The Politics of Chinese Historiography

THE POLITICS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN CHINA: CONTEXTUALIZING THE

KOGURYO CONTROVERSY*

Jungmin Seo

This article contextualizes the emergence of the Chineseclaim over the historical ownership of Koguryo in the politicsof historiography in China. Contemporary Chinese historiog-raphy from which the Chinese state and populace draw coreidentities has never been fully fixed or stabilized. Regardlessof the temporal distance from the present, Chinese pasts arecontinuously constructed and re-memorized based on con-temporary sociopolitical needs. Compared to the pre-reformeras, broadened social spaces in China have made the ChineseCommunist Party’s monopoly over historiography untenable.In that sense, the future of East Asian regional order or Sino-Korean relations is highly unpredictable, if not unstable, dueto the continuously changing Chinese national identity. Withradical nationalization of China’s imperial past, the next gen-eration in China may favor actions to alter the status quo.National and state identities informed by “historical facts” arehardly negotiable or changeable.

Key words: China, nationalism, Communist parties, East Asianpolitics

* The author would like to thank the University Research Council and Centerfor Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for their support;Mikyoung Kim, Kiwoong Yang, and Terrence Roehrig for their invaluablecomments. All errors and shortcomings are the author’s alone.

ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2008, pp. 39-58.

The controversy over the historical ownership of Koguryo,an ancient state in northeastern China and northern Korea, hascreated diplomatic tensions between Korea and China since2002.1 In spite of rapidly increasing human, economic and gov-ernmental interactions between the two countries, the Chineseclaim over Koguryo produced unprecedented emotional reac-tions in Korean society. The claim came about via the “North-eastern Project” (Dongbei Gongcheng) at the Chinese Academy ofSocial Science, which attempted to incorporate ancient nomadichistories in inner Mongolia and three provinces in northeasternChina into a unilinear Chinese national history. Triggered byKorean popular reactions, young Chinese netizens expressedtheir anger over a Korean cultural invasion (a “Korean wave”:hanliu) of Chinese television channels and a Korean city’s suc-cessful register of the Kangnung Tan’o Festival with UNESCO(the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Orga-nization) in 2005 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and IntangibleHeritage of Humanity.2

Most observers agree that the issue of Koguryo is less severeand damaging to regional stability than the territorial disputesover the Tokto/Takeshima and Senkaku/Diaoyudao islandgroups or the textbook controversies over the comfort womenand the Nanjing Massacre. Nevertheless, this controversy, Iargue, can be a potential threat to regional stability in case ofradical changes in the North Korean regime and/or continuedintensification of Chinese popular nationalism. In this article, Iwill contextualize the emergence of the Chinese claim over thehistorical ownership of Koguryo in the politics of historiographyin contemporary China.

40 Jungmin Seo

1. For a complete account of the diplomatic dispute between Korea andChina, see Terence Roehrig, “History as a Strategic Weapon: The Koreanand Chinese Struggle over Korea,” Journal of Asian and African Studies,forthcoming; Yonson Ahn, “Competing Nationalisms: The Mobilizationof History and Archaeology in the Korea-China Wars over Koguryo/Gaogouli,” Japan Focus, February 9, 2006, online at http://japanfocus.org/products/details/1837.

2. The city of Kangnung registered the festival as a regional/local eventon Dan’o Day, which is May 5 on the lunar calendar. The Chinese massmedia reported it as the registration of “Tan’o,” which is a holiday forthe spring harvest in East Asian rural communities.

Problems of Spatiality and Temporality in Manchuria

In 1905 a young Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-Sen, urgedhis fellow Chinese: “Drive out the Tartars: The Manchus oftoday were originally the eastern barbarians beyond the GreatWall. They frequently caused border troubles during the Mingdynasty; then when China was in a disturbed state they cameinside Shanhaikuan,3 conquered China, and enslaved our Chi-nese people.”4 In this manifesto, there is a clear distinctionbetween “Chinese (us)” and “Manchus (them).” Sinicization ofthe Manchu people was still in progress in 1905, as the Qingimperial court’s ban on moving to Manchu, a sacred reservoir ofthe Manchu heritage, was fully lifted in 1902. Due to the land-hungry Chinese farmers and the Qing court’s unofficial encour-agement of Sinicization of the Manchus out of fear of Russianinfluence, the region dramatically changed its complexion.

