ABSTRACT
Dates, especially those major year markers that we customarily refer to as watersheds or turning points in the flow of historical time, are inherently unstable, their meanings shifting in response either to new understandings of the events leading up to them or to later developments that were largely if not entirely unforeseen when the original meanings were established. A good example is the year 1949. This year, until not too long ago, was widely seen as constituting a radical breach in the continuity of Chinese history; it also (sociologically speaking) marked a sharp divide within the field of China scholarship, at least in the United States, with different people for the most part studying the pre-and post-1949 periods, asking different questions, relying on different source materials, reading different books, and more often than not attending different conferences.
