I am deeply honored that the translation of The Three Tones of History: The Boxers as Events, Experiences, and Myths (published in English in 1997 Chinese) will be republished by the Social Science Literature Press, and I would like to take this opportunity to explain to Chinese readers some of the work I have done and how it relates to my writings in recent years. For a scholar who is often associated with the Sinicist view of Chinese history, The Three Tones of History represent a major shift in my academic direction. There is no doubt that I devote a great deal of space in this book to the inner world of the Boxers and other Chinese who lived in the North China Plain in 1900, and in this regard, the research method may be regarded as China-centered. However, I was also interested (albeit to a much lesser extent) in the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the foreigners involved in the events at the time, and often pointed out what both Chinese and foreign sides had in common, demonstrating (at least at some moments) a more universal approach to research than the Chinese-centric view.
More importantly (as I explain in this book), my main aim was to explore a range of issues related to the writing of history, "The Boxers were only 'supporting roles' in this work." "This is very different from the usual procedure of historical research. In such studies (not only in the field of China studies, but also in other fields of study), authors tend to place their emotions in a broad frame of reference and draw conclusions in the hope of reinforcing the significance and importance of their work. I ask a series of questions at the beginning of The Three Notes of History, but I never answer them. Although I have studied the Boxer Rebellion as an extended case, I have made it clear in my concluding section that there is no necessary or unique link between the Boxer Rebellion and the major issues of interest to me. Many other events in the history of the world can also be used to achieve this purpose. The main purpose of this book is not to explain Chinese history, but to put forward its own views on the universal problems related to historical writing. This is not particularly relevant to the Chinese-centric view.
Other research topics about China that are increasingly popular in Western academia also challenge the Chinese-centric view, which in some cases is discarded, but in many cases, researchers subtly combine it with other research methods to play out. When I first described the China-centrism about 30 years ago, I explicitly linked it to the study of Chinese history. In the book "Discovering History in China," I did title the chapter that introduced the China-centric view "Toward a China-Centered History of China." As long as historians choose to study a subject that is broadly and unequivocally focused on a certain field in China (political, social, economic, ideological, cultural, religious) – which is a very important part of the study of Chinese history, despite new developments in academic research in recent years – then, in my opinion, the China-centric view remains very useful. However, the China-centric view is limited. When scholars discuss some of the topics and research directions of 'de-China-centric', including transnational historical phenomena (such as immigration, the emergence of the modern global economy, and the evolution of Asian regional systems) or ideological issues of universal significance (such as multiple methods of studying history, comparative historical research); or 'non-regionalization' of China from an entity space, or a new definition of 'China' (the self-perception of ethnic minorities in China and overseas Chinese), the China-centric view does not apply.
Although these research directions point out the limitations of the narrow sense of China-centricity, they have made unimaginably significant contributions to the study of Chinese history. Some of these contributions have been made by removing the barriers that have been artificially created around "China" over centuries (Chinese as many as those created by Westerners); they subvert narrow discourses about Chinese history (no less from Chinese historians than from Western historians); and they enrich our knowledge and knowledge of "China" in different places and at different times They enable us to conduct a more objective and impartial (less biased) comparative study of China with the rest of the world; they also correct our (Westerners') long-standing view of China as the quintessential "Other" by breaking down the arbitrary and misleading distinction between "East" and "West", enabling us not to see China — Chinese and Chinese culture — as a typical outlier, but as a normal kind.
I would like to explain this last point in detail, as it has become an increasingly important focus in my research work. Westerners' views on the differences between Chinese and Western cultures are exaggerated and unrealistic, and are often (though not all) derived from Western-centrism. In particular, I am skeptical of this. I take cultural issues seriously in all my treatises, and I have never denied that there are major differences in the cultural traditions of China and the West. But I also think that overemphasizing these differences in historical research can easily lead to one such and one deplorable distortion or even exaggeration. One such distortion comes in the form of the essence of culture — the categorical endowed on one culture with some special values or characteristics that are believed to be impossible for other cultures. For example, as Amartya Sen has pointed out eloquently, clichés such as the totalitarian East and the liberal and tolerant West tend to obscure the possibility that India or China may also have historically had a tradition of tolerance or freedom, and that totalitarianism may have been an important feature of Western history. In fact, these traditional views are completely inconsistent with historical facts. Amartya Sen points out that "speaking of freedom and tolerance", it may be more meaningful to "classify Aristotle and Ashoka as one, and Plato, Augustine and Codillier into another" if priority is given to the substance of thought rather than culture or region.
