From the 1890s, as Japan quickened its nation and empire building, it not only imposed more government restriction on academic research, but also opened up a new era with respect to its relation with the West. In contrast to the overt enthusiasm for Westernization in the early Meiji era, the new generation of intellectuals developed a more prudent attitude towards Western influence and a more inward interest in discovering the value of Japan’s past tradition and East Asian tradition in general.69 Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Rescript of Education, issued in 1890, symbolized this cul-tural turn, for the Rescript restated the need for imparting such Confucian moral values as loyalty, obedience, filiality and harmony in Japanese schools. But this restatement hardly signalled that Japan was to cultivate friendship with China at the time. Quite the contrary; Japan’s goal was to turn itself into the leader of Asia, replacing and even subduing China so that it could make itself an equal to the West. That is, in order to become the ‘West’, Japan had to find its ‘Orient’.70 The burgeoning study of Chinese and Asian history, under the rubric of TDyDshi (history of the East), a neologism coined at the time, in Japan’s historical circle and school curriculum from the 1890s on, prefigured the trend. In retrospect, the
changing climate of Japan’s political culture was partially to blame for the dismissal of Kume Kunitake and Shigeno Yasutsugu from Tokyo University mentioned above, for it gave rise to the revival of cultural nativism and political conservatism. Shigeno and Kume’s attacks on Japanese legends, their empiricist bent for historical facts rather than didacticism and their insistence on compiling the Chronological History of Great Japan in Chinese, had made them prime targets. Their departure marked the end of official history writing in modern Japan. But govern-ment sponsorship of and interference in history writing continued, as shown in the area of textbook compilation where government supervision and intervention were to become the norm that has lasted more or less to this day.71
Meanwhile, the study of ‘civilizational history’ advanced. From the 1880s, Taguchi Ukichi and other advocates of ‘civilizational history’ and its variant, ‘people’s history’ (minkan shigaku), began working out a closer relationship with their academic counterparts. Many academic historians became frequent contributors to Shikai (Sea of History), a journal edited by Taguchi aimed at promoting popular history. During the 1890s, the exponents of ‘people’s history’ organized the Society for the Friends of the People (MinyEsha), led by Tokutomi Sohd (1863–1957), Takekoshi Yosaburd (1865–1950) and Yamaji Aisan (1864–1917), whose writings were influential in charting Japan’s cultural reorientation. In so far as their historical studies were concerned, these intellectuals expanded Taguchi’s interest in searching for laws to explain the progress of Japanese civiliza-tion. They also improved his approach by examining such important his-torical events as the Meiji Restoration from the people’s perspective. In their reckoning, the Meiji Restoration became a social revolution, engen-dered by the awakening of the national consciousness among the Japanese people, who rose to fight the unjust authority.72
On two grounds, these historians’ interest converged with that of their academic counterparts. First, like the academic historians who were now mostly Western-educated, these ‘people’s historians’ strove to establish a parity between Japanese history and European history, and advocated that the two adopt a similar approach to interpreting their movements. More bravely than the seemingly bloodless academicians, they refuted the exalta-tion of Japan’s unique cultural and religious traits, promoted by the Shintoists and the political oligarchy. Second, as ideologues of liberalism and populism, they were equally excited by Japan’s overseas expansion and were eager to offer their service. Tokutomi, for example, was well noted for his zealous support of the government in the Sino-Japanese War
and Russo-Japanese War. During the early twentieth century, having notably changed his political stance and his public image, he by and large jettisoned his liberal image and became a chief spokesperson for Japan’s imperialist foreign policy.
Japan’s rise and China’s decline changed the landscape of the Sinitic world and exerted a direct impact on Korea. In the late nineteenth century, by rewriting their own history, Korean historians began seeking a way to emerge from the shadow of China and establish their cultural inde-pendence. This trend, which coincided with the rise of TDyDshi in Japan, represented an embryonic form of modern Korean nationalism. Its origin, however, could be traced back to the Koreans’ reaction to the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China and the subsequent rise of Practical Learning, as well as to the Korean extension of evidential learn-ing durlearn-ing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.73Owing to the influence of nationalism, many Korean historians grumbled that Koreans in the past had made an earnest effort to know about what happened in Chinese history; in the meantime, they had unfortunately ignored and neglected their own history. In actuality, the Koreans should be proud of their country’s history because its length is comparable to China’s. As early as 2333 bce, the legend goes, Tan’gun, the ancient king born of a divine being and a female bear, had founded the Korean kingdom. Thus, towards the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Koreans started shaking off their country’s long bondage to China, or flunkeyism (sadae), a derogatory characterization of Korean culture and history during most of the Chosnn dynasty (1392–1910).74From that time to this day, nation-alism has underscored the major course of development in modern Korean historiography, in part because Korea lost its independence to Japan at the turn of the twentieth century and in part because after gaining independence after World War II, the peninsula has remained divided.