Sun Yat-sen soon replaced his earlier position with a well-pro-moted notion of “Five Peoples of China: the Han, Man (Manchu),Meng (Mongolian), Zang (Tibetan), and Hui (Muslims).” But healways recognized the Han race as the foundation of the Chinesenation.5 Nevertheless, Manchuria as a part of China had not beensettled as an indisputable fact until the end of World War II. Afterthe Manchurian (Mukden) Incident in 1931, followed by the estab-lishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932, the northeast-ern part of China became a contested region in which differentsovereignty claims collided.

Noteworthy is the Chinese claim over Manchuria in thisperiod. Without much academic interest or well-established his-torical claims, Chinese scholars and politicians emphasized the

The Politics of Historiography in China 41

3. Shanhaiguan in the pinyin system. Shanhaiguan is located about 300kilometers east of Beijing and is historically acknowledged as the frontdefense line of the Chinese dynasties against the Manchurian tribessuch as the Khitan and the Jurchen.

4. Sun Yat-Sen, “The Manifesto of the T’ung-meng-hui, 1905,” cited in Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documen-tary Survey, 1839-1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1954), pp. 227-28.

5. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in theNationalist Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996),pp. 87-88.

colonization of Manchuria by massive Chinese immigration inthe nineteenth century. According to Chih Meng, one of thebest-known Chinese scholars in the United States in 1930s, “theManchus in Manchuria today are somewhat in the position ofIndians in the United States, except that the Manchus have beenentirely assimilated into Chinese culture.”6 Here, China is notpresented as a unity of nations but as a homogeneous racial andethnic entity that could colonize and claim the territories of thecolonized following the logic of social Darwinism in the earlytwentieth century.

Against the Chinese claim that is largely based on the migra-tion/colonization formula, Japanese and, to some extent, Koreanperspectives on Manchuria were fundamentally different. TheJapanese sought to establish the racial and historical links ofJapanese and ancient tribes in Inner Mongolia and NorthernManchuria. This served dual goals: first, to sever Japan fromChinese civilization, and second, to justify Japanese control ofManchuria.7 At the same time, Japan claimed that the ban of theQing imperial court made Manchuria an empty space, especiallyin terms of sovereignty. Manchus having supposedly been assimi-lated with the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Japan argued thatManchuria became an autonomous space but without sover-eignty in the modern sense.

In a similar context, Korean settlers in Manchuria in theearly 20th century largely subscribed to two perspectives. Fol-lowing Japanese claims, Manchuria was seen as an empty terri-tory that would provide unlimited opportunities. As shown inthe history of settler colonialism or migration in the age of impe-rialism, demographic emptiness is not significant as a determi-nant of settlers’ political legitimacy. In the era of Western adven-turism in the New World, the American continent was notempty at all in terms of demography but very much vacant interms of the politics of sovereignty. In that sense, many Koreanssaw moving to Manchuria, compared with the colonized Korean

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6. Chih Meng, China Speaks: On the Conflict between China and Japan (1932);cited in Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and theEast Asian Modern (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 55.

7. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 1993).

peninsula, as an opportunity to establish a new political/histori-cal subjectivity in this symbolically empty space.8

At the same time, romantic nationalism, initially promotedby Shin Chae-ho, saw Manchuria as a lost territory of the Koreannation.9 Imagining a once-glorious past is a key component ofmodern nationalism. When a nation-state claims the right to rep-resent all its people, its essential discursive strategy is to pro-duce the rhetorical longing for lost virtue and past glories, inother words, structural nostalgia.10 In the discursive structure ofKorean nationalism, the masculine, conquering, and expansionistimage of Koguryo has been an indispensable part of the masternarratives of Korean nationalism. For advocates of Korean nation-alism in the early twentieth century, the depiction of a colonizedKorean nation as feminine and a helpless victim of imperialismwas the exact antithesis of Koguryo, which was a failed but legit-imate ancestor of the national lineage. In that sense, for manyKoreans, the denial of Korean ownership of Koguryo is tanta-mount to the rejection of Korean nationalism itself.

Overall, Manchuria was a politically and culturally contestedspace until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China(PRC). Japanese and Korean scholars made the claims of histori-cal ownership, whereas Chinese scholars in the early 20th centu-ry based their claims of ownership on recent immigration andsettlement. Contemporary Chinese scholars argue that Koreanclaims to Koguryo or the temporality of Manchuria simply repeatJapanese claims during the age of imperialism.11 Nevertheless, itis important to note that Chinese historians never officiallyclaimed Chinese historical ownership of Manchuria until the


8. Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Originsof the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-sity Press, 2005).