When historians try to understand the peoples living in another culture, too much emphasis on cultural differences makes it more difficult not only to understand the complex and often contradictory factors of that culture, to understand the ups and downs of that culture, but also to fail to see aspects of the thoughts and actions of these peoples that coincide with or echo the thoughts and actions of peoples elsewhere in the world that reflect the inherent characteristics of cross-cultures and human beings. I believe that if we want to have a fuller, richer and more just understanding and recognition of Chinese past, we must also pay attention to this universal characteristic and cultural difference. Valuing this feature is also one of the most effective ways we can transcend the barriers and boundaries that Western and Chinese historians (albeit in different ways and for different reasons) often set for Chinese and Chinese history.
Although I first explored the issue of cultural integration or resonance between China and the West and the basic psychological tendencies of human beings in a paper about Wang Tao, published about 50 years ago, it was not until I studied the Boxer Rebellion that I began to think deeply about this point. In The Three Notes of History, when I strive to give "rationalized" or "humanized" explanations of the boxers' thought and behavior, I often rely on cross-cultural comparative approaches and often expand the scope of the "other" in China, including Africa and other parts of the world in addition to the West. I used this example when I discussed the rumors and mass hysteria in North China at the height of the Boxer Crisis in the spring and summer of 1900. One of the most widely circulated rumors at the time was that foreigners and Chinese parishioners poisoned wells in villages and polluted water sources. According to the records of the time, the accusations of poisoning in the well were "everywhere" and were an "important factor" in provoking the Chinese people to "hate" the parishioners.
An interesting problem has to do with the mass hysteria in this case. Why poison the masses? In particular, why poison public water sources? If we accept the claim that rumors (a form of narrative or story) convey a message, and that the widespread spread of rumors reflects important and symbolic messages related to the mass anxieties of the population in a social crisis, then the way to answer these questions is to try to determine whether there is a close correlation between the panic caused by the rumor and the environment in which the rumor is generated. The phenomenon of kidnappings causing panic has a long history in China and many other parts of the world. In such cases, the safety of children is most concerned, and as the word kidnap indicates, children are often the main victims. On the other hand, the rumor of poisoning the population is the most symbolic response of people who are in potential danger to major crises such as war, natural disasters or epidemic diseases.
An examination of the experiences of other societies can fully confirm this inference. Poisoning and other similar crimes were planted on the first Christians during the Roman period and to the Jews during the Black Death epidemic in the Middle Ages (1348). During the cholera epidemic in Paris in 1832, there were rumors that poison powder had been widely distributed in bread, vegetables, milk and water in the city. At the beginning of the First World War, all the countries involved in the war were rumors that enemy agents were poisoning water sources. Within hours of the Great Tokyo Earthquake on September 1, 1923, when the earthquake sparked a raging fire, rumors began circulating that The Koreans and socialists had not only set fire to the city but had also conspired to rebel and poisoned the well. At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, news reports accused traitors of poisoning Drinking Water in Shanghai. During Nigeria's civil war in the late 1960s, rumors of poisoning the population were rife in the Bifra region.
In many of these cases, rumors have been directed at outsiders (or traitors) who have been either implicitly or explicitly accused of trying to destroy the society in which the rumors circulate. This phenomenon is very similar to the situation in China during the Boxer Rebellion. People at the time accused the parishioners of challenging the authority of the Chinese gods and were fully responsible for the drought in northern China in the spring and summer of 1900. Similarly, rumors accusing foreigners and their Chinese followers of poisoning water sources in northern China portray outsiders as bad people who deprive Chinese of the most important substances on which to survive. The widespread circulation of rumors about poisoning in wells directly reflected the heaviest group anxiety of the common people at that time: the fear of death.
In the summer of 2001, I gave a lecture on the Boxer Rebellion, and I would like to quote one of these arguments to summarize my discussion of these problems caused by the excessive emphasis on cultural differences. The title of the speech was "Humane Interpretation of the Boxers" that people are unlikely to use (the audience was predominantly Western, which was somewhat challenging). My position in my speech is that culture is a prism in which each ethnic group manifests its own characteristics in thought and behavior. In addition, culture has the potential to alienate relations between ethnic groups, thereby accelerating the process of stereotyping, exaggeration and mythologization. Given that the Boxers have been in this unusual process throughout the 20th century in China and the West, I have sought in my speeches to illustrate what the Boxers have in common with people living in other cultures facing similar challenges. I did not deny the cultural peculiarities of the Boxers (and certainly did not describe them as angels); I simply wanted to correct the so-called dehumanizing exceptionalism, which led to misunderstandings and distortions of the history of the Boxers almost from the outset.
