Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has witnessed a surge in world history research, accompanied by a shift in approach.Footnote 1 Old approaches to ‘world history’ (shijie shi) have been replaced by what historians refer to as an ‘integrated world history’ (shijie zhengti shi), a ‘new world history’ (xin shijie shi), a ‘global view on history’ (quanqiu shiguan), ‘global history’ (quanqiu shi), or ‘history of globalization’ (quanqiuhua shi). At first glance, this quantitative increase, qualitative change, and even the use of similar labels suggests a convergence of Chinese and Western historical studies. What I will demonstrate in this article, however, is that, below the surface of common terms and despite Chinese scholars’ interest in Western scholarship in the field, one can find a quite distinctive approach to world or global history in China – one that is marked by a discursive framework that includes both Chinese traditions of world history writing and alliances with current political discourse. Within this particular framework, the ‘global’ in China's global history is not the substance of the historical process but rather the context for the development of nation-states as the uncontested basic historical unit.
This preoccupation with the nation-state is closely related to a nationalism whose origins lie in the nineteenth century and China's experience of national humiliation. Chinese intellectuals searched – and are still searching – for a strategy that would make China ‘strong and powerful’ (fuqiang) and secure it a place in the world.Footnote 2 The writing of history was not exempt from these nationalist concerns, and political projects of various kinds heavily relied on the macro models of progress that history was able to provide. These projects were not uncontested, and (world) history was affected, to varying degrees, by domestic power struggles and ideological debates that unfolded along the central themes of China versus the West, tradition versus modernity, and socialism versus capitalism. For world history, the problem of China's relation to the outside world and the role of the West in China's search for national greatness – aggressor to be fought, model to learn from, repository of experience one can selectively adopt – were particularly important. The last violent battle over these issues took place in the politically turbulent late 1980s, when the TV documentary Heshang (‘River Elegy’) sparked extensive discussions over the essence of Chinese and Western history and the prospects of China's reform policy, against the backdrop of a dichotomized view of essentialized cultural spheres.Footnote 3
While the Heshang debate has been portrayed as a confrontation between official and anti-official or counter discourse (and thus a contest between government and intellectuals),Footnote 4 today's situation is different. The current government supports the ‘global’ turn described above, and no longer imposes rigid ideological restrictions on global history debates. Even when it comes to the still sensitive problem of socialism's place in world history, the ‘voice’ of the Party is only one among many. State leaders subscribe to the notion of a guiding or didactic function of history that includes the history of foreign countries. In this perspective, individual examples of the history of foreign countries are believed to provide ‘lessons’ for China to learn from, and the master narrative of the global historical process is thought to display the ‘laws’ of history in a long-term perspective.
More generally, old concepts of a state–intellectuals divide are insufficient for understanding the dynamics of knowledge production in contemporary China. A number of actors and institutions are involved – the Party state, intellectuals, the general public, the market – none of them in a position of ultimate control and none homogeneous in terms of intellectual or political outlook. The experts of world history, and intellectuals in general, can take different and also multiple roles, ranging from ideological spokespersons or advisors to the state, through public intellectuals to pure scholars. They must not only define their role vis-à-vis the state but also negotiate between a wide range of choices: academic concerns, the state, and the market; national and international academic discourses and communities;Footnote 5 theoretical and empirical work; and so forth.Footnote 6 More concretely, different concepts or master narratives of world history are not necessarily distributed along a line that separates state and intellectuals, but are shared by the political leadership and academic experts. Moreover, in today's pluralized China, the government may foster the dissemination of a certain concept, but it has no control over its reception in academic or popular media.
In this article, I cannot look at all segments of world history writing produced by the intersections of these various parameters. My focus will be on the conceptual level and on the relation between dominant concepts of world history and the wider political discourse.Footnote 7 In my view, three concepts are central, and these three concepts also provide the structure of my argument: integration/interaction as a response to China's ‘open door’ policy and in connection with discourse on ‘globalization’; ‘modernization’ in its relation to the Four Modernizations of state ideology; and the ‘rise of the great powers’ as the counterpart to discussions of ‘China's rise’. As will become clear over the course of the analysis, these three concepts pose particular normative and ideological problems, namely the problem of Eurocentrism and the question of the place of socialism in world history. Chinese scholars’ responses to these two problems will be examined in the remaining two parts of the article. In the conclusion, I discuss my findings in the light of recent debates on Eurocentrism and the inclusion of non-Western perspectives in the scholarship of world/global history.
China's global integration and the ‘global view on history’
The first innovation of China's world history research in recent years is a basic reconceptualization along the lines of an ‘integrated’ world or a more ‘global’ perspective. This trend has to be understood in relation to two underlying innovations: first, the need – shared by all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences – for a fundamental reorientation after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Here the concept of an ‘integrated’ world history (shijie zhengti shi) developed by Wu Yujin since the late 1970s was the breakthrough towards a less dogmatic approach to world history and also a new view of world history as a vertically and horizontally integrated process.Footnote 8 The second innovation is the occurrence of new global realities, and the discourse of the ‘global’ that became translated into discussions of a ‘global view on history’ (quanqiu shiguan, the most frequent term), ‘global history’ (quanqiu shi), and ‘history of globalization’ (quanqiuhua shi) in the early 2000s.Footnote 9 The implications of both innovations become most evident in comparison to the pre-1976 trends and problems of world history writing in China.
