Speaking of the most famous historical works, there is a good chance that some people will mention the Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar. Before Huang Renyu, we did not know that history could be written in this way, and it seemed that it could only be ignored within the ivory tower; but after Huang Renyu, not only did Ming history enter the field of public reading, but the entire history caused one wave of attention after another on the public scale. At the same time, various controversies surrounding Huang Renyu's view of historiography and methods of governance also followed.
Today marks the anniversary of the death of this famous historian. Eighteen years ago today, on January 8, 2000, Huang Renyu died of a sudden heart attack. On this day, we come to talk to you about Huang Renyu, not only a huang Renyu who has achieved fame, but also Huang Renyu who has left a lot of controversy.
At the end of the article, we also specially prepared an "Easter egg" and invited several teachers in the academic circles to talk about their views and thoughts on Huang Renyu and "Fifteen Years of Wanli". What do you think of this popular and best-selling historical work? Did you fall in love with history through Mr. Huang Renyu? You are welcome to leave a message and share your views with us.
Written by | Zongcheng
Huang Renyu has lived himself as a phenomenon, or a legend. He was originally a simple scholar, living in an ivory tower, but after the age of sixty, because of the long time to produce new books, the assessment was not up to standard, he was dismissed by the State University of New York at Newports, and the academic road sounded the alarm. However, life has had ups and downs, and what Newpzi Did Not Expect is that the next year, Huang Renyu published a new book, entitled "Fifteen Years of Wanli", which was expensive in Luoyang as soon as it came out. Since then, each of his books has become a best-selling book, and some people have admired him, and he has also organized the "Huangxue Research Society" and applied to establish the "Huangxue Studies" academic series.
There are many coincidences and anecdotes in his life, and this coincidence runs through life and death. Huang Renyu died on January 8, 2000, and it was rumored that he went to the movies that day and had a heart attack. On the way to the cinema, Huang Renyu smiled and said to mrs. Geer: "There are so many diseases in the elderly, it is best to abandon the shell and leave the world." "I don't want to be a slur.
In the folk, Huang Renyu is a well-known historical master, but in the field of historiography, Huang Renyu is more like a "side door left way", the mainstream Ming history experts in China do not adopt his views too much, and even some people specifically analyze the hard wounds of Huang Renyu's works and criticize his attitude of governance. Huang Renyu has been praised and slandered before and after his death, and now, when we look back at this historian, peel away the insults and pursuits, and rationally look at his works and controversies, it may be more enlightening for future generations.
Big history
Modernity is out of date
Huang Renyu himself is a very interesting person, he is called a "strange hero" scholar by historian Yu Yingshi. In his lifetime, he studied, joined the army, became a teacher, and did learning, a book "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar", which made him known as the writer who can tell history the most.
His ambition to become a historian has something to do with what happened to his father. His father, who came from a landlord family in Hunan, joined the "League" and joined the revolution, but more than a decade of turmoil made his father hate the revolution, and in the end he only survived in the cracks of the times. Huang Renyu once said: "He (my father) made me realize that I am a survivor, not a martyr. This background made it clear to me what could and could not be done in the situation, and I did not need to confront what had already happened. ”
Huang Renyu, (June 25, 1918, January 8, 2000), born in 1918 in Changsha, Hunan Province, is a Chinese-American, and was admitted to the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of the College of Science of Nankai University in 1936. After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, Huang Renyu dropped out of school to join the army, and later went to the United States to study, and received a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan (under the tutelage of Yu Yingshi), known as a historian, an expert in Chinese history and History, and an advocate of the great historical concept. He is the author of "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar" and "The Great History of China" and other best-selling books.
After doing his studies, Huang Renyu focused on Ming history. As early as 1974, he wrote a book "Finance and Taxation in Sixteenth-Century Ming Dynasty China", in which Huang Renyu pointed out that the Ming Dynasty finance paid attention to form, but the bureaucracy and the common people lacked legal and economic links, so it was impossible to establish an effective tax system. The views of this book influenced the writing of the Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar, without which there would have been no Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar.
In addition to "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar", Huang Renyu's more popular books include "The Great History of China", "Capitalism and the Twenty-first Century", "Reading Chiang Kai-shek's Diary from the Perspective of Great History", "Yellow River Qingshan: Huang Renyu's Memoirs" and so on. In these writings, "great history" is a word that is repeatedly mentioned. Huang Renyu believes that only with a big vision can we see the big history, and the history of China as a whole is not isolated, but has its own internal laws and connections. In general, "big history" requires scholars to grasp history from a macroscopic perspective, not to stick to details, and to tell the evolution of specific dynasties in the picture of world history.
