Table Of ContentThe Challenge of Linear Time
Leiden Series in
Comparative Historiography
Editors
Axel Schneider
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
VOLUME 7
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lsch
The Challenge of Linear Time
Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia
Edited By
Viren Murthy and Axel Schneider
LEIDEN BOSTON
2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The challenge of linear time : nationhood and the politics of history in East Asia / edited by
Viren Murthy and Axel Schneider.
pages cm. — (Leiden series in comparative historiography, ISSN 1574-4493 ; volume 7)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-90-04-26013-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26014-6 (e-book)
1. China—Historiography. 2. Japan—Historiography. 3. Historiography—Political
aspects—China. 4. Historiography—Political aspects—Japan. 5. Time—Political aspects—
China. 6. Time—Political aspects—Japan. 7. Nationalism—China. 8. Nationalism—
Japan. 9. China—Intellectual life—20th century. 10. Japan—Intellectual life—20th century
I. Murthy, Viren. II. Schneider, Axel.
DS734.7.C38 2014
951.0072—dc23
2013028013
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ISSN 1574-4493
ISBN 978-90-04-26013-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-26014-6 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
List of Contributors ....................................................................................... vii
Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Viren Murthy, Axel Schneider
TIME, HISTORy, AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITy
1. Negativity and Historicist Time: Facticity and Intellectual
History of the 1930s ................................................................................. 11
Naoki Sakai
2. Ontological Optimism, Cosmological Confusion,
and Unstable Evolution: Tan Sitong’s Renxue and Zhang
Taiyan’s Response .................................................................................... 49
Viren Murthy
3. Nation, History and Ethics: The Choices of Post-Imperial
Historiography in China ........................................................................ 83
Axel Schneider
4. Reading Takeuchi yoshimi and Reading History ......................... 113
Sun Ge
THE BURDEN OF THE PAST AND THE HOPE FOR A BETTER FUTURE
5. An Eschatological View of History: yoshimi Takeuchi
in the 1960s .................................................................................................. 135
Takahiro Nakajima
批林批孔
6. The Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius ( )
and the Problem of “Restoration” in Chinese Marxist
Historiography .......................................................................................... 155
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
vi contents
RECOLLECTION OF THE PAST AND THE POPULARIZATION
OF HISTORy
7. Popular Readings and Wartime Historical Writings in
Modern China .......................................................................................... 181
Long-hsin Liu
8. Figuring History and Horror in a Provincial Museum:
The Water Dungeon, The Rent Collection Courtyard,
and the Socialist Undead ..................................................................... 215
Haiyan Lee
HISTORy AND THE DEFINITION OF SPATIAL,
CULTURAL AND TEMPORAL BOUNDARIES
9. Revolution as Restoration: Meanings of “National Essence”
and “National Learning” in Guocui Xuebao ................................... 257
Tze-ki Hon
10. Temporality of Knowledge and History Writing in Early
Twentieth-Century China. Liu yizheng and A History of
Chinese Culture ........................................................................................ 277
Ya-pei Kuo
Index .................................................................................................................. 293
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Sun Ge (PhD. 2003, Tokyo Metropolitan University) is Professor of litera-
ture and intellectual history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
She is a public intellectual in Japan and China and has published numerous
books on Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. She is currently work-
ing on a book on the famous Japanese intellectual, Maruyama Masao.
Tze-ki Hon (Ph.D. 1992, University of Chicago) is Professor of History at
State University of New york at Geneseo. He has published monographs,
edited volumes and many articles on late imperial and modern China,
including The Yijing and Chinese Politics (SUNy Press, 2005), Revolution
as Restoration (Brill, 2013), the edited volumes The Politics of Historical
Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Brill, 2007), and Beyond the
May Fourth Paradigm (Lexington, 2008).
ya-pei Kuo (Ph.D. 2002, University of Wisconsin, Madison) is currently a
Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at Ruhr-Universität Bochum,
Germany. She worked as an assistant professor at Tufts University, US in
2003–2008, and was a Research Fellow at International Institute for Asian
Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2009–2010. Her forthcom-
ing book, Debating “Culture” in Interwar China (Routledge), analyzes the
debate on China’s national identity in the 1920s and early 1930s. She has
also published on the changing meaning of Confucius cult in the late Qing,
and Protestant missionaries’ Chinese writings in the 19th century.
