The Chinese versions of History of Imperial China (Photo/GT)
The Chinese versions of A History of China (Photo/GT)
The Chinese versions of The Cambridge History of China (Photo/GT)
Books on Chinese history written by foreign scholars have seen a boom in sales in China's bookstores in recent years.
In addition to Chinese versions of the classic British 13-volume series The Cambridge History of China, other commonly seen translations include Japanese publisher Kodansha's 10-volume series A History of China (2014) and six-volume series History of Imperial China (2016) co-written by Timothy Brook, Mark Edward Lewis, Dieter Kuhn and William T. Rowe.
Walk into almost any bookstore in China and you will easily find the names of foreign historians, such as Jonathan D. Spence and Endymion Wilkinson, lying next to major Chinese historians such as Lü Simian and Qian Mu.
Yet there are historians in China who take issue with the way Chinese history is presented in many foreign works.
In his work latest work, Chinese History by Yao Dazhong, Taiwan scholar Yao Dazhong outlines the differences in approach taken by Chinese and foreign scholars.
"Chinese history written by domestic scholars tend to be more subjective and therefore have limited observations. Foreigners distance themselves from affairs and thus tend to be more objective. However, their view of Chinese history lacks depth and sometimes contains stereotypes," Yao wrote in the introduction to his book.
"Keeping this in mind, a balance between Chinese and foreign approaches needs to be achieved when writing about history."
"Who will be China's interpreters?"
This is the question raised by Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a Chinese writer famous for his knowledge of both Western and Chinese culture, in his book My Country and My People (1936).
"He [Lin] talked about the pros and cons of foreigners writing about China," U.S. author Michael Meyer told the Global Times.
Meyer was very aware of this question while he was writing his third book about China, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up, which will come out this fall.
"In some respects, they [foreign writers] see things with a fresh perspective that Chinese writers can't - or don't want to - see," Meyer said, explaining Lin's stance.
"On the other hand, foreigners don't have the depth or emotional connection to China that a native writer does," he continued.
A similar stance was also put forward by Yao in his new book, in which he admits that foreign authors tend to provide more objective viewpoints but still lack depth when it comes to their research in that they "are like a person who just looked at a house but didn't go inside."
Jiang Xiaoyuan, chair professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is more neutral on the subject. He attributes the different sides of the argument to the different views on how histories should be written.
"This [different perspective between Chinese and foreigners] is reflected not only in the way they interpret and describe historical events, but also in the trade-off between going into detail and just giving a broad outline," Jiang wrote in his book review of British sinologist Endymion Wilkinson's Chinese History: A New Manual, published by China Reading Weekly in China on February 25.
For example, Jiang points out that The Xuanwu Gate Incident during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), a political coup in 626 in which Prince Li Shimin forced his way into power by killing his brother the crown prince, is widely recognized as a significant event in Chinese history, but is barely mentioned in Wilkinson's history. By contrast, the author dedicates an entire chapter to the scale of the imperial harem.
While such an omission may seem very "irrational" in the eyes of many Chinese, Jiang defends Wilkinson's choice, saying that it is a good thing to get a different perspective.
"Histories are man-made constructs, as such are not objective. Perhaps in Wilkinson's eyes, Chinese history is seen differently than the way Chinese people see it."