World history research has a tradition in China that reaches back into the mid nineteenth century and China's violent encounter with the West.Footnote 10 Comprehensive accounts of this formative phase of Chinese world history writing are still lacking. What is clear, however, is the close relation between an intellectual interest in the history of the world beyond China's borders and the practical need to deal with this world politically and militarily. Scholars cum reformers called for and contributed to the broadening of spatial horizons and a mapping of the countries of the world according to their geographical and historical dimensions. History, indeed, was seen as an important element in the knowledge of the world, owing to the ‘lessons’ and guidance it could provide for the present – a concept that was based on the idea of the repeatability of history. This didactic or exemplary approach to history had marked the long tradition of historiography in China and was expressed in the topos of ‘taking history as a mirror’ (yi shi wei jing/jian).Footnote 11 Another, closely related, feature was a cyclical concept of the rise and decline of states, which was transferred from traditional concepts of dynastic history to the history of foreign countries. Both principles are well expressed in a historical outline written in 1906 by Kang Youwei (1858–1927), one of the most influential thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century. In his ‘Examination of the evolution of Germany’ (Deyizhi yange kao), Kang claimed:
The reasons for the rise and fall, the victory and defeat of Germany are as manifold as the trees in a forest. To explore the past in order to understand the present, to research the causes in order to grasp the effects and thus obtain a mirror for the changes in our own country – how could one not take such a task seriously.Footnote 12
World history witnessed a tremendous surge after China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, which Chinese intellectuals saw as the ultimate proof for China's weak position in a world of belligerent nation-states.Footnote 13 The approach to world history remained exemplary, leading scholars to examine the history of foreign countries for models of rise or warning examples of decline to be taken into consideration when drafting a political strategy for China.Footnote 14 In particular, the ‘histories of perishing states’ (wangguo shi) became a popular genre of world history writing, reflecting fears of an imminent extinction of China.Footnote 15 Typical titles for these wangguo shi were ‘History of the perishing of Vietnam’ (Yuenan wangguo shi), ‘History of the perishing of Korea’ (Chaoxian wangguo shi), or ‘Reasons for the perishing of Korea’ (Chaoxian miewang zhi yuanyin).Footnote 16 As we will see below, the strong political concern, the exemplary approach, and the focus on nation-states as the basic units of the historical process that marked publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have never fully disappeared from China's world history writing.
In the early twentieth century, Chinese historiography underwent huge changes and was transformed into a modern academic discipline, a process that was strongly influenced by Western concepts of history-writing.Footnote 17 Even though world history was not at the focus of this process, it was recognized as a historical sub-discipline in which individual, mostly foreign-trained scholars made important contributions. It also became part of a tripartite (Chinese, Asian, Western) history curriculum at middle schools and universities and thus the subject of new textbooks.Footnote 18 Both trends forced scholars to take a more comprehensive approach and develop concepts beyond the history of individual nation-states. At the same time, because of the influence of Eurocentric Western works, this very need for integration (and in particular the assessment of the relation between Chinese and world history) posed and continues to pose the biggest conceptual problem to world history writing in China.Footnote 19
After 1949, world history in mainland China basically followed the Soviet concept and was marked by the following features: Marxism–Leninism as a theoretical guideline, class struggle as the driving force of history, and a unilinear development of the world along Stalin's five modes of production.Footnote 20 World history retained its function of giving guidance; in a Marxist framework, however, emphasis was no longer on the ‘lessons’ to be drawn from individual historical examples but rather on the ‘laws’ of the overall historical development provided by the master narrative of universal social progress.Footnote 21 More specifically, this new master narrative depicted the history of the modern world as a history of the rise (and decline) of capitalism since the English revolution of 1640, and the rise of socialism since Russia's October Revolution in 1917. Major turning points in world history were thus attributed to Europe and the Soviet Union respectively, while the rest of the world was peripheralized. In their concrete research, however, Chinese world historians tended to focus on the histories of individual countries and rarely tried to produce integrated accounts of world history. The problem of Eurocentrism remained unresolved.
