Xin Fan.
World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century
Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiii + 251 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-90365-3.
Reviewed by Di Luo (University of Alabama)
Published on H-Asia (August, 2025)
Commissioned by Jenny H. Day (Skidmore College)
The rise of nationalism has long been a central theme in scholarship on twentieth-century China, with many studies emphasizing the Chinese state’s role in shaping nationalist discourse. In World History and National Identity in China, Xin Fan offers a compelling counternarrative. By tracing the development of world history as an academic discipline in China throughout the twentieth century, Fan shifts the focus to Chinese world historians who critiqued narrow forms of nationalism. He argues that the emergence of academic nationalism in twenty-first-century China can be traced to intellectual resistance against the state's imposition of a Marxist worldview in the 1950s. Rather than serving merely as “handmaidens” of political ideology (p. 10), as previous scholarship has often suggested, Fan contends that Chinese world historians made significant and nuanced contributions to challenging Eurocentric frameworks in global historical understanding.
Fan focuses on ancient world history as a field that allowed Chinese scholars to formulate alternative historical perspectives, especially in response to the limitations of Eurocentric modernity. This field raised pressing historiographical questions about the relevance of the ancient past, the spatial divide between East and West, and the persistence of ethnic biases both within China and globally. By situating China within a broader global past, Chinese historians sought to construct a Chinese identity.
The book traces four generations of Chinese world historians. Chapter 1 examines the late Qing period through Zhou Weihan’s An Outline of Western History (1901), which integrated traditional historiographical forms with Western chronology and content drawn from translated Western and Japanese sources. This synthesis reflected the rise of a world-historical consciousness grounded in a revisionist Confucianism. Drawing on neo-Confucian concepts such as xing (common human nature) and gongli (universal principals), Zhou interpreted China’s recent decline as a result of intellectual stagnation rather than civilizational inferiority. His belief in a shared human nature, rooted in Confucian training, became a lasting legacy in the development of world-historical studies in China.
The Republican period (1912-49) saw the rise of academic professionals who institutionalized world history as a teaching field. Fan examines three key figures: Chen Hengzhe, He Bingsong, and Lei Haizong. All were educated in the United States, taught at Chinese universities, and valued professionalism, though they diverged in their views. Chen, influenced by American liberalism and empiricism, promoted internationalism and viewed world history as a means to foster global harmony. In contrast, He and Lei, shaped by the growing threat of Japanese imperialism, turned toward nationalism. He regarded nationalism as a tool of anticolonial resistance, while Lei adopted a culturally conservative and nationalistic stance during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), emphasizing Chinese civilizational uniqueness and calling for strong leadership and militarism.
Through examining the scholarship of these three individuals, Fan highlights how the professionalization of historical studies brought both opportunities and constraints. The inclusion of world history in secondary education in China increased its visibility but also invited state regulation. In times of national crisis, world historians like Lei Haizong, driven by a sense of social responsibility, increasingly aligned themselves with the state and advocated for cultural reconstruction for national survival. The gradual rise of cultural nationalism marked a significant departure from the late Qing vision of a shared human legacy. Despite its limitations, Lei’s culturalist framework, which analyzed world history through seven major civilizations, offered a radical alternative to Eurocentric national historiography and laid the groundwork for future developments in the field.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the early People’s Republic, when state control intensified. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced Soviet-style Marxist historiography and the jiaoyanshi (teaching and research unit) system, which collectivized teaching and research, enforced ideological discipline, and promoted specialization. Chinese world historians responded in varied ways. Lei Haizong, a prominent scholar from the Republican period, was sidelined for his refusal to conform to Marxist historiography. He challenged the Stalinist five-stage framework of history development (primitive, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism) for its Eurocentrism and teleological assumptions. In contrast, junior scholars like Tong Shuye (1908-68) and Lin Zhichun (1910-2007) embraced Marxism and helped institutionalize world history. Fan emphasizes that belief in Marxism, fear of political persecution, and opportunism all shaped their intellectual trajectories. Despite state control, Chinese historians continued to use the language of professionalization to assert autonomy and critique orthodoxy.
Fan highlights how intellectual resistance emerged through debates over periodization and the Asiatic mode of production (AMP). Tong Shuye’s 1954 periodization of Chinese history, for instance, was criticized for relying too heavily on world-historical models and for drawing inappropriate parallels between China and other ancient civilizations. While the CCP promoted world history as a tool for advancing Marxist-Leninist ideology, many Chinese historians dismissed world-historical research as a series of “forced analogies” that imposed a Eurocentric and teleological framework onto China’s distinct historical trajectory. In this regard, Fan argued that the rise of Chinese cultural exceptionalism was “an unintended consequence of the state’s massive social engineering projects” (p. x). At the same time, Fan cautions against dismissing the work of Chinese world historians as mere “handmaidens” of political ideology. The 1950s saw significant developments in world-historical scholarship. Chinese scholars translated a large body of Soviet texts and primary sources from non-European civilizations, upon which they built their own interpretations using Marxist historical materialism. Tong Shuye, for example, challenged Soviet interpretations by arguing that Asiatic societies were more advanced than their Western counterparts and that the AMP should be seen as a form of feudalism. Tong’s position reflected a broader effort to reconcile national pride with Marxist theory. He used the language of Marxism to challenge Soviet orthodoxy, arguing that Marxist theory was dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Such effort, Fan points out, constituted a form of subtle intellectual resistance to state control.
The Marxist historiography was furthered challenged by Chinese historians in post-Mao China. In chapter 5, Fan explores how economic reforms since 1978 and modernization reshaped world-historical studies. “A belief in cultural difference” between China and the West gradually replaced Marxist historiography that advocated “a common humanity based on historical materialism” (p. 160). Lin Zhichun, once a Marxist advocate, came to view world history as a tool for national rejuvenation in the 1980s. He helped found the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations (IHAC) in 1984, promoting ancient world history as a scientific discipline rooted in linguistic expertise and archaeological inquiry. By the 1990s, Lin Zhichun had rejected the applicability of feudalism to Chinese history, arguing it was a mistranslation of Western concepts. Instead, Lin celebrated China’s unique civilizational attributes, echoing Lei Haizong’s wartime nationalism. These ideological and institutional shifts had mixed effects. While international exchange increased, the relevance of ancient world history declined amid economic concerns. Earlier anti-Eurocentric stances softened, and ironically, Eurocentrism reemerged as world history increasingly focused on the “Great Powers.”
Xin Fan’s World History and National Identity in China offers a rich and nuanced account of how world history developed as a discipline and intersected with nationalism and identity formation in twentieth-century China. While the book excels in tracing intellectual and institutional shifts, it gives limited attention to how academic changes influenced the broader public. A more sustained analysis of public discourse—beyond brief references such as the 1988 television series River Elegy (p. 175)—would have strengthened the study. Additionally, while the focus on ancient world history is well justified, it would be helpful to situate this subfield within the broader landscape of world-historical scholarship in China. Did studies of other historical periods follow similar trajectories of politicization, professionalization, and nationalist reinterpretation? Despite these limitations, Fan’s work is a valuable contribution to Chinese intellectual history, historiography, and global history.
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Citation: Di Luo. Review of Fan, Xin, World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. August, 2025.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61659
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