9. Andre Schmid, “Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Ch’aeho and the Politicsof Territorial History in Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 56, No. 1(February, 1997), pp. 26-47.

10. For an in-depth discussion of the concept of structural nostalgia, seeMichael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (NewYork: Routledge, 1997), especially ch. 6.

11. Ma Dazheng, Li Dalong, Geng Tiehua, and Quan Heshui, Gudai ZhongguoGaogouli lishi xulun (An Extended Discussion of the Ancient KoguryoHistory) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe, 2003), p. 7.

ambitious nationalistic reconfiguration of historiography in the1990s. Though there have been territorial disputes with the SovietUnion, the Chinese northeastern border has been relatively secureand stable since the skirmishes of the 1960s. Then, why did Chinasuddenly raise the issue of historical ownership of Koguryo atthe expense of diplomatic tensions with South Korea, one of thebiggest investors and trading partners of China, and with NorthKorea,12 a historical ally? I suggest that shifting Chinese nationalhistoriography is the key to understand the emerging claimsover historical ownership of Korea and other border territories.

The Politics of Historiography in Contemporary China

Throughout the twentieth century, transformation from apre-modern political entity to a modern nation-state was a com-plex process in China. Replacing the Confucian world order andits tributary system, as well as categories of race, ethnicity, andnation with the concept of the sovereign state became centralfeatures of the newly emerging political consciousness. In theWest, imperialism as a new form of modernity was philosophi-cally based on the universalistic claim of progress. By makingrace a scientific and objective category that produced a clear anddistinctive political hierarchy, Western imperialism was able tomanage two mutually contradictory principles: inclusion andhierarchization.13 In other words, the addition of territories andthe inclusion of indigenous people in expanding Western empireswere taken for granted as the natural rights of civilized nations.

44 Jungmin Seo

12. In August 2008, the author had a chance to attend a conference in Vancou-ver, Canada, on the history of Koguryo organized by the InternationalSociety for Korean Studies-North America Branch. Noteworthy was theparticipation of North Korean scholars from the Academy of Social Sci-ences, the most prestigious research institute in Pyongyang. Though theyrefrained from making any diplomatically sensitive point that mightendanger Sino-North Korean relations, North Korean scholars broadlyshared the point of view that the Korean nation has historical ownershipof Koguryo.

13. Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar andImmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (NewYork: Verso, 1991).

At the same time, the internal hierarchization of imperial subjectsbased on race and ethnicity was managed through the produc-tion of scientific knowledge and belief systems.

In a way, the pre-modern Chinese empire also relied on astrong sense of universalism. The universal persuasiveness14

based on appeals to the sense of civilization, rather than to anenclosed national membership in modern terms, was the verytool to demarcate “us” and “them” among Chinese and EastAsian literati. This demarcation was not based on exclusive ter-ritory. For example, literati in Seoul or Hanoi were regarded assimilar or equal peers with Chinese literati in Beijing or Nanjing,whereas peasants and merchants, regardless of their locations,were inherently treated as “the other” or subalterns in the Con-fucian universe.

One of the prime tasks for emerging Chinese nationalists inthe late nineteenth century was to produce a new mode of writinghistory. Witnessing the collapse of the Chinese empire by theencroaching Western imperialism, Chinese intellectuals embracedthe notion of the modern nation’s “particularity,” which had beenan important weapon to fight against the imperialistic notion ofthe “universality” of Western civilization.15 Nevertheless, the con-struction of a new history in China was particularly difficult dueto the political reality of China—its fragile and fragmented politi-cal authority between the collapse of the Qing Empire and theend of the civil war in 1949.16

Only after the consolidation of the Chinese CommunistParty’s power upon the establishment of the People’s Republicof China was the Chinese state able to complete nationalizationof the vast population in China. It did this through dense stateinstitutions, compulsory educational systems, and numerouscampaigns. However, the problem in the early period of thePRC was how to narrate the Chinese nation in a cohesive and


14. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Triology (Berkeley,Calif.: University of California Press, 1958).

15. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A DerivativeDiscourse? (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

16. For the intellectual movements to produce new national histories inChina in this period, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from theNation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1995).

persuasive manner. As a seminal work by Lucien Bianco eluci-dated, if the communists exploited nationalism for their ownends, it was through communism that nationalism triumphed.In other words, what led to the establishment of the PRC wasthe Chinese revolution, not the communist revolution.17 It wasthen important to the CCP leadership to define “Chineseness,”while making the coming of the CCP seem like a natural conse-quence of historical progress.

Defining the Chinese Nation: Historical Materialism and Nationalism

In the early period of the PRC, China had to posit itself as ajunior partner of the Soviet Union due to the intensifying coldwar and the breakout of the Korean War. Academically, SovietSinology was important to Chinese scholars as it helped theminterpret Chinese history and culture in alignment with theorthodox Soviet method.18 When the works of Soviet Sinologywere translated into Chinese, the most disturbing finding wasthe Soviet interpretation of the origin of the Chinese nation. Fol-lowing Stalin’s definition of a nation, which regarded commonlanguage, common territory, common economic life, and com-mon culture as prerequisites to national identity, a Russian his-torian argued that the Chinese nation did not exist until the endof the nineteenth century. A unified market economy had notemerged in China until the last decades of the Qing Empire, hewrote.19 Though there was no broad consensus regarding whenand how the Chinese nation or Han as a unified ethnicityemerged among Chinese historians, many of them believed the

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17. Lucien Bianco, Origins of Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949 (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1967).

18. As to Soviet influence over Chinese historians, see Edward Q. Wang,“Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and theSoviet Influence, 1949-1963,” Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 9, No.23 (2000), pp. 95-111.

19. Ibid., p. 100. For the full text of the Russian historian’s article, see GeYefeimofu [E. V. Efimov], “Lun Zhongguo minzude xingcheng” (Onthe Formation of the Chinese Nation), in Han minzu xingcheng taolunji(Discussions on the Formation of the Han Nation) (Beijing: Sanlianchubanshe, 1957), pp. 228-54.

Chinese nation existed as early as the Qin-Han period.In response to what was deemed as insulting, Chinese histo-

rians adopted two somewhat contradictory strategies. The firststrategy was to emphasize the uniqueness of the Chinese way ofdeveloping a nation. Fan Wenlan, the most influential Chinesehistorian at the time, quickly rebuffed the Soviet perspective byarguing that the long-lasting centralized statehood in China sincethe first unification by Qin (221 B.C.) enabled the Chinese peopleto develop a common language, culture, and economic life. Inparticular, Fan innovatively interpreted the notion of commoneconomic life, one key element for becoming a nation. While Stal-inist theory regarded it as the development of capitalism, Fanargued that economic transactions through a private market sys-tem and the state tax institutions in the empire without capitalis-tic development should be acknowledged as “common economiclife.”20 In sum, Fan made it clear that the emergence and devel-opment of the Chinese (Han) nation was possible without capi-talistic evolution, which was believed to be the most importantelement of the birth of the modern nation in Europe.

Two years later, the second strategy against the Soviet claimwas invented by Shang Yue. It involved empirically proving theexistence of proto-capitalism in pre-modern China.21 He analyzedthe handcraft industry in the Yangzi Delta area and argued thatthe Chinese proletariat and bourgeois classes—key elements ofthe modern concept of a nation for Marxists—had existed sincethe Song and Ming dynasties. Instead of arguing the uniquenessof the Chinese nation, Shang interpreted Chinese history throughthe lens of Marxist universalism while making the long history ofChinese capitalism the legitimizing factor in the eventual victoryof the Chinese Communist revolution. Nevertheless, he pointedout that two invasions by northern barbarians, Mongols andManchus, were the reason why Chinese proto-capitalism couldnot fully evolve to mature capitalism. His perspective was bril-


20. Fan Wenlan, “Zi Qin-Han qi Zhongguo chengwei tongyi guojia deyuanyin” (The Sources of Unified Chinese States since the Qin-Hanperiod), in Han minzu xingcheng wenti taolunji, pp. 1-16.

21. Shang Yue, Zhongguo zibenzhuyi guanxi fasheng ji yanbian de chubu yanjiu(A Preliminary Study on the Emergence and Transition of Chinese Cap-italism) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1956).

liant in the sense that the antiquity of the Chinese nation was sup-ported without denying Stalinist perspectives on nationhood.

