China's Modern Economic History in Communist Chinese Historiography

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Abstract
It will be evident to a reader of historical works produced in the People's Republic of China that this article, in the choice of subject-matter and in its treatment, is decidedly influenced by the current domestic and foreign political “line” of the Communist Party and Government. This is a relative matter, not absolute, but I would suggest that the dominant “class viewpoint” of the first decade of the Peking régime which produced an anonymous history of dynasties without “feudal” emperors or bureaucrats, literature minus the landlord-scholar-official literatus and nameless peasant rebellions as the central matter of China's history, was to a degree correlated with the process of the internal consolidation of power which may more or less be said to have been accomplished with the completion of the collectivisation of agriculture. The more recent “historicist” trend, which while not rejecting entirely its predecessor concentrates on what may be “positively inherited” from the “feudal” past, represents a quickening of Chinese nationalism fanned to a red-hot intensity, one cannot resist the temptation to conjecture, by the increasingly severe quarrel with the Soviet Union. Soviet Russian commentary on recent Chinese historiography, for example, accuses the Chinese of the “introduction of dogmatic, anti-Marxist and openly nationalistic and racist views.” The Chinese, for their now relatively favourable view of the thirteenth-century Mongol conquests (which are seen as calamitous by the Russians and other Europeans), for their claim that Chinese “feudalism” is the classical model of this historical phenomenon, and because they exaggerate the role of Confucian ideas and their influence on Western philosophy, are roundly condemned by the Russians for “bourgeois nationalism.”

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