Reorientation began in 1978 with a repudiation of the distortions and malpractices that came to be associated with the ‘Gang of Four’ and their highly politicized and utilitarian approach to history.Footnote 22 Disciplinary reconstruction in the field of world history started with the founding of research institutes and academic journals.Footnote 23 Since 1978, the number of books and journal articles published in the field of world history has steadily increased.Footnote 24 In terms of theoretical reorientations, Wu Yujin (1913–93), a world historian at Wuhan University and one of the leading world historians of the older generation,Footnote 25 was the pioneer of a concept that is still widely accepted by scholars in the field today, namely the idea of world history as an ‘integrated history’ (zhengti shi): ‘World history is an important discipline within historiography. Its content is the systematic exploration and relation of the process of the development of human history from primitive, isolated, and dispersed groups of people to a closely connected integrated whole (zhengti)’.Footnote 26
The details and groundbreaking aspects of Wu Yujin's concept of an ‘integrated history’ have been discussed by others.Footnote 27 Wu remained loyal to a Marxist theoretical basis but markedly departed from the dogmatic or even utilitarian approaches of earlier periods. Basic elements of Wu's ‘integrated history’ are the notion of vertical (progress over time) and horizontal (connections and interactions across space) dimensions to the global historical process; the call for a true integration of national histories into a master narrative of world history; and criticism of Eurocentric approaches. Finally, the emphasis on integration led Wu and many other world historians to reconsider earlier periodizations. They came to accept the year 1500, and in particular the discoveries of European powers, as the starting point of world history in its literal sense: a truly interconnected world.Footnote 28 In the vertical dimension, material progress is regarded as the driving force of the historical process.
Calls for inclusiveness and integration were reinforced in the early 2000s when terms such as ‘global history’, ‘global historical perspective’, and ‘history of globalization’ were introduced into the debate. Even though Chinese authors usually refer to earlier Western theorists of world history, in particular Geoffrey Barraclough, when they try to explain the roots of this conceptual turn,Footnote 29 the inflation of the ‘global’ in world history debates is probably more directly related to general discussions of ‘globalization’ and the ‘global’ as a ubiquitous experience and term in China's political, economic, social, and cultural life and discourse. Remarkably, the beginning of the twenty-first century – with China once more witnessing increasing interaction and interconnection with the outside world – has become another high tide of world history as a discipline that provides orientation in a new global environment.Footnote 30 As I will demonstrate, world history has entered the horizon of an educated elite, which is reflected in bookshop displays and, even more interestingly, in the state leadership's demand for expert knowledge in this particular historical discipline. However, the new category of the ‘global’ has not really changed the general directions of an ‘integrated’ world history as proposed by Wu Yujin. Chinese world historians generally agree on the need for inclusiveness and integration as the horizontal dimension and material progress as its vertical thread. Even though they might identify different approaches to world history,Footnote 31 a closer look reveals that these potential schools are closely related and not mutually exclusive.
At the same time, however, one can discover a certain discrepancy between the work of a few pioneers and their calls for a more ‘integrated’ or ‘global’ conceptualization of world history on the one hand and the continuing disciplinary compartmentalization of world history into the history of foreign countries (French history, German history, and so forth) on the other.Footnote 32 There also seems to be a certain lack of interest in empirical research on interaction and exchange.Footnote 33 As we will see in the next two sections, this problem is not caused by a lack of will but by a fundamental contradiction inherent in Chinese concepts of world history, namely the fact that even the most ardent proponents of an integrated history continue to see individual nations as the basic historical unit. Seen from their perspective, the ‘global’ is indeed crucial, but it is viewed as a context of national developments rather than the substance of the global historical process.
The Four Modernizations and ‘modernization’ as the ‘main thread’ of modern world history
If the theme of ‘integration’ prepared the ground for a fundamental reconceptualization of world history in Reform China, ‘modernization’ is the most influential concept when it comes to the specification of the driving force of the historical process.Footnote 34 Needless to say, in a political environment of the Four Modernizations as state ideology, a discussion of Chinese ‘modernization’ research has to go beyond purely academic statements and highlight their relation to the ideological framework that has been constructed by the state leadership.
The term ‘modernization’ has a long history in China. It first occurred in the 1920s and started to be used systematically from the early 1930s. Interestingly, from the moment of its introduction until now, the term ‘modernization’ has implied the need for China to overcome its backwardness and to catch up with advanced Western societies. Another feature that was already evident in the 1930s was the distinction between different paths or models of modernization – modernization based on Chinese or Western culture, a capitalist or socialist system – and the debate as to which path China should take.Footnote 35
In socialist China, ‘modernization’ became a key term in political debates in the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping announced the Four Modernizations as state policy.Footnote 36 As the core term of political reorientation in the late 1970s and 1980s, their basic function was to replace revolution, class struggle, and political mobilization as the perceived driving forces of the historical progress. The Four Modernizations were closely related to a large range of political and ideological adaptations, including a new emphasis on economic progress, the rehabilitation of science and technology (and thus also intellectuals) as the source of progress, the shift of focus from production relations to productive forces in the interpretation of Marxism, and the professionalization of economics.Footnote 37 While all this resulted in a remarkable liberalization of Chinese society in general, and academia in particular, Marxism–Leninism and the socialist system remain the overall framework of state ideology in China. It is true that socialist theory has constantly been adapted to the new realities of Reform China.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, the fundamental contradiction between ‘socialist’ theory and an economic practice that resembles what is known as ‘capitalism’ has not been convincingly solved and leaves an imprint on concepts of world history.
