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society under the impact of Western capitalism. If the only function historical materialism served in China was the historicization of Chinese values, it is difficult to see why Marxist historicism and not some other alternative was chosen to play the part.23 The materialist conception of history, it

J. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

For a discussion of this problem in the case of T'ao Hsi-sheng, see my "T'aoHsi-sheng: The Social Limits of Change," in C. Furth (ed.), The Limits of Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

must be remembered, is not merely a historicism but an explanation of the dynamics of historical change in terms of basic socioeconomic processes, in particular the historical changes instigated by the rise of the market economy. It is not coincidental that historical materialism proved to be appealing to Chinese under social conditions reminiscent of the conditions of European society which shaped Marx's own formulations on history, conditions of rapid change when the revolutionary transformation of society was daily becoming evident both in the breakdown of the old order and in the emergence of new social forces. An overriding concern with values and ideas was possibly the case with Chinese intellectuals in the first two decades of this century, especially the period of the New Culture Movement around 1920; it is misleading to take these two decades as the paradigm for the whole of modern Chinese history. As the revolutionization of Chinese society progressed, it created shifting constellations of internal and external problems of which the intellectual confrontation between China and the West was only one aspect. By the mid-twenties, when Chinese politics took a social revolutionary course, social problems had acquired prominence in Chinese consciousness. Marxist historiography, in fact, grew directly out of efforts to explain the social dimensions of contemporary revolutionary change; it also expressed in the realm of history the new, revolutionary paradigm of change. It is noteworthy that Marxist historians in the thirties paid relatively little attention to traditional thought and culture in their work  except, of course, to the extent that it affected their social analyses.24 Their primary concern was to understand the past so as to carry out the task of revolution in the present.

Exceptions to this statement are to be found in the studies, of Chinese thought and thinkers by T'ao Hsi-sheng, Kuo Mo-jo, and Li Chi, which are cited in the bibliography. These studies, however, do not represent the basic concerns of their authors but were outgrowths of their work on social history.

Excerpted from Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937 by Arif Dirlik Copyright 1989 by Arif Dirlik. Excerpted by permission.
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