ABSTRACT
For some years now a major change has been in progress in American writing on the recent Chinese past. The old picture of a stagnant, slumbering, unchanging China, waiting to be delivered from its unfortunate condition of historylessness by a dynamic, restlessly changing, historyful West, has at last begun to recede. China is, indeed, being liberated. It is being liberated, however, not from itself but from us, not from an actual state of changelessness but from an externally imposed perception of changelessness derived from a particular – and heavily parochial – definition of what change is and what kinds of change are important.