Reorientations in (world) history followed the general ideological turn initiated in the late 1970s. The problem of the driving force of the historical process was at the core of discussions among historians. Class struggle was replaced by a variety of concepts, all of which pointed to economic development as the source of progress (for example, productive forces, the production struggle, science and technology).Footnote 39 In the field of world history, Luo Rongqu (1927–96), Professor of History at Beijing University, became the pioneer of modernization research. In his 1984 article ‘Some problems concerning a breakthrough for world history research’, Luo suggested for the first time ‘modernization’ as a new paradigm for research in the field of world history.Footnote 40 In 1986, he launched a major project, ‘Research on the global modernization process’ (shijie xiandaihua jincheng yanjiu), which was supported by the government's Seventh Five-Year Plan for the social sciences. The project was transformed into a research centre and the results of the research were published in a series of scholarly texts.Footnote 41
Considering the close relation to state ideology, research on modernization in China has to be understood on China's own terms. Luo Rongqu and others have, of course, studied the relevant Western works. At the same time, however, Luo clearly stated the relation between this new field of study and the Four Modernizations as Chinese state policy.Footnote 42 He explicitly rejected Western theories that take the West as the model of modernization, and instead developed a Marxist modernization theory.Footnote 43 Luo's widely accepted definition of ‘modernization’ is quite general. He referred to modernization as a global transformation process, beginning in the late eighteenth century, from an agrarian to an industrial society and, in a narrow sense, the accelerated process of backward societies trying to catch up with advanced ones. This process involves change in all fields of society.Footnote 44 Not all scholars make the effort to define the term. ‘Modernization’ has, in fact, become an equivalent to economic progress based on technological developments. Owing to its support by the state, the term is considered ideologically neutral and therefore – as we shall see below – allows for a certain vagueness when it comes to issues that are still politically sensitive, such as the relationship between modernization and capitalism.Footnote 45
More recently, Qian Chengdan, an expert in British history and head of the Department of World History at Beijing University, has become the most ardent proponent of interpreting the history of the modern world as a history of modernization.Footnote 46 He first promoted this view in 2001, in an article titled ‘Modernization is the main thread of modern world history (Shijie jin xiandai shi de zhuxian shi xiandaihua)’, where he also gave an outline of the global process of modernization since 1500.Footnote 47 Referring to Wu Yujin's concept of world history as a process ‘from dispersal to integration’ (cong fensa dao zhengti), Qian speaks of a ‘new world history’ (xin shijie shi) that ‘explores the integrated development of human history from the perspective of the entire globe’.Footnote 48 Like many other Chinese world historians, Qian particularly emphasizes the practical value of world history research for China: ‘In the process of modernization, China has to learn from the experience and lessons of other nations, including forerunners and latecomers. Therefore it must understand the modern history of other countries’.Footnote 49
The introduction of modernization research, together with cultural and social history, became the most important innovation in Chinese historiography since the mid 1980s.Footnote 50 In the field of world history, this led to a extensive array of publications, most of which take the nation-state – and sometimes also regions – as the basic unit of research. Typical titles read: ‘The modernization of the political economy and society of Great Britain’ (Qian Chengdan), ‘Japan: the path to modernization’ (Jin Mingshan, Xu Ping), ‘The American modernization path’ (Li Qingyu et al.), ‘Research on the Latin American development model’ (Jiang Shixue), ‘History of the take-off of the four little tigers’ (Gu Yuanyang), ‘Why was Korea successful?’ (Yi Baoyun), ‘Islam and the modernization process of Central Asia’ (Peng Shuzhi).Footnote 51
Furthermore, what we can see from this list of titles is a certain lack of interest in the horizontal dimension of world history – the interaction between countries – and a preference for implicitly or explicitly comparative approaches. This leads to the more abstract discussion of ‘paths’ (daolu) and ‘models’ (moshi) of modernization, and the creation of typologies.Footnote 52 Authors distinguish between socialist, capitalist, and ‘mixed’ (hunhe) modernization; endogenous and exogenous modernization; modernization from above, from below, and a combination of the two; reform, revolution, and a (German) type of ‘uneven political modernization’; early and late modernization, with different roles played by the market and the state; cases of interrupted modernization, and so forth.Footnote 53 In the next section, we will see how these more abstract academic models were drawn into a new master narrative that was concrete enough to transcend the narrow confines of academia and fascinate a broad audience.