Haiyan Lee (Ph.D. 2002, Cornell University) is Associate Professor of
Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the
author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950
(2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association
for Asian Studies for the best English-language book on post-1900 China.
劉龍心
Long-hsin Liu , (Ph.D., National Chengchi University) is Associate
Professor of history at Soochow University in Taipei, received her Ph.D. in
history from National Chengchi University, Taiwan. She works on histo-
riography and on modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Her
most recent publications are “Academy and Institution: The Disciplinary
viii list of contributors
Process and the Foundation of Modern Chinese Historiography” (2002, and
revised to Chinese simplified version in 2007), and “Historical Lessons
and the History of Knowledge in the Late Qing Examination System,” in
Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow ed., Transforming History: The Making
of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China (2011). She is
currently working on a new book-length project on modern Chinese his-
tory and historiography within the context of “knowledge transformation”
and national identity.
Viren Murthy (Ph.D. 2007, University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor
in Transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He
specializes in Chinese and Japanese intellectual history and is especially
interested in the critique of capitalist modernity and imagining Asian
identity.
Takahiro Nakajima (Ph.D. 2009, University of Tokyo) is Associate Professor
of Chinese philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His publications include
The Philosophy of Evil: Imaginations in Chinese Philosophy (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobō, 2012), Praxis of Co-existence: State and Religion (Tokyo: University
of Tokyo Press, 2011), The Zhuangzi, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009),
Philosophy in Humanities (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009), The Reverberation
of Chinese Philosophy: Language and Politics, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo
Press, 2007). He is now interested in the phenomenon on Confucian revival
in East Asia.
Naoki Sakai (Ph. D. 1982, University of Chicago) is Goldwin Smith Professor
of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has published in a number of lan-
guages in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation
studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of semiotic
and literary multitude—speech, writing, corporeal expressions, calligraphic
regimes, and phonographic traditions. His publications include: Translation
and Subjectivity (in English, Japanese, Korean, German forthcoming); Voices
of the Past (in English, Japanese & Korean); The Stillbirth of the Japanese as a
Language and as an Ethnos (Japanese and Korean); Hope and the Constitution
(in Japanese; Korean forthcoming). He edited a number of volumes includ-
ing: Knowledge and System under Total War: 1935–1955, Tokyo, Iwanami
Shoten, 2002; Trans-Pacific Imagination (with Hyon Joo yoo), Singapore &
London, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2012; Translation, Biopolitics,
Colonial Difference (with Jon Solomon) Vol. 4, Traces: A Multilingual Series
list of contributors ix
of Cultural Theory and Translation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2006; Globalization Studies—From Total War System to Globalization
(with yasushi yamanouchi) Tokyo, Heibonsha, 2003; Specters of the
West and the Politics of Translation (with yukiko Hanawa) Vol. 1, Traces:
A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation. Ithaca: Traces, Inc.,
2001; Deconstructing Nationality (with Brett de Bary and Iyotani Toshio)
Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobô, 1996 (English translation thereof, Deconstructing
Nationality. Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005). Sakai
is the founding senior editor of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural
Theory and Translation.
Axel Schneider (Ph.D. 1994, Bochum University) is Professor of Modern
Sinology at the University of Göttingen. He specializes in modern Chinese
intellectual history, especially the history of historical writing and histori-
cal thinking.
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Ph.D. 1982, Ruhr University Bochum)
is a professor of Chinese Studies and Vice Rector for Research and Career
Development at the University of Vienna. She has published on 20th cen-
tury Chinese history and historiography and is currently completing a
book on East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has also published
articles on memory issues related to the Great Famine and the Cultural
Revolution.