The confrontation of these two strategies in a series of arti-cles in Lishi yanjiu (Historical Research) between 1956 and 1958indicates a grave dilemma concerning how to define the Chinesenation.22 Shang’s argument was a successful integration of Chinesenationalism—the emphasis on a glorious history—and Stalinistdoctrine. Fan’s interpretation is the ultimate form of nationalisthistoriography based on a strong sense of particularism. Neverthe-less, Fan’s theory eventually became the official position of theCCP precisely because of the issue of national community. Shang’sopponent, Liu Danian, put an end to the controversy. In his article,published in 1958, he poignantly criticized that “though the inva-sion and rule by Manchu was destructive, should we not over-come such ways of viewing the struggles among nationalities? . . .Such a perspective possibly means several nationalities are exclud-ed from China.”23 In other words, from the opponents’ point ofview, Shang’s theory identified Han nationhood but not Chinesenationhood.

The heated debate in the late 1950s concluded after Mao’soriginal position toward the issue of the Chinese nation was reit-erated. Instead of capitalist development, Mao located the revo-lutionary capacity of the nation in the ancient history of peasantrebellions against landlords. He replaced the Marxist notion ofproletariat and capitalist with much less scientific concepts,propertied (youchan jieji) and property-less (wuchan jieji) classes.24

At the same time, by confirming the introduction of the capitalistsystem along with colonialism beginning from the Opium War,

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22. For a concise summary of those debates, see Zhao Xiaohua, Zhongguozibenzhuyi mengya de xueshu yanjiu yu lunzheng (Academic Research andDebates on Chinese Proto-capitalism) (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyechubanshe, 2004).

23. Zhongguo Renmin Daxue Zhongguo lishi jiaoyanshi jindai xiandaishizu, “Ping Shang Yue tongzhi guanyu Ming-Qing shehui jingji jiegou deruogan guandian” (Some Comments on Comrade Shang Yue’s Perspec-tives on the Socio-economic Structure of Ming-Qing Society), Lishi yanjiu,No. 12 (1958).

24. Mao Zedong, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party(1939),” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence &Wishart, 1954).

pre-modern Chinese history was released from the pressure tofollow strict historical materialism. In the 1960s, history text-books in China were rewritten following the historiographyestablished in the late 1950s. The languages of “four thousandyears of history” and names of mythical ancient empires wereproudly presented in the textbooks. Then, the national historywas quickly traced back to the early Zhou era.25

Had the Cultural Revolution not occurred, the 1960s wouldhave been a period of consolidating the national question inChina. That catastrophic event postponed the further develop-ment of Chinese historiography for two decades. In this period,the question of Chinese nationhood was simply ignored through anextremely simplistic thesis suggested by Mao: “the racial (ethnic)question is in essence a class question.”26 After the beginning of thereform, discussions on the origin of Chinese capitalism resumed.

In these discussions Chinese historians tried to find the his-torical connection between China’s pre-modern market economyand the reform-induced socialist market economy.27 Neverthe-less, the new discussions in the 1980s and 1990s were limited tothe academic realm without politicization.28 The newly emergedhistoriography regarding Chinese proto-capitalism took the formof balanced compromise. While acknowledging the existence ofproto-capitalism in pre-modern China, the Opium War remainedas the watershed of the radical transformation from traditional


25. A. F. P. Hulsewe, “Chinese Communist Treatment of the Origins andFoundation of the Chinese Empire,” in Albert Feuerwerker, ed., Historyin Communist China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 122-23.

26. Mao Zedong, “The Racial Question is a Class Question,” online atwww.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_06.htm.

27. Soon after the beginning of the Chinese reforms, American scholars werealso attracted to the issue of the pre-modern Chinese market. Exemplaryworks in the early years are William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce andSociety in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress, 1984), and Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy,1750-1950 (Stanford, Cailf.: Stanford University Press, 1984).

28. Shang Yue’s controversial works were republished in the early 1980s bythe People’s Press, the most prestigious publisher in China. Shang Yue,Shang Yue shixue zuowen xuanji (Selected Academic Works by ShangYue) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984); Zhongguo lishi gangyao (ConciseHistory of China) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980).

society to the semi-colonial transplantation of capitalism.29 Bydoing so, Chinese proto-capitalists were regarded as forerunnersof Chinese history, not oppressors of the class society.