‘China's rise’ and the ‘rise of the great powers’
In 2003, world history started to attract the attention of the Chinese general public when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) invited two of China's leading world historians, Qian Chengdan and Qi Shirong, world historian at the Capital Normal University, to give a lecture at a Politburo study session, on the topic ‘A historical exploration of the development of the major world powers since the fifteenth century’. The two historians were given ninety minutes to elaborate on the histories of Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia/the Soviet Union, and the United States.Footnote 54 The lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session of twenty minutes, and by a speech from the CCP General Secretary and President of China, Hu Jintao. This remarkable event was reported in the news and became the starting point of a new interest in the history of the great powers – an interest that was shared by the state leadership, academics, and the general public. In a similar manner to the close relation between the academic paradigm of modernization and the state policy of the Four Modernizations, the debate on the ‘rise of the great powers’ was closely related to a key term that entered China's political discourse in 2003: the ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi) or simply ‘rise’ of China.Footnote 55
We do not know the contents of the two world historians’ lecture, but in an interview about the event Qian Chengdan once more stressed that, for China, the purpose of dealing with world history was to draw lessons from the modernization processes of other countries.Footnote 56 Likewise, in his speech, Hu Jintao emphasized the didactic function of (world) history and in particular the guidance it can give for contemporary politics, in terms of both historical ‘laws’ and the ‘lessons’ to be drawn from exemplary cases of history:
We must pay more attention to historical knowledge and we must learn to better understand and grasp the laws of historical development and social progress and the general developmental trends of our time, based on the successes and failures as well as the experiences and lessons of Chinese and foreign history. This will help us to improve our skills in managing state affairs.Footnote 57
Reports on the Politburo session caused a boom in academic and popular publications on the ‘rise of the great powers’. In 2005, a volume on The historical evolution of the nine world powers since the fifteenth century, edited by Qi Shirong, was published.Footnote 58 Typical chapter titles are ‘Great Britain's hegemony over the world and its return to Europe’, ‘Germany's unification in the Second Reich and the fall of the Third Reich’, and ‘The rapid rise of the Japanese empire and its sudden decline’. Obviously, the concept of a cyclical history of rising and declining states, combined with an exemplary approach, was reintroduced into the debate of world history. The difference from the situation around 1900, however, was that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, China had reason to compare itself with the ‘rising’ rather than the ‘perishing’ states of world history.Footnote 59
The popularity of the topic further increased with the broadcast, in autumn 2006, of a twelve-part TV documentary on The rise of the great powers (Daguo jueqi). The series was co-produced by China Central Television (CCTV) and Beijing University, with Ren Xuean as the director and Qian Chengdan as the leading academic advisor of the series.Footnote 60 The idea of producing the series seems to have originated in radio news about the Politburo session, which Ren Xuean said he could not but take as a ‘call of history’.Footnote 61 Production started in early 2004; the film script, based on the research of world historians from Beijing University, was finished by the end of 2004 and approved by the CCTV managers in April 2005. In autumn 2005, after the script had been completed, seven camera teams were sent to nine countries to conduct interviews with experts on the history of those respective countries. The final product was broadcast in autumn 2006, with each instalment lasting 45 minutes. Due to its success, the series was repeated three times.Footnote 62 By summer 2007, 400,000 authorized DVDs had been sold; innumerable copies of six or seven pirated masters were circulating.Footnote 63 The series triggered even more publications and also a broad debate on the ‘rise of the great powers’, which was conducted in academic journals and on the internet. The rise of the great powers was clearly an extremely significant event in the intellectual life of China and demonstrated a shared interest of the political leadership, scholars, and the general public alike in a quite particular type of world history writing.
What were the basic features of the narrative of The rise of the great powers? Ren Xuean seems to have based his film on the concept of world history as a drama of competing world powers:
Since the fifteenth century, the rise and fall of the great powers has no longer been a story (gushi) that develops by itself on an isolated stage. The direction of the plot (juqing) on the great world stage (shijie da wutai) has been influenced by mutual attention, fusion, and conflict on a global scale. Over the course of five hundred years, the nine world powers Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and America have successively assumed the leading role (zhujiao) in different ages and created their own glory.Footnote 64
Here, the ‘global’ only partly refers to global interactions (‘mutual attention, fusion, and conflict’). Primarily, and throughout the series, it is the mere context – the ‘stage’ – of a power struggle between competing nation-states as actors in the global historical drama. The ‘stage’ metaphor runs through the series, each part of which is dedicated to a different world power and to its rise in a particular global historical context.Footnote 65 More specifically, the series’ concept of world history is marked by two major elements.Footnote 66 Politically, a realist notion prevails, with nation-states as the basic unit of the historical process and the accumulation of wealth and power as the goals of state policy. The great powers are ruled by enlightened elites (individuals or groups) who make strategic decisions in important moments of world history. Success on the world stage depends on a strategy that suits the particular situation of a country (in Chinese, its guoqing – another key term in China's political discourse).Footnote 67 At a very general level, the series suggests that reform is better than revolution.Footnote 68