When Japan eyed China as its ‘Orient’, China however appeared unalarmed. Beginning in the 1860s, the reigning Qing dynasty had embarked on a course of Westernization, though on a much smaller scale than that of Japan. Its half-hearted approach reflected Chinese reluctance on the one hand to forsake their entrenched worldview that their land was the ‘Middle Kingdom’ under Heaven and on the other to acknowledge the rise of the West. But it also had something to do with the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), which was sparked by a self-styled Christian movement. Though the Western powers sided with the dynasty out of eco-nomic interest, the Chinese literati were alarmed by the danger of Western religious and cultural influence eroding traditional belief in Confucianism.
When the Qing army appeared incapable of dealing with the Taiping rebels, the literati organized militia forces to lend their support to the dynasty; together, they succeeded in putting down the rebellion. This vic-tory paved the way for the Qing dynasty’s restoration (1862–74), in which more attempts were made to harmonize China’s relation with Western powers and Japan. At the same time, the regime renewed its effort to rein-force Confucian tradition. Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), a ranking Qing official, propounded a theoretical formula in which Chinese learning was exalted as the ‘substance’ (ti), whereas Western learning was deemed as the
‘functional’ (yong). This ‘ti-yong’ formula became the guiding principle for the restoration, in that while many new offices were established in the government – the General Office for Managing Foreign Affairs (Zongli yamen) being the most notable and most important, in that it aimed to acquaint the Chinese with new knowledge of international affairs – no serious attempt was made to reform and modernize the Chinese educa-tional system. To be sure, there were also new schools being established to teach foreign languages and scientific knowledge, funded either by provin-cial governments or by Western missionaries. But these schools generally lacked appeal to the Chinese youth because they failed to prepare students for the civil service examination, which before 1905 remained an import-ant aim for schooling Chinese students and the usual channel for them to enter officialdom.
Thus, though the Qing restoration paralleled the early Meiji period, unlike Japan, China had not felt the need for establishing a modern institu-tion through which Chinese students could acquire a systematic know-ledge of the West and the world. There were of course exceptions, of which Wang Tao (1828–97) was a notable example. Born into a literati family in south-east China, Wang had a solid training in Confucian learning and later got a chance to work in Hong Kong for several years, where he assisted James Legge (1815–97), a Scottish missionary, in translating Confucian classics into English. Invited by Legge, Wang also spent three years in England. Compared with his predecessors of the previous genera-tion, such as Wei Yuan, Wang thus acquired first-hand knowledge of the West and gained a much better understanding of the changing tide of world history. If to Wei Yuan, the Westerners’ ‘knack’ was military tech-nology, Wang Tao extended it into institutions and culture, which he felt necessary to introduce to his compatriots. Influenced by Western journal-ism, his writings focused on contemporary events, such as the Franco-Prussia War, and offered descriptions and analyses in a narrative structure, an attempt comparable to Taguchi Ukichi’s in Japan. But Wang was also
very much a person of his time. Arguably the most cosmopolitan person in late nineteenth-century China, he maintained that Confucian moral values were universal and pertinent for analysing the trends of world history.75
Wang Tao can be regarded as China’s ‘civilizational historian’, whose historiographical innovations inspired his Japanese counterparts. In Wang’s visit to Japan in the 1870s, he had been warmly welcomed by Shigeno Yasutsugu and his colleagues at the History Bureau.76 But back home, Wang’s work was received less enthusiastically; throughout his life, Wang remained something of a maverick with respect to both his lifestyle and literary accomplishments. Qing official historians, or Shigeno Yasutsugu’s counterparts in China, showed little interest in Wang’s Western-influenced approach to historiography. They were instead more concerned with the quality of such ‘standard histories’ as the Ming History and Yuan History (Yuanshi) compiled by their predecessors of previous centuries. And their criticism of these two histories was usually directed at these histories’ supposed lapses in expounding the Confucian moral and political agenda. Yet a closer look at these historians’ preoccupation with dynastic historiography at the time reveals that they did not hole up com-pletely in the old tradition. At least in their study of Yuan history, their work seems to have benefited from Western sources regarding the Mongol conquest of Euro-Asia that had recently been made available. More specifically, these Western sources enabled such historians as Hong Jun (1839–93), Ke Shaomin (1850–1933) and Tu Ji (1856–1921) to examine the accuracy of the Yuan History by cross-referencing if with other works.
