ABSTRACT
It has been a routine practice to draw a clear line between two parts of historical discourse. The history of historians is taken to be archival and narrative labor seeking to discover new data and to register an objective concatenation of occurrences in the past. The other part is theoretical labor, which expounds the principles and models for explaining historical change. Some historians complain that all too often in modern Chinese historiography theoretical labor has tended to get the upper hand of empirical work. Yü Ying-shih remarks that Chinese historians in the Mainland have often gone too far in pursuing theoretical models in historical inquiry, privileging a Hegelian or Marxist style of abstract discourse at the cost of objectivity. 1 Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik uses the familiar distinction of lun and shi to define two parts of history writing in socialist China. While in premodern China the discussion of the dao, or principles that inform change, never ceased to animate the literati, in the twentieth century Chinese historians have embarked on theoretical pursuits with greater urgency. 2 Wang Hui gives credit to this pursuit with the observation that the development of modern Chinese historiography lies not in the accumulation of knowledge about the past, but rather in the constantly renewed efforts to explain historical changes and reformulate historical outlooks. 3