The second major element is the economy as both the central field of competition and the major basis of great-power status. It is not particularly surprising that the series strongly reflects Qian Chengdan's concept of modern world history as a history of modernization, albeit without explicit reference to it. National unity, a strong state, and political stability appear as preconditions of economic success, but these factors are not integrated into a single concept of material progress. De facto, of course, through the chronological presentation of rising powers, the series depicts the process of the evolution of capitalism since about 1500. In this process, each great power follows a strategy that fits its guoqing and the opportunities of the time. Two major groups of countries are distinguished: the pioneers (Holland, England, the USA) and the ‘late-developing countries’ (houfa guojia). These late developers are Germany, Japan, and Russia, and they are also the potential models for China to learn from.Footnote 69
The popularity of the series can partly be explained as the result of the high technical and artistic quality of the production. More importantly, of course, people are attracted by the subject. The series provides a revised (but, in a Chinese context, not totally new) view of world history and a coherent narrative of concrete examples that substantiate this view. The narrative of rising (and declining) states derives its power from the persistent belief in rise and decline as the basic pattern of state affairs, the extensive use of interviews with foreign experts (which makes the film appear more ‘objective’), and the visuals, which create a sense of authenticity.Footnote 70
Fitting all the different cases of rising powers into the basic pattern of ‘realism plus economic success’ naturally poses problems. Contradictions between old and new historical narratives occur; the dark sides of the great powers – militarism and aggression – are omitted or played down; and the experts were not always happy with the ways in which the interviews were used in the final product.Footnote 71 Furthermore, a number of Chinese commentators on the series and participants in the general debate on the ‘rise of the great powers’ raised critical concerns. In particular, alternative views on the criteria of historical ‘greatness’ (for example, sophisticated welfare systems and lack of corruption as in the case of Scandinavia) or the major ingredients of a rise to great-power status (such as democracy and freedom) were raised, demonstrating the plurality of norms that can be displayed in today's China.Footnote 72
One specific audience reaction to The rise of the great powers was the question of China's position in the narrative.Footnote 73 Given the exemplary approach that marks the various publications and also the series, China is naturally implied as the potential tenth ‘great power’.Footnote 74 Taking this a step further, the success of The rise of the great powers and audience requests encouraged Ren Xuean to launch a second major documentary project, a six-part ‘sister series’ on China's history since about 1840. The new series was titled The way to revival (Fuxing zhi lu) and was broadcast in October 2007, immediately before the opening of the CCP's Seventeenth Party Congress.Footnote 75 The function of the series as a legitimization for CCP rule is evident and this is probably also the reason why it follows the conventions of party historiography (in particular, an emphasis on the necessity of revolution) rather than the concepts underlying the Rise of the great powers discourse.Footnote 76
A less contradictory way of projecting China's future global role against the backdrop of world history is based on the world-power status of the ‘late-developing countries’ of the nineteenth century, and suggests that China is the current successor of this pattern. This link becomes more evident when we look at discussions outside the narrow field of world history, in particular at recent debate of the ‘Chinese model’ (Zhongguo moshi) or the ‘Beijing consensus’ (Beijing gongshi). The concepts behind the two terms are not completely identical but, broadly speaking, they both revolve around the idea that China, as a successful late developer, might become a model for today's developing countries throughout the world.Footnote 77
What we have seen so far is that concepts of world and global history in China underwent radical changes. On the one hand, the new concepts better fit the realities and ideological innovations of Reform China, in particular China's integration in the world, its quest for modernization, and the ‘rise’ of China in global affairs. On the other hand, the new master narrative of an integration of the world around 1500 through European powers and the evolution of modernity based on a capitalist world market poses obvious normative and ideological problems, to which I will attend in the remaining two parts of this article.
Good and bad Eurocentrism: the problem of global centres and particularist research perspectives
Part of the argument for new concepts of an ‘integrated’ world history or a ‘global view on history’ had been the promise of a more inclusive and less Eurocentric narrative of the history of the world.Footnote 78 However, given the even more fundamental role that Europe takes in the new narrative(s) as centre or as model, this promise, quite obviously, did not come true. How do Chinese scholars explain this contradiction?Footnote 79 In answering the question, we have to distinguish between two different manifestations of Eurocentrism.