Cultural differences are, of course, closely related to the antagonism between the inside and the outside and the many different patterns that can be observed from the above perspective. This is a question that I have been interested in throughout my research career. In the concluding part of the preface to the second edition of The Discovery of History in China, I began to address the issue of the "outsider's perspective" in historical narratives. I point out that while I discussed the externalities in the last chapter of the book and considered some of these models to be less destructive than others, I have always described it as "a problem that is a burden rather than a positive asset for historical research." Many oppose this position, arguing that in some cases outsiders (in this case, American historians who study China) may have an advantage over insiders (Chinese scholars of Chinese history). In the course of writing The Three Tones of History, in the course of a long-term effort to think about differences, especially between direct historical experience (the perspective of a typical insider) and history later reconstructed by historians (no doubt outsiders), I accepted the above criticism and began to realize that, while the external character of the historian is indeed a problem, it is also an indispensable factor: it distinguishes us from the direct experiencers of history, so that we as historians can do our best, In ways that are not possible with the direct participants of history, history becomes easier to understand and more meaningful.
Ironically, my next book, Speaking to History: TheStory of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (University of CaliforniaPress, 2009), may be the ultimate demonstration of this truth. The book explores the various ways in which Chinese throughout the 20th century tells the story of the conquests of the Kings of the Southeastern region during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. At the same time, the book discusses a broader historical question: why people (at certain points in their collective or individual existence) are particularly attracted to stories that resonate with their environment (often ancient stories). The synopsis of the story of the Yue King's gouge is that a young king was defeated by his main rival, the powerful neighbor wu, and served as a prisoner and slave in the state of Wu for three years. After King Wu finally believed in his loyalty and reliability, he was allowed to return to Yue. He spent 20 years in Vietnam and was determined to take revenge. Gou Jian patiently increased the population of Vietnam and strengthened the military and economic strength of Vietnam. After gaining the support of his ministers, Gou Jian eventually led his army to launch a series of attacks against his rivals, killing the King of Wu and destroying the State of Wu.
Chinese students in the 20th century were as familiar with the story of the Yue King's gouge as American teenagers were with the biblical stories of Adam and Eve or David and Goliath. But while the story of Yue Wang's Gougege has had a profound impact on Chinese cultural circles, American scholars (referring to non-Chinese scholars) who study china's recent history seem to know nothing about it. This kind of story is undoubtedly a cultural element of every society, and "insiders" (people who live and are educated in this society) are often indoctrinated with this knowledge from an early age as part of the cultivation of culture, while "outsiders" (who learn about that culture mainly from books, or through a short period of time in that society as adults) are almost never exposed to this knowledge (or have not been noticed when they are exposed). As a result of this strange phenomenon, the writings of American historians (as far as I know of all Western historians) have largely, if not all, failed to explore the place of the story of Yue Wang's gouge in 20th-century Chinese history.
Unlike most American historians who study Chinese history, Chinese scholars are intimately familiar with the story of Yue Wang's Gou Jian (a Chinese colleague once told me that this story is "imprinted on our hearts" and know that this story was widely circulated and widely cited in the 20th century. But I find no indication that Chinese scholars view the relationship between this story and its own evolutionary history as a subject suitable for serious study. If my reasoning is correct, the reason for this phenomenon is likely to be this: Most Chinese are accustomed to the close connection between story and history. From an early age, they were indoctrinated with the idea that even stories derived from antiquity can provide reference to real-world problems in meaningful ways. As a result, they instinctively value the guiding or motivating role of such stories on real-world issues, rather than diving into the unique importance of stories-historical relationships themselves in China or other cultural contexts.
The contradictory character of Dialogue with History should be explained. The book explores the impact of a story that is little known to outsiders but is deeply rooted in Chinese culture and is well known to Chinese people on Chinese history. Arguably, there is nothing more Sinocentristic than the book. This is a retaliatory return to the Chinese-centric view. But at the same time, for foreigners like me who were not born in a Chinese cultural environment, once familiar with the story and understand its significant impact on turbulent 20th-century China, it seems natural to go further and raise a larger — apparently non-Chinese-centric — question: What is the impetus behind pushing a people (any nation) to look into its current historical experience through seemingly prophetic stories.
While the breadth of such stories in China may be extraordinary, the role they play in the way they engage in historical dialogue is inevitably found in many other societies. Let's look at how the myth of Masada (symbolizing an individual's willingness to sacrifice his life over admit defeat) resonates among Jews threatened in the decades before and after the establishment of the State of Israel (1948), or the revelations that Serbs at the end of the 20th century received from the disastrous defeat of their ancestors in the Battle of Kosovo more than 600 years ago (1389), or the interesting story of Barack Obama consciously placing himself in the history of the American civil rights movement constructed on the content of the Bible, he argues, Martin Luther King Jr. and others represent the "Moses generation" –"The men and women who participated in the movement demonstrated and suffered, but in many cases 'they didn't cross the river to see the land of hope'" –"; his own generation was the "Joshua generation".