These new specimens of Yuan historical study also received attention in Japan, where Mongol history was considered an integral part of the TDyDshi. All this suggested that by the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese had also gradually expanded their worldview, which resulted in some discernible changes in historical writing. Not only had more Western historical works been translated into Chinese by such missionaries as Young J. Allen (1836–1907) and Timothy Richard (1845–1919), whose activities had received much more tolerance, even patronage, from the Qing court, but Xue Fucheng (1838–94), Xu Jianyin (1845–1901) and other Chinese diplomats overseas also offered historical accounts and trav-elogues about the West, and also Japan. Huang Zunxian’s (1848–1905) Riben guozhi (Japan: A National History) was considered the best in the category. That Huang decided to write a general history about Japan was a significant move in itself, for previously, Japanese history was either overlooked or inaccurately portrayed by Chinese historians, even by Wei Yuan in his Sea Kingdoms. By comparison, Huang not only provided a
comprehensive and detailed account of Japanese history, but he also praised Japan’s recent success in modernization.
But few Chinese, including perhaps such ‘Japan hands’ as Huang Zunxian, had foreseen the direct and dire impact that Japan’s moderniza-tion would have on China and the Sinitic world order as a whole. Having watched the impressive ‘progress’ of Japanese civilization with an envious eye, they enjoined their compatriots to quickly follow suit, lest China fall behind. During the 1890s, ideas of evolution and social Darwinism were gaining currency in China. Robert Mackenzie’s (1823–81) The Nineteenth Century, an otherwise banal survey of modern European history, was translated by Timothy Richard into Chinese and became an instant best-seller because of its zealous espousal of the ideal of progressive history. But by and large, prior to 1895 when the Qing was shatteringly defeated by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, even the most open-minded Chinese appeared impressed rather than alarmed by Japan’s quick pace in modern-ization. The war’s outcome, however, came as a shock to them. Having put an end to the restoration era of the Qing, it also ushered in a new era of change for Chinese historical thinking. Japan’s blatant challenge to China proved convincingly to the Chinese that the world now followed different historical laws, best encapsulated in the Darwinian principle of the sur-vival of the fittest. The Chinese then painfully realized that if their country failed to acknowledge this law, it would lose not only its vaunted Middle Kingdom status but also its national independence. Paradoxically, there-fore, Japan’s quick ascendance also proved inspirational to the Chinese: it goaded them to take more action and launch similar political and social reforms whereby they hoped to reclaim their past glory. By 1898, both the court and the literati seem to have agreed on the need for more thorough reforms. However, after the emperor decreed the 1898 Reform, the more powerful Empress Dowager smothered it after mere hundred days – she was afraid of losing her power.
Thus, in contrast to the transformation of Japanese historical writing, where evidential empiricism meshed successfully with Rankean critical historiography, the Chinese interaction with Western historiographical influence was shown in their acceptance of evolutionism, or social Darwinism, which was a more urgent agenda in their continued struggle for national survival and regeneration. Aside from Robert Mackenzie’s Nineteenth Century, Thomas Huxley’s (1825–95) Ethics and Evolution, translated by Yan Fu (1853–1921), a student returned from England, also became a bestseller in fin-de-siècle China. In the meantime, the Darwinian emphasis on change and evolution prompted Chinese scholars to delve
again in their own tradition for compatible elements. In this light, Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan’s reinterpretation of Confucianism as harbouring the idea of change in history continued to attract attention. Drawing on the Three-Age Doctrine advanced by Gong and Wei, Kang Youwei (1858–
1927), the protagonist of the 1898 Reform, went as far as to recast the image of Confucius as a social reformer from the perspective of Darwinian evolutionism in a series of controversial works.77 Kang’s repositioning of Confucius was not accepted by many, but his attempt at merging New Text Confucianism with evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, inspired historians and scholars of future generations to accommodate foreign ideas and introduce more changes into modern Chinese historiography during the next century.
