Song Nianshen: East Asia's Trouble With History Comes Down to How We Understand "the Modern" | Interviews

Starting in the late 19th century, East Asia gradually adopted a view of time built around the nation-state, flowing in one direction, driven by development. Song Nianshen argues that view is wrong.

Song Nianshen teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In 2015 he was invited to write a column in China called Discovering East Asia (《发现东亚》), on the relationship between "East Asia" and "the modern."

The book's framework came from the introductory East Asian history course he teaches in the United States, a general-education course for undergraduates. Because the column was written with Chinese readers in mind, the book can also be read as an inquiry, within a regional frame, into how modern China came to be.

In July this year the columns were collected and published as Discovering East Asia. In the preface, Song Nianshen makes an honest disclosure: "This book is not a work of research; it involves no deep excavation of sources and no original discoveries. Apart from a small amount drawn from my own research and personal experience, most of the material is distilled from existing scholarship. The book touches on many different fields.

To specialists in those fields, my introductions may be common knowledge. My job was to take the most current research I could, organize it, string it together through a few coherent themes, add my own perspective and understanding, and turn it into writing for a general reader."

The "my own perspective and understanding" part shows up as an attempt to correct received wisdom, and along with it comes a worry of the author's own. One important worry concerns how people see history. Song Nianshen worries about China's fetish-like worship of modernization. Writing this book was, at bottom, an expression of that worry. In his own words from the book: "The problem of historical understanding that troubles East Asia today is, in the end, not about assigning responsibility for a particular war, a particular person or group of people, or a particular event — it is about how we understand the idea of modernity."

Song Nianshen argues that starting in the late 19th century, East Asia gradually adopted a view of time built around the nation-state, flowing in one direction, driven by development. In this view, history is a continuous march toward "progress"; humanity moves from "barbarism" to "civilization"; the future is always more "advanced" than the past; we were beaten because we were "backward," and we were backward because we were "closed and conservative." This logic requires us to stand forever on the side of the "victors of civilization" and to deny the "ignorant barbarians."

The logic can be applied to relations between countries, and it can be applied to affairs at home. Either way, how will such a view of history shape the future of a society? Song Nianshen thinks that deserves reflection.

Judged by his résumé alone, Song Nianshen's path covers a lot of ground. He was born in Beijing and studied Chinese at the University of International Relations. By his own account he was a "literary youth" back then, holding onto journalistic ideals. After graduating in 1996 he went to work at Global Times. When the paper started an international commentary page, he became its editor in 1999.

At Global Times, Song Nianshen got the chance to study abroad while keeping his job, doing a master's at the London School of Economics. One condition was that his field had to relate to the work he was doing, but several years in the newsroom had already made him sick of the news — roughly speaking, because he had watched news value drain out of news reporting. So he chose "comparative politics," a field close enough to his job. While writing his master's thesis he kept returning to something he had covered as a reporter around 2005: the diplomatic dispute between China and South Korea set off by the World Heritage nomination of the Goguryeo capital cities. After talking it over with his advisor, he made that his subject.

A kingdom that vanished 1,200 years ago had somehow become an intractable problem in the present. Song Nianshen thinks it is an absurd and pointless argument. China and South Korea, as nation-states, are very recent ideas — only about a century old. And even granting that they are nation-states, why can't different nation-states share a history?

While writing the thesis, Song Nianshen read two historians at the University of Chicago: Prasenjit Duara and Bruce Cumings. Compared with comparative politics, he found himself drawn more and more to the arguments and methods of history. After finishing his master's, he quit Global Times and started applying to PhD programs.

He went to the University of Chicago and began studying history under Prasenjit Duara and Bruce Cumings. His dissertation was Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 — still about "East Asian modernity" — published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

After his PhD he did a postdoc at Vassar College. In 2016 he got a faculty position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has taught history at that public university since.

The author's-bio page of Discovering East Asia says nothing about his years in media. But listen to him tell it and you find that his time in journalism, and other experiences besides, may look very different from what he does now yet have shaped his present choices and understanding — some parts broke away, some have stayed with him.

