World History and National Identity in China

The Twentieth Century

Xin Fan

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108842600
• eBook ISBN: 9781108906296
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Nationalism is pervasive in China today. Yet nationalism is not entrenched in China's intellectual tradition. Over the course of the twentieth century, the combined forces of cultural, social, and political transformations nourished its development, but resistance to it has persisted. Xin Fan examines the ways in which historians working on the world beyond China from within China have attempted to construct narratives that challenge nationalist readings of the Chinese past and the influence that these historians have had on the formation of Chinese identity. He traces the ways in which generations of historians, from the late Qing through the Republican period, through the Mao period to the relative moment of 'opening' in the 1980s, have attempted to break cross-cultural boundaries in writing an alternative to the national narrative.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Control and Resistance: The Social Production of World History under the Influence of Radical Politics
• 1 The Confucian Legacy: World-Historical Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 2 The Cultural Destiny: Nationalism and World History in Republican China
• 3 Becoming the “World”: World Historians in the Early People’s Republic
• 4 The Forced Analogy: Control, Resistance, and World History in the 1950s
• 5 Imagining Global Antiquity: Continuity, Transformation, and World History in Post-Mao China
• Conclusion: World History and the Value of the Past
• Appendix: List of Characters
• Bibliography
• Index