As a scholar, Huang Renyu promotes a high spirit of rational calculation. In terms of governance methods, he advocated the use of inductive methods to highly compress existing historical materials and conduct comparative analysis on the basis of comparison. This is especially evident in the Great History of China. To some extent, the thinking of "The Great History of China" and "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" is consistent, Huang Renyu looks at the agrarian society and the rise and fall of China's dynasties from a critical point of view, which is actually a typical idea of Westerners studying Chinese history, in their view, different social forms and economic systems do have backward and advanced points, the latter is often praised as "modern" or "modernity", and the former is represented by China's agrarian society and feudal political system, "China's Great History" is about " The conflict between the modern economic system and the agrarian society."
"Changsha White Jasmine"
Author: [Beauty] Huang Renyu
Translator: Song Biyun
Edition: Kyushu Shuppansha, August 2009
In addition to historical works, Huang Renyu also has a hobby of writing novels, and he once published novels under the pen name "Li Weiang". "The Residual Dream of Fenjing" and "Changsha White Jasmine" are his novel works. If he did not do research, Huang Renyu is expected to become a diligent novelist, but his novels are not as good as in history books, there are too many preaching parts, the language still has a clear "historical cavity", and there is a lack of delicacy in controlling the characters, unlike writing novels, but like a historical explainer.
In terms of writing, Huang Renyu imitated the path of Ming and Qing dynasty dialects and popular novels of the Republic of China, draped in a tough rational shell, but in his bones there was some gentleness of Mandarin ducks and butterflies. He considers himself a romantic person. You can chase a girl without hesitation, and you can bravely join the army when the resistance breaks out. He loves to be in the limelight and likes to experience the feeling of a warrior. During the War of Resistance, as a member of the General Command, he occasionally ventured into no-man's land, even if it did not help much in the war, and when the Chinese army lost two light tanks near the pass, he also ventured to observe the tanks burned by the Japanese. "Touch the hole pierced by the point four seven anti-tank gun with your fingers."
1587
From "Meaningless" to "Big Turn"
Speaking of Huang Renyu, he still can't get around the "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar", which has a huge impact.
Forty years later, the book is still selling well, and analyzing this phenomenon is not a sentence of "novelty in writing" that can be dismissed. The year 1587 was calm on the surface, but something far-reaching happened. This was the fifteenth year of Wanli's ascension to the throne, the year in which Shen Shixing served as the first assistant to the cabinet, and the year in which the Qing official Hai Rui and the military general Qi Jiguang died, which Huang Renyu believed was a turning point in the Ming Dynasty. After 1587, the Ming Dynasty was already on the verge of death.
Fifteen Years of Wanli
Edition: Life, Reading, And New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, May 1997
Compared with past works that study the Ming Dynasty, "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" avoids the cumbersome historical data and instead introduces the author's views with fragments of the lives of several characters. In the book, Wan Li is dissatisfied that everything about himself is constrained by red tape; Shen Shixing is doing boring work every day; Qi Jiguang is at the end of his life; and Li Zhen is facing a dynasty hanging. In 1587, the civil service was obsessed with trivial matters, while the ruling apparatus was careful to maintain a rigid taoist system. Huang Renyu believes that the Ming Dynasty lost the key to state management: technology. At the same time, the regime placed too much emphasis on morality and despised the rule of law in the mid to late period.
This can be seen from the fate of Shen Shixing (Editor's Note: Famous Minister of the Ming Dynasty). This princess Zhang Harmonious has few things, believes in Confucian classics, emphasizes convincing people with virtue, and measures people with virtue. The main problem he faced was how to reconcile the debates of officials at all levels, and over time he became a mediator, but he could not improve the bureaucratic ability to do things like Zhang Juzheng.
However, Shen Shixing wanted to balance the relationship between the civilian bureaucracy and the emperor, and the painstaking management of harmony and little trouble did not bring the understanding of his colleagues. In the end, The Second Auxiliary Xu Guo made public a correspondence between him and the Wanli Emperor, and Shen Shixing completely lost the trust of the civilian official clique, and he could only resign from the position of First Auxiliary.
Emphasizing morality over legal system and technology, in the end he was eclipsed by unwarranted moral problems, and Shen Shixing was precisely driven out by the system he maintained. In this system, the highest criterion for judging an official is whether he is morally sound, not whether the technology is advanced and whether the procedures are reasonable. The criterion of mediation is not whose argument is more reasonable, but whether the morality of the commentator is noble. In order to maintain their own reputation, officials on the one hand dare not appoint technical talents, on the other hand, they are willing to make friends with celebrities and give themselves a good reputation.
