In 1958, the brilliant sinologist and intellectual historian Joseph Levenson (1920–1969) published the first of the three volumes that would become his trilogy Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. The work was completed in 1965 and has since gone on to become what literary critics call a canonical text. Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate quite deliberately mimes Levenson’s trilogy in its title, but it is not a literal resumption of the inquiry he began five decades ago. Rather, I think of his work as a marker, a major milestone on what must necessarily be a never-ending intellectual journey...

On November 19, 2004, Xu Jialu, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, announced the completion of a vast literary enterprise he had been supervising. For more than thirteen years Xu had been editor in chief of a translation of China’s twenty-four official dynastic histories from the classical literary Chinese in which they had been composed into modern vernacular Chinese, the language as it is spoken and written today. The project had employed more than two hundred professors from seven academic institutes and universities. These twenty-four histories represent the accumulated effort of centuries and cover all...

“Today, thanks to God and in consequence of Him,” noted the great Persian historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1317) in the introduction to his magnum opus of 1308,

the extremities of the inhabited earth are under the dominion of the house of Genghis Khan, and philosophers, astronomers, scholars, and historians from North and South China, India, Kashmir, Tibet, the land of the Uighurs and the other Turkic tribes, the Arabs and the Franks, all belonging to different religions and sects, are united in large numbers in the service of majestic Heaven.

And each one had manuscripts on the chronology, history and...

In March 1997, Joanna Handlin-Smith, a specialist in the Ming era, convened a panel of China scholars at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago. Its purpose was to assess the state of studies of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It had been twenty years since a comparable panel had addressed the condition of Ming-era scholarship, the occasion then being the publication in 1976 of The Dictionary of Ming Biography, a large-scale scholarly collaboration, seen as a companion to the famous biographical dictionaries that had been compiled for both the Qing era (1644–1912) and the...

In 2012 China will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the abdication that ended the Qing dynasty, the last episode in China’s long imperial history. In the normal course of things, the next dynasty would have taken on the task of writing the official history of its defunct predecessor. But there has been no “next dynasty,” and thus in this sense the long chronicle of the emperors of China has not been brought to a proper end. Even in the past, when there was a proper dynastic successor, the preparation of the requisite history could take a long time; the...

Contemporary China’s changing understanding of the country’s modern history begins with Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Until not too long ago, it was the final destination of older historical interpretations and the point of departure for newer ones. Here was another cataclysm, not only in China’s modern history but also in the history of the world, a great event among the other great events of the twentieth century. The victory of the Communist Party of China was unanticipated. The party had begun with a single cell in Shanghai in 1921. It had...

For centuries the West has had a stake in China’s struggles about its political culture and its mode of governance. In particular, the West believed that a triumph in China by one or another of its major religious or political creeds would tip the balance of power in the world. Thus, in the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries sought the conversion of China not only in the interests of the Middle Kingdom’s lost souls but also in the interest of Christianity as a whole; a Christian China, if one could be brought about, would be the decisive factor in Christianity’s worldwide...

One of China’s greatest and far-reaching discoveries in the nineteenth century was that the world was no longer what it had once been thought to be. China was hardly alone in having to readjust its most basic sense of things, for this was a problem for the entire non-Western world. The West had also gone through similar conceptual crises, and the world history that the West presented to the world in the nineteenth century was just the latest iteration in a long series.

Classical historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, and others had developed a sense of what belonged...

A century ago a few of China’s most brilliant and insightful thinkers imagined a stellar future for their country—a China that is now under construction before our eyes—but none of them envisioned the details of the intervening hundred years, the actual events that would occur between then and now. From the perspective of 1905, neither utopian philosophy nor religious conviction nor science fiction provided even a hint of the horrific occurrences of twentieth-century history. And no pessimist—no prophet of dystopia—could even have begun to foresee them either. To re-examine great eras in China’s past is to...

Any discussion of the future of national epics and national narratives in China should begin by examining the fate of the very story that was put forward not long ago as the greatest of China’s modern national narratives—the coming of the People’s Republic of China. And central to an understanding of that particular tale is the radical way in which it attached China’s history and China’s future to concepts that were not Chinese at all—Marxism, dialectical materialism, proletarian internationalism, and Stalinism. Beyond these abstractions, China’s future was also attached to a recently established, actually existing, political regime—the...

In the course of the past century the modern has presented itself to China in very appealing guises—only to leave disappointment behind. The promise of the first great age of liberal globalization at the turn of the twentieth century gave way to disillusionment, as European civilization collapsed in the wake of World War I. After that, the promise of a new revolutionary internationalism, when implemented in a new People’s Republic, led not to a restoration of China’s glories but to mind-boggling material and psychological damage, to international isolation, and almost to open war with a once-inspirational Soviet Union. Most...

The present invariably imposes itself on its understanding of the past, and these perceptions of the past then come to interact in the present when making grand plans for the future. Still, an examination of past eras of Chinese greatness shows far more adaptation to changed circumstances—often dangerous circumstances—than it demonstrates an implementation of some pre-existing vision. Indeed, whatever can be said about the fixed principles and enduring philosophical assumptions of Chinese strategy, its implementation was frequently the product of bitter, and even violent, argument within the political system, argument that was, in turn, the result of a...

In the prologue that introduced this book, I recalled that my first lesson about Modern China came from George Orwell. It has turned out that in the decades since that introduction, this was not a bad place to begin. Cerebral analysis and its talk of dialectic and metaphysics can all too easily overlook the Modern Fate of those who have actually lived the story, but who lived it not dialectically or metaphysically, but tragically. And even amid the more benign version of modernity that settled into China after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, life is lived neither sociologically...