We are familiar with the major contours of twentieth-century China: the collapse of empire, the rise of the republic, warlord conflicts and foreign invasions, revolutions and their counterparts, social upheavals, and rapid modernization. We also know a great deal about the historians who have narrated this turbulent century for us, from Gu Jiegang and Fu Sinian, to Jiang Tingfu and Jian Bozan, and later John King Fairbank and Frederic Wakeman Jr.. Yet we know far less about the institutional and social formation of history as a professional discipline in China, a development that has profoundly shaped both how the past is written and who is authorized to write it.

In this talk, I examine the social and institutional dimensions of the making of the historical profession in twentieth-century China. Tracing its evolution across successive political and intellectual contexts, from the “entry scholars” of the late Qing, to academic professionals in the Republican era, to “thought workers” in the early People’s Republic, and finally to specialized experts in reform-era and contemporary China, I argue that the professionalization of historical scholarship has produced unintended consequences. On the one hand, it has broadened Chinese historical consciousness by embedding the nation within global narratives and comparative frameworks. On the other, it has narrowed historical interpretation through institutional, ideological, and nationalist constraints.

By foregrounding historians themselves as historical actors, this paper invites us to reconsider the significance of historiography in understanding not only China’s past, but also a country that continues to transform itself, and, increasingly, the world.

Xin Fan is a professor of history and vice dean at the Institute of Humanities at ShanghaiTech University. He is a historian of modern China and the world. He is the author of World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Global History in China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He is also the co-editor of Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018, with Almut-Barbara Renger) and The SAGE Handbook of Interpreting Chinese History (SAGE, February 2026, with Kristin Stapleton and Els van Dongen).

本次讲座主持为 Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.