The English edition of "Fifteen Years of Wanli"
Version: Yale University Press, September 1982
In contrast to Shen Shixing are Hai Rui and Zhang Juzheng. Harry is not only a moral model, he has good work ability and execution. In charge of the local government, he suppressed the mighty, dredged the river, and implemented a whip law to become a central official in the Ming Dynasty. Hai Rui burns a huge passion in his heart, and he strives diligently for the peace and prosperity in his heart, and he wants to use unrealistic idealism to oppose everything that he does not like in real life. But the tragedy of Hai Rui is that the world only regards him as a moral symbol, and does not value his technical ability. It remained so until the time of his death. In the fifteenth year of the Wanli Calendar, Hai Rui died. "All the officials in the north mourned him, and even the emperor himself wrote a tribute to mourn him." As Liu Heping, the author of "Daming Dynasty 1566", said: "What they mourn is not the death of a person, but the demise of a spiritual symbol." ”
Zhang Juzheng is more politically skilled than Hai Rui, he opposes the replacement of technology with morality, and after ten years in power, he reuses technical talents, but he has undergone tremendous pressure and was brutally raided after his death.
Interests were cut off, and the civilian-official clique decided to make a fuss about Zhang Juzheng's private morality. Zhang Juzheng tried to improve the technology of the bureaucracy with his own efforts and solve the problems of the Ming Dynasty with a set of secular administrative efficiencies, but ignored the weight of morality in the hearts of conservative bureaucrats, so he was besieged.
His failure is inevitable, because he is pushing his reforms with his own strength, he is using huge power, but in the system, Zhang Juzheng lacks changes, which makes it difficult to retain the fruits of his reforms. Moreover, Zhang Juzheng not only had to face the harsh moral reproach of conservative civilian officials, but also had to face the counterattack of imperial power. Therefore, after Zhang Juzheng's death, the politics of the Ming Dynasty returned to the old way.
The reason why the Ming Dynasty bureaucracy formed a trend of replacing technology with morality was related to the culture at that time. Some political scientists have pointed out that China's political culture has always been a "political culture of the central axis of culture", which is different from the "political culture of the axis of the system" in the West. Culture determines the political ecology, and the Ming Dynasty is no exception. The Ming Dynasty was an era in which the academic ethos was prevalent, ostensibly based on Confucianism, but there were two major forces intertwining and conflicting, one was a conservative bureaucrat who believed in Cheng Zhu Lixue, and the other was a new bureaucrat who admired Lu Wangxin's study. However, no matter what, there are great requirements for personal morality, plus the Period of God's system, China, there was originally a strong atmosphere of human rule, successive dynasties, called for virtue to rule the world, filial piety to rule the world, so it is not surprising that the Ming Dynasty bureaucracy emphasized morality over the legal system.
controversy
Rationally look at Huang Renyu
Along with the best-selling, there is a huge controversy, and historians have long criticized Huang Renyu's works and their grand historical views. The biggest controversy is Huang Renyu's literarization of "historical analysis.". When Huang Renyu recounts a historical figure, he can sprinkle and gush endlessly, but he can describe more and have less basis. For example, when writing "Fifteen Years of Wanli", when it comes to shen shixing, Hai Rui, and Zhang Juzheng, Huang Renyu spent a lot of ink to write about their "mentality" and "behavior", but where is the basis for this speculation? He did not provide, which is a taboo in the study of history.
Hidden under the big historical view is Huang Renyu's "heavy judgment, light interpretation." Huang Renyu is a master of word-making, "big historical view", "Hongwu-type finance", "digital management" is his favorite word, but he often introduces new words, but the explanation is insufficient, making people in the clouds, making it difficult for mainstream academia to accept. Academic circles do not allow new views, such as Qiu Luming's study of the history of the Three Kingdoms, he proposed that "Sima Yi is not the spokesman of the Confucian family" is a "dissent" to Chen Yinke's views, this "objection" is based on detailed arguments and grasp of the latest historical materials, so Qiu Luming's views were quickly accepted by historians.
