뉴스레터

The rise of modern China as a world power from the 1990s onward has resulted in a remarkable change in China's status in the world, compared to thirty years ago when China was an under-developed country thinking of itself as a revolutionary Third World nation against imperialism. China's efforts to unify and reorganize itself as a nation-state began with the National Revolution in the 1920s and bore fruit in 1949 as Communist China established the People's Republic of China, but not before China fought a war against the Imperialist Japan that was attempting to thwart such efforts and then the Civil War. But it was not the utopian revolutionary socialist movement during the reign (1849-1976) of Mao Zhedong (毛澤東) of Communist China that caused a remarkable change in the world's (including Korea's) perception of China's status and roles in the world. The change did not occur until the 1990s, about a decade after China's adoption of the Reform and Open-Door Policy in 1978. With such change in the perception of China in world history, a revolutionary change in scholars' views on the history of China in general and the history of the Qing (淸) era and modern and contemporary China in particular became inevitable.

Fundamental Changes in the Historical Perception of China

While the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) during Mao's later years ended in failure and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) launched the Reform and Open-Door policy, there was frankly no fundamental change until the 1980s in the Korean history community's perception of the Chinese Revolution and China's status in the world in the 20th century. There were two external reasons. First, the significance of China's local change could not be confirmed until the fall of communism in East Europe and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. Second, China's reform and opening-up, which received a blow from the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, was not expanded in full-scale until 1992, the year China established diplomatic ties with Korea. As for an internal reason, the sentiments characterized by 'anti-imperialist' nationalism and 'the people's' democratic revolution still persisted in Korea, although the democratic movement accomplished some changes in the system in 1987. Meanwhile, China had been carefully experimenting with the Reform and Open-Door policy under the theory of 'the Initial Stage of Socialism' since 1978. From 1992 onward, China put forward a more radical open-door policy by which its vast land would be open to international capital and technology under the systems of 'Chinese nationalism' and 'national capitalism' that went along and cooperated with the U.S-led world order. By the early 21st century, China became one of the G2 countries asserting worldwide influence, aided by its economy of continental scale, even though it is still a developing country due to structural limitations. In other words, the isolated revolutionary nation that was once poised to replace the bureaucratic Soviet Union as the center of global revolution had renounced revolution and transformed itself into an empire-sized, bureaucratic power operating realistic world strategies. While China may be advocating Marxism and Leninism on the surface, it has been discovered that the Confucian Sinocentrism and the cultural tradition of Sun Tzu's Art of War still persist in modern China. The history of Qing, the last dynasty of the two-millennia-old Chinese Empire, and of the People's Republic of China as the modern history that shaped China today, and the significance of modern China's revolution that overcame and carried on with it must be examined as the starting point of reestablishing academic challenges in the Korean history community.

The Tradition of the Chinese Empire and the Ideal of Republic

While China's modernization movement in the 20th century went through the processes of anti-imperialist national revolution and socialist revolution and aimed for the foundation of an independent, unified people's state and the ideal of utopian republic, Korea, a country sharing colonial/half-colonial experience with China, in its historical perception, tended to sympathize with or reserve judgment for the development of China's modern and contemporary history. What's more, the history of China and the historical continuity of Sino-Korean relations were forgotten while the ties between China and Korea remained essentially broken for about a century, from Qing's withdrawal from Korea following the Sino-Japanese War (1894) until they were reestablished in 1992. Now that Korea is back to facing China as a power, it is worth noting that China's tradition of Confucian Sinocentrism had been a powerful foundation of thinking for the development of modern China's nationalism since the 19th century while the Qing Empire fell and Western imperialism invaded China. Besides, the traditional Sinocentrism was essentially an ideology that strategically advocated the legitimacy of the Chinese Empire as the world's center and its hierarchical control at home and abroad. Therefore, the nationalism of a modern, sovereignty country based on Sinocentrism tends to have the disposition of a 'national empire.' Modern China put forward a centralized administrative system and a national integration policy that were much more powerful than the traditional Chinese Empire's control over multiple ethnic groups. It is also necessary to note the possibility that the traditional military imperialism, even if the international trends of national independence and idealistic cosmopolitanism since the 20th century may work against it, might persist as driving force behind power politics in a more sophisticated and modern form that befits our time. To ensure the development of contemporary nationalism in light of the ideal world order today, it is necessary to criticize and overcome the Sinocentric imperialism deep-rooted not only in China but in Japan and across East Asia and self-centered cultural nationalism, that is the legacy of the traditional Sinocentrism. What is needed to this end, I believe, is to develop pluralistic civil society through democratization of China, local, ethnic autonomy, and cultural pluralism. If this approach is taken in the study of the history of Qing or 20th-century China, there will be quite a number of topics that can be interpreted differently, such as criticism of centralized autocracy during the late Ming and early Qing years, and the May 4th New Culture Movement that advocated the ideal of democratic public and made efforts to reconstruct the traditional Chinese culture. Given this critical mind, a revolutionary change will be required in the description of the history of centralized revolution in modern and contemporary China from the 1920s.

Understanding China's Traditional Culture and Reconstructing Universal Civilization

The Confucian, Sinocentric view of civilization that became the ideological basis of the Chinese Empire started to be surrounded and challenged by the modern Western civilization from the 16th century, but it persisted until the 1860s. When it finally succumbed, it was only by the military pressure in the form of battleships and guns after China's defeat in the two Opium Wars with the British Empire. But China's embrace of true modern reform in the late 1890s came about in the process of confrontation with Japan, a modern state based on the Meiji Restoration with imperial control over Asia. While going through full-scale Westernization following the fall of the Qing Dynasty, rearrangement of traditions, cultural upheaval, including resistance against communization, China has yet to reconstruct an advanced universal civilization. In the 1990s during which Communist China's reform and opening speeded up, China resumed full-scale exchange with the West, the origin of modernity. Notice the pattern of a constructive cycle of history that started in the 1890s and reappeared 100 years later. When China was at a crisis with the fall of Qing in its late years and the disintegration of the People's Republic of China in its early years, Chinese intellectuals deplored the sense of defeat resulting from the disintegration of their civilization by Western modernity more than they did the fall of their nation. They were left with the challenge of reviving Chinese culture, which has not been done. When we look at the relationship between China's cultural tradition and Western modernity in the context of such view of civilization in world history, the challenge of 'Chinese culture as substance; Western culture as practice (中體西用)' posed in the early stage of modernization in the late 19th century, though it did go through changes in meaning and form with the phased development of modernity, still remains unresolved. In connection with this issue, there are some topics in the history of thinking that need to be reexamined, such as changes in the system of knowledge in the Realist School of Confucianism centered on Studies in Statecraft (經世學) and Documental Archaeology (考證學) concurrently with the introduction of early modern Western Learning (西學) from the late Ming and early Qing (17th century) periods, and the formation of modern knowledge system with the full acceptance of modern Western Learning and the establishment of Sinology (國學) in the early years of the People's Republic of China following the late years of Qing. These topics need to be reexamined from the perspective of the integration of civilizations in world history, in connection with changes in China's system of socialist state and world view. This is also connected to the challenge of reconstructing the universal civilization in a form unique to China from the Qing period to the present. To meet the demand of the times in the age of knowledge creation, studies of thinking as part of historical phenomena occurring across many fields tend to expand into more specialized and advanced studies of the history of system of knowledge as an integral part of civilization.