The first manifestation is related to research perspectives – universalist or particularist – and, as such, is part of broader discussions on the internationalization of the humanities and social sciences in China. Most scholars in this debate would probably refute a pure universalism and acknowledge the plurality of approaches. However, they would also point to the particular problems of China, which might necessitate distinctive approaches to their solution.Footnote 80 Differing from this ‘mild’ particularism, Yu Pei, director of the Institute of World History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, not only insists on China's indigenous tradition of a ‘global view of history’ that can be traced back to the 1920s,Footnote 81 but also calls for a distinctive national perspective in world history research: ‘Without doubt global history has “the entire globe” as its contents. But there is no unified global history or a single understanding of these contents. The Chinese nation has a global history related to its own national historical memory. This is also true for other nations.’Footnote 82
A second potential manifestation of Eurocentrism is the identification of centres in a substantial sense: that is, the centres of the global historical process. Here, indeed, some scholars distinguish between the ‘subjective’ problem of research perspectives and the question of global centres as an ‘objective’, and thus irrefutable, historical fact. He Fangchuan (1939–2006), for instance, a renowned world historian from Beijing University, regarded modernity as a ‘period of capitalism that was created by the West’. Since this is, according to He, an ‘objective’ fact, it cannot be criticized as Eurocentric.Footnote 83 Remarkably, Chinese texts on the problem of how to conceptualize world history rarely refer to recent Western publications that revalue China's achievements in comparison to Europe. The books of Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong have been translated into Chinese; but the discussion of these particular works seems to have been rather separated from the general discussion of how to conceptualize world history.Footnote 84 Why is the problem of centres still not a real issue in recent Chinese world history discussions? As I have demonstrated throughout this article, a major concern for Chinese world historians is the lessons that can be drawn from foreign examples. The acknowledgement of the West as the centre and origin of modern history, and the wish to learn from it, are closely related.Footnote 85 The liberal Chinese intellectual Xu Youyu even goes so far as to refute Frank's ReOrient Footnote 86 based on the argument that learning from the West was and is the only way for China to overcome its own outdated traditions.Footnote 87
There are probably few scholars who would follow Xu Youyu's explicit praise of Eurocentrism. Still, the idea of the West as the centre of modern world history does not really worry them because they have found ways to counterbalance the centrality of the West. Taking a wider historical perspective and, in particular, referring to recent research on pre-modern history and also to the new global realities, they find alternative ways of securing a place for China in world history. Two strategies are employed. The first is to historicize the experience of a Western-dominated modernity by looking back into the past and forward into the future. Centres and hierarchies might be ‘objective’ historical facts but, from a long-term perspective, it is easy to see that they are shifting.Footnote 88 A quite specific and widely discussed concept that contributes to historicizing the role of the West is the idea of ‘cultural circles’ (wenhua quan). He Fangchuan, for instance, who confirmed the centrality and dominance of the West in the modern period, pointed to the existence of a multitude of centres, and also to reversed directions of influence before that time. More specifically, He referred to Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism as the three centres of what he called the ‘civilization of medieval time’ (zhonggu wenming).Footnote 89 Other authors produce different lists of cultural circles but all include Confucianism as a major factor.Footnote 90 This creates for China not a unique but nevertheless an important role in the pre-modern world. The same is true for the present or even future, where Chinese world historians can point to a more polycentric structure of the world and the increasing importance of the non-West, in particular Asia.Footnote 91
The second strategy is to pluralize modernity in a way similar to the notion of ‘multiple modernities’. Here, scholars acknowledge the West as the origin of the modern world, but, as has already been mentioned earlier in this article, they also stress the multitude of paths taken by different regions and nations in the process of modernization. Luo Rongqu, the ‘father’ of modernization research in China, spoke of a ‘multilineal character’ (duoxian xing) of modernization.Footnote 92
Whose modernity? Capitalism and socialism in modern world history
The second problem raised by the new concepts of world and global history occurs at the level of ideology and results from a contradictory state ideology that insists on the ‘socialist’ nature of the Chinese system while legitimizing economic structures that are reminiscent of capitalism. In the macro and long-term perspective of world history, this contradiction is particularly hard to ignore. If, at the conceptual level, the dominant system of modern world history is capitalism, and if the reality of globalization does not point to an imminent victory of socialism, Chinese world historians and ideologists face a major ideological problem. Wang Tai, a younger scholar of world history, poses it as follows:
To whom does the history of the modern world belong? How is the history of the modern world to be defined? What is its meaning, what is its central structure? Or, to put it differently, what, ultimately, is the name of the history of the modern world? Whose history is it? Chinese scholars of modern world history have different answers to this question, but, undoubtedly, they are all related to the development of capitalism.Footnote 93
The problem of the ‘name’ (capitalism or socialism) of modern world history becomes even more complex because Marx is widely quoted as an authority by those who support the concept of an integrated world history, based on the Discoveries since 1500 and the evolution of a capitalist world market.Footnote 94