This interaction between (ancient) stories and (present) history is a phenomenon of considerable historical significance. However, this interaction is extremely complex and profoundly reflects the way in which individuals, groups or, in some cases, the whole population place themselves in the space of historical memory. The placement in different cases is very different. Barack Obama's understanding of the resonance between the American civil rights movement (and his place in it) and the biblical stories of the Moses to Joshua period is certainly very different from the understanding of Jews who were heavily influenced by the myths of Masada in the mid-20th century. But there is something constant about all these examples, the mysterious power that people draw from stories that date back to the present and that are often used to tell things that have only a little bit of historical foundation.
This power is pervasive, but little is known about it. In fact, this power deserves more attention from historians. In the process of exploring the impact of the story of Yue Wang's Gou Jian on the history of modern China, I began to become interested in the general pattern of interaction between past stories and present history. After finishing that book, it occurred to me that it might be very interesting if I chose a certain number of examples related to certain particular problems from the many examples of countries in the world and analyzed them comprehensively. This idea led me to recently complete a new book called History and PopularMemory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, Columbia University Press, 2014. The book focuses on six countries – Serbia, Palestine/Israel, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and France – all of which faced serious crises in the 20th century. The crisis in each case involves war or the threat of war, and in response to the crisis, affected people and nations are using ancient historical stories that have similar themes to what actually happened. The plays, poems, films, plays, and other works that are produced often play an important role in reviving these stories, and, as we saw in the 20th century, nationalism played an important role in them.
Since old stories can't match exactly what's going on, people have modified them to a greater or lesser degree to make them more in tune with reality. In this case, popular memory becomes important. Popular memory — the widespread belief that things did happen in the past — is often very different from what serious historians have determined, after careful study of various historical evidence, what really happened in the past. This distinction between memory and history is important to historians, but it is often vague in the minds of ordinary people, who are more likely to be attracted to history that fits their preconceptions—the history they feel comfortable with and the history with which they identify—than in the more objective "real" history. This ambiguity is naturally reinforced when professional historians are not absolutely sure of determining historical facts due to the relative lack of historical evidence or the unreliability of the surviving evidence. This is true of every example I explore in the book. Even in situations where there is only a modicum of historical evidence, for example, when Joan of Arc was burned to death in 1431 and the armies of the Roman Empire besieged Jerusalem in AD 70 A.D. and destroyed the Second Temple of the Jews, the influence of the historian's "historical facts" is often difficult to match the influence of historical stories, although historical stories are mixed with myths and legends (perhaps this is why it is so influential). The main purpose of History and Popular Memory is to explore this phenomenon in depth.
The book's central theme (as does Dialogue with History) clearly stems from the seeds sown in The Tritones of History, starting with the distinction between story (or myth) and history. However, I think it has a more important meaning. As a historian who has studied China all his life, my work revolves around a country and a culture. Of course, I also often make comparative studies of China with other countries and cultures, but the purpose of comparative research is mainly to deepen and enrich my (and my readers') knowledge and understanding of Chinese history. Although one chapter in History and Popular Memory is derived from Chinese history, it is only one chapter in the book and weighs the same as the chapters discussing France, Serbia, Britain, Palestine/Israel, and the Soviet Union. The book does not discuss a particular country or culture, but rather a cross-cultural (or supracultural) phenomenon — the role of stories in popular memory that has undoubtedly occurred in all parts of the world, regardless of the linguistic, religious, social, cultural, and other differences of the peoples living in those places. In short, what we see is a completely different kind of world history, not a traditional world history based on connection and influence, but a world history seen in the constant recurrence, distinct similarity, independent development, and most likely rooted in certain human habits that transcend cultural particularities— importantly, the universality of storytelling in human experience. Sowing the seeds of such an understanding of global history is another part of my research work, and it may be said that this seed has sprouted in The Three Tones of History.
Written on February 28, 2014 at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University
This article is excerpted from Paul A. Cohen. The Three Notes of History as a Collector's Edition of Events, Experiences, and Myths. Beijing:Social Sciences Academic Press, 2015.07
Using the Boxer Rebellion as an example, this book explains three different ways of understanding history, namely the three tones of history: events, experiences, and myths. Historians' work to reshape history is at odds with two other paths to "knowing" history—experience and myth—that are more persuasive and influential to the average person.
The main purpose of this book is not to tell the history of the Boxers, but to explore a series of issues related to the writing of history, "The Boxers are only 'supporting roles' in this work." So this book is also, to some extent, a work of historical theory, and it offers us a new way of thinking about history.
The book has been reprinted many times, sold out many times, and this time the modern history theory is jointly launched by the Prophet Bookstore