Introduction

All eyes are riveted on China as the emergent superpower and we are often told that we can have little understanding of this nation without a deep knowledge of its history. Certainly many have pointed out that China has had the longest continuous history of all major states. Historians tend to think of history as the ground of contemporary developments, but if for a moment we adopt the Gestalt visual perspective, it may turn out that this history is a figure erected upon the ground of contemporary systems. Like the classic Gestalt duck-rabbit switch, whereby an image may be perceived either as a rabbit or as a duck depending on the ground of our perception, so too China may look historical or not depending on how our perceptions have been trained. In this volume I want to train our eyes to see the picture of China less as a self-contained entity, a ‘geobody’, than as part of a broader set of global and regional processes; from the ‘outside-in’. Only by integrating outside and inside can we view history in its fullness, grasp our historically global condition and recognize the condition’s urgency for our future. Of the nine essays in this volume, four were published between 1988 and

2003, and five in 2007-8 in various journals and collections. The essays are integrated by their concern with the major historical problems of China in the twentieth century, including imperialism, nationalism, state-building, religion and the role of history. My line of inquiry is distinguished by the wider angle from which I approach these questions: the regional (principally Sino-Japanese interactions), the global and the comparative. The essays have been recast to highlight this approach. The essays are divided into three parts. Part I views imperialism and

nationalism in China from the perspective of global and regional circulations and interactions. I also examine the changing role of history over the twentieth century from the same perspective. Part II focuses on myth, religion and Chinese conceptions of society and polity, all phenomena that have, of course, older histories within Chinese society. I utilize a comparative and interactive perspective to explore not only how they are re-shaped by external influences and forces, but how these internal practices themselves shape the external impact. In Part III, I adopt a fully comparative framework. By examining how convergent global processes play out in China in comparison

to India and how experiences of Chinese migrants in the US differ from those in Southeast Asia, we can gain a robust sense of how global processes become unique developments in China. The essays thus speak to each other through their substantive connections

and concerns of historical methodology arising largely from the outside-in approach. They raise questions and develop approaches to the problems of the efficacy of conceptions and practices from the past in the face of external influences, including the structuring role of historical narratives, of comparing societies that are also interconnected or interactive, and not least, of hegemony and counter-hegemonic forces in society. I will return to these problems below. Much of what follows in this introduction deals with how I conceptualize the ‘outside’: the dominant global forces shaping and shaped by China and the East Asian region during the twentieth century. The decentering of national histories has recently been gaining popularity in

the profession, but questions remain as to how and why it is taking place during these decades and what might be the most productive ways of approaching the move away from the nation as the ultimate ground of history. The historical event that catalyzed what is arguably a paradigm change in the human sciences was the end of the Cold War. To be sure, in retrospect many changes in the post-1945 political and economic systems were taking place in the 1980s. This is particularly true of East Asia, where the Sino-U.S. rapprochement and the opening up of China had practically been underway since the 1970s. But our understanding of systemic change was catalyzed by developments in Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China from the late 1980s. The fall of socialism during this period led fairly rapidly to two important

developments. The first was the unleashing of nationalist and identity movements that often overshadowed the simultaneous outbreaks of democratic movements in the post-socialist world. The second was the new globalization associated with the spreading power of multi-national corporations, finance capitalism and neo-liberal market economics, particularly into and from Asia. The developments in China after June 1989 were of a piece with what was happening in many other parts of the world, such as India and Russia. In all these societies, a protected and redistributive national economy and a multi-ethnic, territorial nationalism that had been built up since World War II (earlier in the USSR) was being replaced by a market-oriented economy and a dominant ethnic nationalism. I discuss these changes in China, especially through its changing historiography, in Chapter 3. In the humanistic social sciences in the West, the historical break was

reflected in burgeoning theories of globalization and renewed, critical interest in nationalism, which displaced or destabilized what we might call the national modernization paradigm of the previous decades. The new theories were often underpinned by cultural or constructionist methodologies. While, again, the advent of poststructuralism certainly preceded the end of the Cold War, two developments occasioned by these changes reinforced the constructionist (and deconstructionist) perspective in my understanding of history.