Reform and Reconfiguration of Chinese Historiography: the Nanjing Massacre

Unfinished tasks of the CCP in the late 1950s resumed as thepolitical turmoil of the Cultural Revolution ended and the reformperiod started. As many China observers witnessed, the publicdiscourses of China took the path of nationalism slowly butsteadily. For example, the Zeng Guofan phenomenon, after the1993 publication of the three-volume historical novel, Zeng Guofan,which deals with the life of the late-Qing scholar-general, was animportant event that disseminated nationalist discourses in thepublishing market. Between 1993 and 1996, the book was reprintednineteen times and sold more than a million copies.30

The Zeng Guofan phenomenon is not an isolated event in theChinese cultural terrain. Since the beginning of the 1990s, in bothacademic and popular cultural spheres, nostalgia has been animportant niche in the cultural industry. From Emperor Kang Xito Mao, abundant cultural items both from pre-revolutionaryand revolutionary days have been resurrected, and nostalgiaitself has become one of the most lucrative businesses.31 Almostall books on revolutionary history in China start with the ancientglory of the Chinese civilization, followed by progressive decayof the civilization due to feudalism and the beginning of massivesuffering from the Opium War in 1840. By glorifying the ancientcivilization and national humiliation, history education in con-temporary China is now making the nation, and not the state orrevolutionaries, the main subject.

One of the most vivid examples of the shifting focus during

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29. Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, ed., Zhongguo zibenzhuyi fazhan shi: Zhongguozibenzhuyi de mengya (History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism:Proto-Capitalism in China) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2003), pp. 29-36.

30. Yingjie Guo and Baogang He, “Reimagining the Chinese Nation: TheZeng Guofan Phenomenon,” Modern China, vol. 25, No. 2 (April, 1999),pp. 142-70.

31. Jinhua Dai, “Behind Global Spectacle and National Image Making,”Positions, vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 161-86.

the reform era is the new narrative on the Nanjing Massacre.32

The emergence of the Nanjing Massacre as the symbol of modernChinese national identity is a relatively new phenomenon. Untilthe first Japanese textbook controversy in 1982, the Nanjing Mas-sacre was absent from government documents and Chineseleaders’ speeches. In the nine volumes of the Selected Works ofMao Tse-Tung, the Nanjing Massacre is not discussed with his-torical significance. The first empirical survey and collections ofsurvivors’ testimony were published as late as 1985.33 I believethe silence on the Nanjing Massacre in pre-reform China and itsemergence in the reform era can only be explained through theshifting Chinese official historiography that had to identify “us”and “them” in accordance with changing domestic and interna-tional needs.

A typical national historiography needs two enemies: exter-nal threats that might endanger the community itself and aninternal enemy that might break the unity of the community. Asshown above, the initial CCP historiography in the 1950s identi-fied Western imperialism, and later the United States, as thearchenemy of the Chinese nation. At the same time, the role ofinternal enemy was assigned to the Kuomintang (KMT) in Tai-wan. During numerous mass political campaigns, such as the“Three-Antis” and “Five-Antis,”34 the “Anti-Rightist Campaign,”and the Cultural Revolution, the victims were with few excep-tions associated with the West and the KMT. It is important tonote that the CCP sustained a strong peasant-oriented identity,while the KMT was viewed as representing the urban bour-geoisie. Hence, as the late Tang Tsou illuminated, the ChineseRevolution amounted to peasants in rural areas who seized mod-


32. For a fuller discussion on the changing historiography of the NanjingMassacre, see Jungmin Seo, “Politics of Memory in Korea and China:Remembering the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre,” NewPolitical Science, vol. 30, No. 3 (September, 2008), pp. 369-92.

33. Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections onHistorical Inquiry,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in His-tory and Historiography (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,2000), p. 140.