A first, but rare, response to Wang Tai's question is a quite radical one, namely to reveal the contradictions caused by the new historical concepts and to call for an explicit discussion of the problem. This is the strategy of Yu Jinyao, a world historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who published a review article in 2000, titled ‘Modern world history is the history of the capitalist age’.Footnote 95 In another article, published in 2007, Yu tackled the problem in a more systematic way.Footnote 96 His major concern seems to be that scholars avoid the problem of capitalism and try to find neutral terms (history of integration, history of modernization, history of globalization) for a process that is capitalist in nature: ‘The occurrence, development, and evolution of capitalism is the major thread of global historical development since the sixteenth century’.Footnote 97 In Yu's view, it was the capitalist class who opened up a world market as the basis of an integrated world. It was also the capitalist class that was the driving force of industrialization as the basic element of modernization. And, finally, it is capitalism that defines globalization. In terms of periodization, Yu no longer sees a need to distinguish between a bourgeois (jindai) and a socialist (xiandai) phase of modernity because socialism has never gained a dominant role in world history. Instead, socialism, according to Yu, has to be analysed in the framework of a capitalist world system.Footnote 98 Other authors rather refrain from identifying the dominant force, and instead speak of the coexistence, interaction, and even cooperation of capitalism and socialism.Footnote 99
State ideology does, of course, provide an answer to the question of where China's socialism should be placed in the process of world history. It does so by referring to the theory of the ‘early stage of socialism’ (shehuizhuyi chuji jieduan), which tries to explain the existence of a socialist system in a backward society. More specifically, it places today's (backward, yet socialist) China at the beginning of a succession of ‘stages’ of socialism, with ‘mature’ socialism and communism as the final goal of a long-term socialist development.Footnote 100 Chinese world historians refer to this theory in two ways. In a more pessimistic perspective, the current backwardness of Chinese socialism and the marginality of socialism in a global context are stressed.Footnote 101 The official, optimistic version of the theory can be found in an article published in the party organ, Qiushi (literally, ‘seeking truth’) in 2005.Footnote 102 In this article, Ke Zhigang, a specialist in Marxist theory, investigates the contribution that Marx's theory of world history could make to contemporary China. Ke, like the world historians quoted above, understands world history as a process of integration, with capitalism as the ‘driving force’ of modern world history. The lesson for China to draw from this fact is that it has to continue in its efforts to develop the productive forces, participate in the world market, and open up to the outside world. At the same time, however, Ke draws heavily on Marxist teleology that makes the current situation simply a transitional stage. According to Ke, capitalism may still be able to solve the contradictions inherent in the system for the time being, but this will not continue for ever. The ‘early phase of socialism’ is only the first step in a nevertheless inevitable development towards mature socialism and communism. This, according to Ke, ‘is an irrefutable law of the historical development of mankind. World history will, in the end, also develop towards communism.’Footnote 103
Conclusion
In this article, I have emphasized the specific nature of Chinese concepts of world or global history as a result of Chinese discursive traditions of world history writing, as well as alliances with themes, categories, and theories of current political discourse. In terms of the function of world history, I have stressed the shared interest of scholars, the political leadership, and an educated public in world history as a field that can provide ‘lessons’ and ‘laws’ for China's own development. In the final analysis, world history writing in China is marked by the persistence of the nation-state as the basic historical unit that repositions itself in a changing global environment – or ‘stage’, as the film director Ren Xuean puts it. This nationalist orientation goes hand in hand with the belief in (capitalist) Europe as the centre of modern history and a model for China to learn from. We can thus observe the persistence of a deeply embedded Eurocentrism, albeit one that is self-imposed and manipulated for national purposes. What do these findings tell us about global history as an international project, in particular with regard to calls for making global history more inclusive and less Eurocentric?Footnote 104
While discussions of power relations and discursive monopolies are certainly overdue in the international historical community, concepts of inclusiveness based on dialogue or multi-perspective approaches should be viewed sceptically. What we can see from the Chinese case is how world history as an academic field might use common terms but still be fragmented into mostly nationally or regionally defined discursive spaces. Leading world historians in China have confirmed this national outlook as part of their identity and responsibility. Qian Chengdan, for instance, wants Chinese world history research ‘to be independent in global scholarship and contribute to China's modernization efforts’.Footnote 105 Their orientation towards national concerns and the broader political environment also forces Chinese scholars to tackle problems that only make sense in a local context: the place of socialism in world history is the most evident case in point. It is true that, for some fields and concepts, convergences may occur, including at levels below that of the merely terminological; and in concrete empirical research, it may be easier to forge bridges across national boundaries.Footnote 106 However, it is precisely the quite specific dominant theories, master narratives, and ‘laws’ of world history as macrohistory that invest it with the fascination that it enjoys in contemporary Chinese society. More inclusive approaches in international scholarship will certainly lead to a fuller awareness of these differences in perspective, but, as I have argued elsewhere, by simply adding perspectives without addressing the epistemological foundations underlying them they also miss the opportunity of producing new and truly critical knowledge.Footnote 107
This is particularly true for the persistence of Eurocentrism both in the West and in China. As Arif Dirlik has succinctly pointed out: ‘The internalization of Eurocentrism in non-Euro-American societies has even created an ironic situation where they appear as the perpetrators of Eurocentrism when Euro-Americans are in the process of renouncing it’.Footnote 108 Dirlik's remark is part of a powerful argument for the futility of any attempt to overcome Eurocentrism as long as it is not addressed as a ‘fundamental part of the experience of modernity, lodged in the consciousness of all who have been participants in modernity globally’.Footnote 109
What we can conclude from these observations on Eurocentrism is that the problem of centres probably has to be reconsidered. In a world of internationalized, but at the same time locally manipulated, knowledge, the question of the geographical origin of a certain concept, theory, or master narrative seems to have become meaningless. Instead, we should ask whose interests are reflected in a certain theory in terms of either domestic social and political divides or the differences between transnationally defined interest groups. In this perspective, ‘globalization’/‘integration’, ‘modernization’, and the ‘rise of the great powers’ as they are proposed by Chinese world historians as the ‘threads’ of modern history all appear as elitist concepts that are first and foremost concerned with a strategy for China as a nation, but not with the internal distribution of the wealth that this strategy is expected to produce.
