Once or twice a week I work part time at the Oriental Library (東洋文庫), mostly doing English editing and occasional small bits of translation from Chinese or Japanese. I spend most of my time helping edit a collection of previously published English essays by the author Etô Shinkichi, who was my own Professor Hirano’s mentor. In one of his essays I was working on today, on the Chinese revolution of 1911, Professor Etô discusses the historiography related to the period and contrasts the “modern detached positivists” who “try to minimize overt political assessment in their research” to the deeply political Marxist historiography of the revolution after 1949.
To give an example of this he looks at how the anniversary of the revolution has been marked in Communist China . The 40th anniversary, in 1951 the anniversary was totally ignored, “because of the Korean War and the strict wartime policies of the Chinese Communist Party.” The 50th anniversary in 1961 came during a time of “moderation following the failure of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and the anniversary was celebrated in Beijing as well as in the other major cities of China.” The 60th anniversary came during the Cultural Revolution, “when the radical left wing prevailed and hence completely ignored,” the 1911 revolution. The 70th anniversary came in 1981, and was celebrated all over China at a time when the excesses of the 1970s had given way to moderate policies and the national goal of modernization. In contrast, he notes, the event had always been celebrated in nationalist controlled Taiwan.
I really like this nice little presentation which nicely shows how the historiography of an event in Chinese history, in this case marked as an event of national celebration and accompanied by large academic conferences and the outpouring of new publications, has been subject to the political (and geopolitical) changes. Let us put aside the fact that this sort of large scale celebration is not necessary indicative of any major shifts in Marxist interpretation of the revolution (something Etô concedes in his essay). Marxist theorists are indeed very explicit about their political views and, as he claims, subject to the left and right shifts in the political scene.
It is the contrast with the “modern” and “detached” empiricist historians, who “minimize” their “overt” political assessment which I find most interesting, of course. I think he is exactly right, positivist historians do try to minimize their overt political assessment. It is the fact that their political assessments, and the shifts over time in their analyses and selection of questions to research, are not overt that we must be all the more careful when we read them.