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China Chapter 1. Historical Setting
THE HISTORY OF CHINA, as documented in ancient writings, dates
back some 3,300 years. Modern archaeological studies provide
evidence of still more ancient origins in a culture that flourished
between 2500 and 2000 B.C. in what is now central China and the
lower Huang He (Yellow River) Valley of north China. Centuries of
migration, amalgamation, and development brought about a
distinctive system of writing, philosophy, art, and political
organization that came to be recognizable as Chinese civilization.
What makes the civilization unique in world history is its
continuity through over 4,000 years to the present century.
The Chinese have developed a strong sense of their real and
mythological origins and have kept voluminous records since very
early times. It is largely as a result of these records that
knowledge concerning the ancient past, not only of China but also
of its neighbors, has survived.
Chinese history, until the twentieth century, was written
mostly by members of the ruling scholar-official class and was
meant to provide the ruler with precedents to guide or justify his
policies. These accounts focused on dynastic politics and colorful
court histories and included developments among the commoners only
as backdrops. The historians described a Chinese political pattern
of dynasties, one following another in a cycle of ascent,
achievement, decay, and rebirth under a new family.
Of the consistent traits identified by independent historians,
a salient one has been the capacity of the Chinese to absorb the
people of surrounding areas into their own civilization. Their
success can be attributed to the superiority of their ideographic
written language, their technology, and their political
institutions; the refinement of their artistic and intellectual
creativity; and the sheer weight of their numbers. The process of
assimilation continued over the centuries through conquest and
colonization until what is now known as China Proper was brought
under unified rule. The Chinese also left an enduring mark on
people beyond their borders, especially the Koreans, Japanese, and
Vietnamese.
Another recurrent historical theme has been the unceasing
struggle of the sedentary Chinese against the threat posed to their
safety and way of life by non-Chinese peoples on the margins of
their territory in the north, northeast, and northwest. In the
thirteenth century, the Mongols from the northern steppes became
the first alien people to conquer all China. Although not as
culturally developed as the Chinese, they left some imprint on
Chinese civilization while heightening Chinese perceptions of
threat from the north. China came under alien rule for the second
time in the mid-seventeenth century; the conquerors--the Manchus--
came again from the north and northeast.
For centuries virtually all the foreigners that Chinese rulers
saw came from the less developed societies along their land
borders. This circumstance conditioned the Chinese view of the
outside world. The Chinese saw their domain as the self-sufficient
center of the universe and derived from this image the traditional
(and still used) Chinese name for their country--Zhongguo,
literally, Middle Kingdom or Central Nation. China saw itself
surrounded on all sides by so-called barbarian peoples whose
cultures were demonstrably inferior by Chinese standards. This
China-centered ("sinocentric") view of the world was still
undisturbed in the nineteenth century, at the time of the first
serious confrontation with the West. China had taken it for granted
that its relations with Europeans would be conducted according to
the tributary system that had evolved over the centuries between
the emperor and representatives of the lesser states on China's
borders as well as between the emperor and some earlier European
visitors. But by the mid-nineteenth century, humiliated militarily
by superior Western weaponry and technology and faced with imminent
territorial dismemberment, China began to reassess its position
with respect to Western civilization. By 1911 the two-millennia-old
dynastic system of imperial government was brought down by its
inability to make this adjustment successfully.
Because of its length and complexity, the history of the Middle
Kingdom lends itself to varied interpretation. After the communist
takeover in 1949, historians in mainland China wrote their own
version of the past--a history of China built on a Marxist model of
progression from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism,
capitalism, and finally socialism. The events of history came to be
presented as a function of the class struggle. Historiography
became subordinated to proletarian politics fashioned and directed
by the Chinese Communist Party. A series of thought-reform and
antirightist campaigns were directed against intellectuals in the
arts, sciences, and academic community. The Cultural Revolution
(1966-76) further altered the objectivity of historians. In the
years after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, however, interest grew
within the party, and outside it as well, in restoring the
integrity of historical inquiry. This trend was consistent with the
party's commitment to "seeking truth from facts." As a result,
historians and social scientists raised probing questions
concerning the state of historiography in China. Their
investigations included not only historical study of traditional
China but penetrating inquiries into modern Chinese history and the
history of the Chinese Communist Party.
In post-Mao China, the discipline of historiography has not
been separated from politics, although a much greater range of
historical topics has been discussed. Figures from Confucius--who
was bitterly excoriated for his "feudal" outlook by Cultural
Revolution-era historians--to Mao himself have been evaluated with
increasing flexibility. Among the criticisms made by Chinese social
scientists is that Maoist-era historiography distorted Marxist and
Leninist interpretations. This meant that considerable revision of
historical texts was in order in the 1980s, although no substantive
change away from the conventional Marxist approach was likely.
Historical institutes were restored within the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, and a growing corps of trained historians, in
institutes and academia alike, returned to their work with the
blessing of the Chinese Communist Party. This in itself was a
potentially significant development.
Data as of July 1987
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