In addition to netizens who know and Douban, there is no shortage of articles in the academic community that criticize Huang Renyu. For example, Wan Ming's "Re-examination of the Fiscal History of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th Century: Commenting on Huang Renyu< The > of Finance and Taxation in Ming Dynasty China in the Sixteenth Century", Zhu Xiaoming and Yi Chengzhi's "The Logic of History and the < fifteen years of the Wanli Calendar> - On Some of the Omissions in It", and Pan Shuming and Xu Sumin's "< The Fifteenth Year of the Wanli Calendar> Misreading Li Zhen's Works". They mainly criticized Huang Renyu's errors in citing historical materials. Among them, Pan Shuming and Xu Sumin have a very sharp view, they believe that Huang Renyu's academic prejudice is that a society like China cannot produce any germ of new economy and new ideas, and can only be "modernized" under the action of external forces.
The Great History of China
Edition: Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, February 2007
In fact, Huang Renyu's academic attitude is inseparable from the flow of his life. This romantic and flamboyant Hunan Changsha native, who received academic training from the United States early on, intuitively felt the completely different styles in the different social ecologies of that period, which made Huang Renyu actively embrace modernity, emphasize the role of technology and the legal system, and take a critical attitude towards agrarian society and patriarchal traditions.
Huang Renyu did not shy away from controversy, and he constantly reiterated and supplemented his "big historical view", and his response was found in works and lecture collections such as "Big History Will Not Shrink". He first opposed the stripping of historical figures from specific contexts and the rash moral judgment, so he said: "Chinese praise and criticism, and when writing history, he often explains the people he writes as the most good and the most evil." It is easy to use writing history as a lyrical tool. At the same time, he advocates incorporating local history into the production and evolution of the entire large history, and the observer intervenes in the historical process while grasping the spatial interaction and storytelling in history. Works such as "Fifteen Years of Wanli" are the practice of his series of views, Qi Jiguang was taken out of the context of "anti-Wu hero", and Hai Rui is not just a moral symbol.
Of course, most people affirmed Huang Renyu's narrative charm and his great impetus to the spread of Ming history.
Wu Si said: "I have read the "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" four times. When I first read it in 1986, I only felt that it was well written and talked about the key point, but I couldn't say what the key point was, but I felt that wang Yang was wanton, like a dragon seeing the beginning and not the end. This kind of wanton wang yang is the characteristic of Huang Renyu's telling of history, he always stands on a high place, trying to tell the texture of history, reading his books, the breath of vertical and horizontal sweeping, even if the views are different, reading it will still be enjoyed. Huang Renyu's contribution to historical narrative may be greater than his own historical perspective, he has opened up a unique way of writing, and market feedback has proved to be effective. In the early 1980s, the Zhonghua Book Company published the Chinese edition of "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar", and the first 25,000 copies sold out. To this day, the work is still very popular.
The Complete Works of Huang Renyu
Author: [Mei] Huang Renyu Version: Kyushu Publishing House, February 2012
Today, we revisit these controversies, not to blame the dead, but to re-examine the work and the so-called "Huang Renyu phenomenon". Despite the mistakes and omissions, Huang Renyu's works still provide inspiration for the academic community to "go global". Academic research is not behind closed doors, academic writing does not have to stick to the old form, if there is anything outstanding about Huang Renyu, it is that his writing style takes into account a small number of elite and non-professional readers, proving that boring historical materials can also be transformed into fascinating and vivid narratives.
Interestingly, Huang Renyu highly affirmed digital management in his book, believing that the digital business society is a higher social form than the agrarian society, but Huang Renyu was dismissed by the State University of New York at Newports precisely because of "sophisticated digital management". His "performance point" (FTE) is not up to standard, and his academic thinking is not in line with the "professional division of labor" advocated by modern academic production. For a scholar, being fired was a huge setback, and it was also the unspeakable secret of Huang Renyu's life.
When the more "progressive" social form throws itself out of the door, is it its own problem, or does this "progress" also have to be marked with a huge question mark? What's more, we have witnessed the era of computational rationality that Huang Renyu highly advocates in his writings. Computers, mobile phones, big data, cloud computing, no other era more than the current "computing", a higher degree of division of labor, intellectuals are nurtured as experts, urban citizens with tools to rationally look at everyone who walks by, we can even predict our own future, cyberpunk intelligent world is not a fantasy. But in this era, has Huang Renyu's concerns been solved? Huang Renyu has left, and he cannot answer this question, but this is the problem of our time, and it is also the dilemma that today's people should reflect on.
Round table
What do they think of Huang Renyu and "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar"?