Notes
1 Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT, 1983).
2 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, 1960); Sulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism (Princeton, NJ, 1978); Georg G. Iggers, ‘Academic Anti-Semitism in Germany 1870–1933: A Comparative Perspective’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, 27 (1998), 473–90.
3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), 477.
4 Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1993); Mike Gane, Auguste Comte (London, 2006); Henri G.
Gouhier, La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols (Paris, 1933–41).
5 See Georg G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians (The Hague, 1958); Robert Carlisle, Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore, MD, 1987); Actualités du Saint-Simonisme (Paris, 2004).
6 See Buckle, excerpts from History of Civilization in England, in Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (Cleveland, OH, 1956), 121.
7 Ibid., 125.
8 Henry Buckle’s work, along with François Guizot’s, was translated into Japanese in the 1880s. It also had a Chinese translation shortly afterwards.
See ikubo Toshiaki, Nihon kindai shigaku no seiritsu (The Establishment of
Modern Japanese Historiography) (Tokyo, 1988), 94–5; Ozawa Eiichi, Kindai Nihon shigaushi no kenkyE: Meiji hen (Study of the History of Modern Japanese Historiography: Meiji Period) (Tokyo, 1968), 169–76; Hu Fengxiang and Zhang Wenjian, Zhongguo jindai shixue sichao yu liupai (Ideas and Schools in Modern Chinese Historiography) (Shanghai, 1991), 201–5.
9 Droysen, ‘Art and Method’, in Stern, The Varieties of History, 137–44.
10 Leopold von Ranke, ‘Introduction’, Histories of Latin and Germanic Nations (1824), in Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke, eds, Leopold von Ranke:
The Theory and Practice of History (Indianapolis, IN, 1973), 137.
11 See Georg G. Iggers, ‘The Image of Ranke in German and American Historical Thought’, History and Theory, 2 (1962), 17–40.
12 Leopold von Ranke, ‘On the Character of Historical Science’, in Iggers and Moltke, Leopold von Ranke: The Theory and Practice of History, 33.
13 Von Humboldt, ‘On the Historian’s Task’, ibid., 5.
14 Leopold von Ranke, ‘The Great Powers’, ibid., 100.
15 Leopold von Ranke, ‘A Dialogue on Politics’, ibid., 112.
16 See Iggers, The German Conception of History, ch. 5, ‘The High Point of Historical Optimism: The “Prussian School” ’, 90–123; Robert Southard, Droysen and the Prussian School of History (Lexington, KY, 1995).
17 Jörn Rüsen, Begriffene Geschichte. Genesis und Begründung der Geschichtstheorie Johann Gustav Droysens (Paderborn, 1969).
18 Johann G. Droysen, ‘Interpretation’, in Peter Leyh, Historik: historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart, 1977), 22, 169–216.
19 See Iggers, The German Conception of History, 112–14; Günter Birtsch, Nation als sittliche Idee: der nationale Staatsbegriff in Geschichtsschreibung und Gedankenwelt (Göttingen, 1964).
20 Iggers, The German Conception of History, 111.
21 Ibid., 115.
22 Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven, CT, 1957).
23 Georg G. Iggers, ‘Heinrich von Treitschke’, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1972), 66–80.
24 See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Ranke and the Neo-Rankean School in Imperial Germany: State-oriented Historiography as a Stabilizing Force’, in Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY, 1990); Hans-Heinz Krill, Die Ranke-Renaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks: ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken in Deutschland 1880–1935 (Berlin, 1962).
25 Georg G. Iggers, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 129–52.
26 Gustav Schmoller, The Economics of Gustav Schmoller, tr. W. Abraham and H. Weingast (New York, 1942).
27 Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, reprinted in A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859), in Tucker, Marx–Engels Reader, 4.
28 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, ibid., 143–4.
29 Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, from Capital, vol. 1, ibid., 319–29.
30 Leopold von Ranke, ‘On Progress in History’ (1854), in Iggers and Moltke, Leopold von Ranke: The Theory and Practice of History, 53.
31 Leopold von Ranke, ‘On the Character of Historical Science’, ibid., 46.
32 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Tucker, Marx–Engels Reader, 608.
33 Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, ibid., 653–64.
34 Johann Droysen, ‘Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft’,
34 Johann Droysen, ‘Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft’,