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Because of the strength of the Chinese Communist Party and the importance of the Marxist interpretation of history in legitimizing its rule, it is difficult for historians within the PRC to actively argue in favor of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist interpretations of history. However, this political restriction is less confining as it may first appear in that the Marxist historical framework is surprisingly flexible, and a rather simple matter to modify an alternative historical theory to use language that at least does not challenge the Marxist interpretation of history. |
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This view of Chinese history sees Chinese society in the 20th century as a traditional society seeking to become modern. |
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This view of Chinese history sees Chinese society in the 20th century as a traditional society seeking to become modern, usually with the implicit assumption that Western society is the definition of modern society. |
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John Fairbanks |
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This view of Chinese history has its roots with British views of the orient of the early 19th century. In this viewpoint, the societies of India, China, and the Middle East were societies with glorious pasts but that they have become trapped in a static past. This view provided an implicit justification of British colonialism with Britain assuming the "white man's burden" of breaking these societies from their static past and bringing them into the modern world. By the mid 20th century, it was increasingly clear to historians that the notion of "changeless China" was untenable. A new concept, popularized by [John Fairbanks]? was the notion of "change within tradition" which argued that although China did change in the pre-modern period but that this change existed within certain cultural traditions. There are a number of criticisms of the modernist critique. One centers on the definition of "traditional society." The criticism is that the idea of "traditional society" is simply a catch all term for early non-Western society and implies that all such societies are similiar. To use an analogy, one could classify all animals into "fish" and "non-fish" but that classification would be hardly useful, and would imply that spiders are similar to mountain goats. The notion of "change within tradition" also been subject to criticism. The criticism is that the statement that "China has not changed fundamentally" is tautological, that one looks for things that haven't changed and then define those as fundamental. The trouble with doing this is that when one can do this with anything that has lasted for an extended period of time resulting in absurd statements such as "England has not changed fundamentally in the past thousand years because the institution of the monarchy has existed for this long." |
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European conflict interpretations focus on interaction with Europe as the driving force behind recent Chinese history. There are two variants, one focuses on Europe as the driven force behind China's quest to modern, the other focuses on the effects of European colonialism. One criticism of this view is that it ignores historical forces that do not involve Europe, such as indigineous economic forces. One example of a blind spot which is provided by this viewpoint is the influence of central Asian policies on interactions with Europe in the Qing dynasty. |
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