Guo Xueyan, a trainee reporter at the Beijing News, wrote | Ding Zhenwei
Controversy and criticism pale
Yi Zhongtian, born in February 1947 in Changsha, Hunan Province, graduated from Wuhan University in 1981 with a master's degree in literature and stayed on to teach. He is a well-known historical writer, scholar and later a professor at the School of Humanities of Xiamen University.
Mr. Huang Renyu's "Fifteen Years of Wanli" has had a tremendous impact on our generation, which is immensely grateful and is often read.
For me, the most direct and serious influence of Mr. Huang Renyu and "Fifteen Years of Wanli" on me is to know that the original history can still be viewed in this way and written in this way. This impact is revolutionary and subversive for me.
And what kind of expression a scholar chooses to publish his research results is completely his freedom, and the reader's likes and dislikes can choose by looking at it or not, what is there to argue about? At that time, I was a graduate student at Wuhan University, and a large number of non-history graduate students rushed to read the "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar". How many people can have such influence? Isn't all controversy and criticism pale?
The publication of "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar" has opened up a new trend in the field of historiography
Xie Xizhang is a well-known critic, scholar and researcher of modern history. He is the author of "Biography of Liang Qichao", "The Reading History of One Man", "Hustle and Loneliness", "Elegant Customs" and so on.
Huang Renyu offers a new way of telling history for our generation, and we have not seen such a way of telling history before him. When I first read "Fifteen Years of Wanli", it was in the early eighties, and when I saw this book, I had a sense of novelty, and I was very excited among my classmates in college, and I had never seen such a book. Because most of the textbooks we have seen before and the history books written by domestic scholars are still stable and dogmatic; but Huang Renyu's "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" has both a macroscopic historical framework, and can start from microscopic figures to analyze and introduce history, and the freshness at that time was particularly strong. The controversy over Huang Renyu may be due to the relatively conservative side of the domestic historians in general, it is difficult to accept new things, and when you see this book, you will think that Huang Renyu's historical narrative is not standardized. But in fact, many of the historical works we read in the West, especially the more popular history books, can have some communication with ordinary readers who love history.
Over the years, the way of historical research and historical narrative has also become diverse, and similar books have gradually appeared in China in recent years, but there were absolutely no books before Huang Renyu. After the reform and opening up, just like the impact of Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng on china's popular literature circles, and like the impact of Teresa Teng on Chinese popular songs, "Fifteen Years of Wanli" is also the first impact on the hard plate of history, he provides a new possibility, telling people that history can also be written in this way, and his influence is very far-reaching in this regard.
Of course, it is normal to have different opinions on the specific discussion of history and some conclusions and descriptions, because it is difficult to have a consensus on history, and different perspectives on history, different materials at hand, and different positions and starting points may affect the historical narrative, and it is normal to be controversial. But whether you accept it or not, the publication of "Fifteen Years of Wanli" is a new wind, and the impact on young people, especially college students, is absolute.
Huang Renyu is indeed powerful, but not so powerful
Zhang Mingyang is a historical writer and editor-in-chief of the Shanghai Review of Books
When I was in college, Huang Renyu came out with his "Fifteen Years of The Wanli Calendar" and "The Great History of China" and told us that these students who had "not seen the world too much" could still write history like this. Even for many history scholars, Huang Renyu has adopted a very subversive way of writing, and it turns out that we have not read such history, and no one has written such a history.
At the beginning, Huang Renyu was a state of being buried and neglected in the mainland, and as soon as "Fifteen Years of the Wanli Calendar" entered China, Huang Renyu was put on the altar, and this style of books was published for a period of time; before 2010, Huang Renyu's reputation was too high, many people commented that he was one of the "most powerful scholars in decades", but his academic ability could not withstand such high praise. I think this is not necessarily an objective evaluation for Mr. Huang Renyu. In recent years, the reading industry has entered the third state and begun to reflect on Huang Renyu, and everyone has begun to think that Huang Renyu is indeed powerful, but not so powerful. I think this kind of evaluation reflection is good, but in the process of re-evaluating Huang Renyu, we can't overcorrect and say that he is a very bad, second- and third-rate historian, which I can't accept, and I think he is still a very first-class historian.
Whether historical writing is written in academic or non-academic style is controversial even in the United States, and the history of Mr. Shi Jingqian, who once served as the president of the American Historical Society, may be more literary, and there is a lot of debate in the American academic circles, but his status is still very high. There will always be people of different schools, different personalities, and different reading habits in the field of historiography, and it is normal to have such controversies. I think there is no fixed standard for the way history is written, there is no one-or, or it depends on the level of the writer, not easy to write, but good at writing academically.
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