34. In the middle of the Korean War, the CCP launched the “Three-Anti”and “Five-Anti” campaigns to eliminate reactionary elements in thegovernmental and economic sectors.

ern cities, which is exactly the reverse of what happened in theFrench and Russian revolutions.35 After the establishment of thePRC, the rural origin of the Chinese revolution was constantlyreinvigorated through the symbolism of “the Yen’an way” of lifein the new republic.36

What happened in Nanjing in 1937, therefore, does not exactlyfit into the master narrative of Chinese nationhood initially con-structed by the CCP.37 Because of the party’s strong peasant iden-tity, CCP historians ignored the fall of the KMT capital city and thesuffering of its residents. Nevertheless, mainland China’s takeoverin 1971 of the United Nations Security Council seat from theRepublic of China in Taiwan and the newly emerging Chinesemarket economy by the end of the 1970s removed the necessity tosustain the KMT as China’s archenemy. The most striking changein the description of the Nanjing Massacre in the 1980s was thenaming of the victims. Pre-reform history textbooks in China hadidentified the victims as “Nanjing jumin” (Nanjing residents) or“Nanjing renmin” (people in Nanjing).38 Descriptions of the eventwere focused on the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army, notthe suffering of the victims.

In the 1980s, the description of the event fundamentallychanged. The victims became “Chinese men (women) who werekilled” and “Chinese compatriots (tongbao) who were massa-cred.”39 In new textbooks, the weight of the Nanjing Massacresurpassed those of the “three-all” attacks (sanguang) and theinfamous Japanese army Unit 731 that had performed biologicalexperiments on living Chinese. At the same time, the ultimatevillain’s role was transferred from the American imperialists

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35. Tang Tsou, “Interpreting the Revolution in China: Macrohistory andMicromechanisms,” Modern China, vol. 26, No. 2 (April, 2000), pp. 205-38.

36. David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

37. For a fuller version of the changing description of the Nanjing Massacre,see Seo, “Politics of Memory in Korea and China.”

38. Li Xin et al., Zhongguo xin minzhuzhuyi geming shiqi tongshi (A History ofChina’s New Democracy Revolution), vol. 3 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe,1961 [1981]), p. 30.

39. Beijing Shifan Daxue lishixi Zhongguo xiandaishi jiaoyanshi ed., Zhongguoxiandaishi (1919-1949) (Modern Chinese History), vol. 2 (Beijing: BeijingShifandaxue chubanshe, 1983), pp. 23-24.

and Japanese fascists to Chinese who collaborated with theJapanese imperialists. The prime example was Wang Jing-Wei,40

who now appeared through a chapter-length description in newhistory books.

Changing modern history was paired with a number of newdescriptions on earlier historical figures such as Zeng Guofan andYue Fei. Zeng, who used to be described as a feudalistic traitorwho brutally suppressed the Taiping Rebellion, reemerged as anational hero who sustained the unity of the empire and foughtagainst foreign ideology (Christianity in the Taiping Rebellion).41

The downfall of Yue Fei from the status of national savior to adivisive figure is more ironic. As a loyal general of the SouthernSong court, he was punished due to his combative attitude towardJin (a Jurchen state in Northern China) that was regarded as unre-alistic by the emperor and his colleagues. Like the case of Liu Dan-ian’s criticism against Shang Yue regarding the Manchus, Yue’shawkish policy toward Jurchen, the ancestor of Manchu, now can-not be praised as heroic since Jin is now a part of Chinese history.

In sum, the changing historiography in reforming China is acontinuing effort of the Chinese nation-state to nationalize itsimperial past, a task that was temporarily discontinued duringthe turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. When the chaos was over,the consolidation of China as a multi-ethnic nation state started,first, by officially rejecting Mao’s thesis that “racial (ethnic) strug-gle is in essence a kind of class struggle” and acknowledging theuniqueness and historicity of inter-ethnic relations in China.42

Then, as indicated in the reevaluations of Zeng Guofan and YueFei, the new historiography began to nationalize the imperialpast, the incomplete mission of the PRC.


40. Wang was a former associate of Sun Yat-sen and an important factionalleader in the KMT. He eventually collaborated with Japanese forces inChina and became the nominal leader of the Japanese-established Nanjinggovernment (1940-1945).

41. Gua and He, “Reimagining the Chinese Nation.”42. “Ping suowei minzhu wenti de shizhi shi jieji wenti” (Commenting on the

Perspective that the ‘National Problem Is in Essence a Class Problem’),Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), July 15, 1980; cited in Jin Binghao, ed., Minzugangling zhengci wenxuanbian (Collected Documents on the Principles ofNational Policies) (Beijing: Zhongyang Minzu Daxue chubanshe, 2006),pp. 636-47.

