IN AND OUT OF THE WEST: ON THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF CHINESE HISTORICAL THEORY

In ancient China, dissatisfaction with the official compilation of histories gave rise, in time, to reflections on what makes a good historian, as well as on such issues as the factuality and objectivity of history‐writing, the relationship between rhetoric and reality, and the value of historians’ subjectivity. From these reflections arose a unique set of historiographical concepts. With the coming of modern times, the urgent task of building a nation‐state forced Chinese historians to borrow heavily from Western historical theories in their effort to construct a new history compatible with modernity. A tension thus arose between Western theory and Chinese history. The newly founded People's Republic embraced the materialist conception of history as the authoritative guideline for historical studies, which increased the tension. The decline of the materialist conception of history in the period since China's reform and opening up in the late 1970s and, with this development, the increasing plurality of theories, have not exactly lessened Chinese historians’ keenly felt anxiety when they confront Western theories. For Chinese historians, the current state of affairs with respect to theory is not exactly an extension of Western theories, nor is it a regression to the particularity of Chinese history completely outside the Western compass. Rather, a certain hybridity with respect to theory provides to Chinese historians a way to move both in and out of the West, as well as an opportunity for them to make their own contributions to Western history on the basis of borrowed Western theories.