The making of an alienated past: The study of ancient world history in twentieth-century China

In China today the exclusion of China's own past from world-historical studies indicates a binary view of the relation between China and the world---a binary which is the end result of certain cultural, social, and political transformations in the twentieth century. In this dissertation, I first focus on the aspirations, struggles, and setbacks of a group of individuals who sought to connect the ancient world to modern Chinese society in their study of history. This resulted in the establishment of ancient world history (AWH) as a branch of modern historical studies. The introduction, circulation, appropriation, and production of AWH knowledge took place in the contexts of rapid socio-political changes, one of which was the professionalization of historical studies. This generated a tension which grew throughout the century: On one hand, it increased the state's capacity to control historians by turning them into professional workers in modern academic institutions; on the other hand, it created an aspiration among historians to maintain an autonomous view, justified by their authoritative position in knowledge-production.;Evolving from an amateur tradition of historical writing in the early twentieth century, the development of AWH in China became gradually fraught in this conflict of professionalization from the 1930s onward. In the 1950s, the Communist state turned AWH into a professional field and cultivated historians who accepted Marxist historical materialism and Marxist-defined universal stages in world history. Many non-Marxist historians felt this as an intrusion on their autonomy as professional knowledge-producers, and, seeing Marxism as foreign, they stressed the boundaries between China and the world to exclude the exterior influence of political ideology. This emphasis on cultural difference became even more open when ideological strictures were loosened in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the alienation of AWH in post-Socialist Chinese historiography. Thus, this alienation in historical writing was an unintended consequence of a social drama among historians, one that arose from the repeated conflict between political demands and aspirations for professional standards.