Contextualizing the Koguryo Issue

Being Chinese has always been a contested theme. When theCCP in 2006 invited several hundred Taiwanese, including keyKMT leaders, to Huangling, the tomb of the legendary first emper-or of China, the Chinese mythology was able to symbolically tietwo rival parties, the CCP and the KMT.43 Nevertheless, it couldnot satisfy many Taiwanese who do not identify themselves withthe Han lineage starting from this emperor. Reification of Huan-gling as the symbol of Chineseness might be thought of as an easytool for the current Chinese rulers to use in boosting nationalpride. Nevertheless, just as many Americans cannot identifythemselves with the Mayflower and the Pilgrims, non-Han Chi-nese would view Huangling with detachment. Thus, making a lin-ear history for a nation-state is not an easy task for a China thatanchors its identity in particularism or national uniqueness whileat the same time maintaining its multi-ethnic composition as alegitimate form of a nation-state.

The controversy over the historical ownership of the KoguryoKingdom is directly related to this Chinese attempt to create alinear temporality of the multi-ethnic state while historicizingand incorporating border regions at the same time. As Chinesehistorians acknowledge, the primary purpose of the borderregion research in China is to promote patriotism and stabilizethose areas. The booming research on Chinese border regions is,therefore, an effort to consolidate contemporary Chinese territoryby imbuing sentiments and (structured) nostalgia.44

Rising China has been a heated topic in both academia andpolicy research sectors in East Asia and the United States. Bothpessimists and optimists agree that China’s double-digit eco-nomic growth rates and its rapid military modernization willproduce a new global and regional order in the foreseeable

54 Jungmin Seo

43. Keith Bradsher, “China Woos Taiwan by Honoring First Emperor,”New York Times, April 5, 2006; www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/world/asia/05cnd-emperor.html?scp=1&sq=huangling&st=cse.

44. Dazheng Ma and Ti Liu, Chungguk ui kukkyong, yongto insik: 20-segiChongguk ui pyongangsa yon’gu (Chinese Perceptions of National Borderand Territory: Chinese Scholarship on Border Regions in the 20th Century),translated from the Chinese by Sehyon Cho (Seoul: Tongbuga YoksaChaedan, 2004), pp. 233, 396.

future. Recently, David Kang made an important argument thaturges us to embrace a more imaginative way of understandingthe emerging regional order in East Asia.45 Based on his obser-vation that small and mid-size states in East Asia, includingSouth Korea, “have accommodated rather than balanced China’srapid economic, diplomatic and political emergence over threedecades,”46 he argues that East Asian state identities formulatedthrough the time-honored tributary system play a key role increating an East Asian style of regional stability that does notseek power balancing against China.

In spite of the invaluable insight that takes history seriously,Kang’s argument ignores the epistemological revolution ofnationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesthat was introduced by the novel notion of the sovereignty, tem-porality, and territoriality of the modern nation-state. ModernChinese historians might suggest that Mao’s vision of globalrevolution, which identified national struggles as forms of classstruggle, rather than today’s ambitious nationalism, is a legacyof the Chinese Empire, since it contains significant aspects of theuniversality of history. In sum, the Chinese nation that initiallyemerged at the end of the nineteenth century and reemerged inthe era of reform is in principle different from the political logicof empire. Hence, the stable tributary system cannot be a properreference point for projecting East Asian state relationships inthe future.

As I discussed above, contemporary Chinese historiographyfrom which the Chinese state and populace draw core identitieshas never been fully fixed or stabilized. Regardless of the temporaldistance from the present, Chinese pasts are being continuouslyconstructed and re-memorized based on contemporary sociopo-litical needs. Compared to the pre-reform eras, broadened socialspaces in China have made the CCP’s monopoly over historiog-raphy untenable.47 In that sense, the future of East Asian regional


45. David C. Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2008).

46. Ibid., p. 4.47. For a detail discussion regarding broadened social spaces that produce

alternative forms of nationalism in China, see Jungmin Seo, “InternalDynamics of Chinese Nationalism and Northeast Asian Regional Order,”

order or Sino-Korean relations is highly unpredictable, if not unsta-ble, due to the continuously changing Chinese national identity.Radical and rapid nationalization of China’s imperial past mayproduce a new generation in China that is likely to favor aggres-sive actions against the status quo. National and state identitiesinformed by “historical facts” are hardly negotiable or changeable.Hence, reproduction of historical knowledge and facts in Chinawill bring indirect but fundamental and irreversible consequencesin intra-regional relations.

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