Given the limits on public speech, you can plainly see that the second half of Discovering East Asia leaves out discussion of certain sensitive stretches of history. That, along with the use of certain specific words, meant that after the book came out many readers felt the second half was pulling its punches — less fresh than the earlier chapters, and in need of a discerning reader.

Song Nianshen's next book is about a neighborhood in Shenyang. Shenyang was first one of the Qing dynasty's capitals. Its modern urban development is closely tied to colonialism, and later, in the socialist era, the city became a major contributor to China's industrialization. But after the Cold War it was hit hard by new economic arrangements — layoffs — and then by the decline of state-owned enterprises. He wants to study the neighborhood's history from the 17th century to now, more than 370 years.

During the interview, Song Nianshen kept coming back to one line: "This isn't just a matter of fact — there's a whole set of judgments behind it."

As for that worry he mentions, the "developmentalist view of modernization history," one important thing he wants to say about it is this: "A country wants to develop, and to develop economically, and what that emphasizes above all is efficiency. What we face today is partly a problem of efficiency, but the bigger problem is fairness. And on fairness, you can't look at it from a developmentalist angle."

Q: QDaily

Song Nianshen: teacher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; author of Discovering East Asia

Q: The core thesis of your teaching is East Asian modernity. How did you arrive at it?

Song Nianshen: After I finished my PhD I went to Vassar College as a postdoc. They handed me a course title — "Encounters of East Asian Modernity." Meaning, "We don't care about the content, teach it however you like." That's a feature of American teaching: they decide certain courses belong to the undergraduate core, so you have to teach them, but every teacher teaches it their own way. You don't have to use the same textbook or the same framework as anyone else.

Once I had the title, it turned out to sit close to my own interests. I'm fairly opposed to the idea that if you work on China you do Chinese history, and if you work on Japan you do Japanese history. So I took East Asia as a whole and looked for a new way to teach it. You shouldn't talk about East Asia as China plus Japan plus the Korean Peninsula; you have to see the historical transformation they went through together.

With that in mind I started writing the syllabus. I put a lot of weight on things that move — the flow of ideas, for instance; how the region took in and reworked shocks from outside; what its internal social changes looked like; including what changes the environment brought to the region in the 16th century, and so on.

This helps break down a fixed idea we hold: "Chinese history is Chinese history, one unbroken line, 5,000 years long." Japanese history likewise insists on at least 4,000. And if a Korean student turns up, they'll say, "Ours is 6,000 years — what we study is 6,000 years of history." This is a fiction. For the people living in these three places above all, contact between them never once stopped over those thousands of years, and the boundaries between them were never as clear as we now assume.

The idea is to find their shared historical experience and lead students to rethink some settled concepts. Why do we call it "East Asia"? We never used to call ourselves that. The point is to prompt students to think about, and rethink — better yet, criticize — the existing framework of knowledge. That was roughly my thinking at the time.

Q: "East Asian modernity" — why set the starting point of "the modern" in the 16th century?

Song Nianshen: This isn't only my idea. In the United States, most teachers of East Asian history put the start of what's called modern at roughly the Ming-Qing transition. They feel many new social, historical, intellectual and political phenomena appeared around then, and that understanding how they appeared is essential to understanding where East Asia as a whole is headed — that is, the turn East Asia is taking now, in the 21st century.

We shouldn't follow our national view of history, which says, for instance, that in China the turn came only with the Opium War in 1840, when in fact many of the changes had already happened. In the U.S. this is no longer a novel idea. But for those of us used to the standard Chinese history textbooks it may read as a bit abrupt.

Because whenever we talk about modern history it starts in 1840, and everything before 1840 is called ancient history. In fact no periodization has a truly clear dividing line; nobody would say 1839 is ancient and 1841 is modern. Read the history and you find that this sharp sense of rupture doesn't exist. The 16th century is a fairly fuzzy marker — it isn't one event, or a clean break at a particular year. Broadly, by the 16th century early globalization had already taken shape. After the great voyages of the 15th century, their effects had already spread all the way to Central Asia.

Several things can be strung together — the opening of the sea trade routes, with Spain and Portugal first. Then came the Jesuits, carrying Catholic culture to Japan or China. And in East Asia specifically we have a few major events, one being Toyotomi Hideyoshi's war in Korea. Important seeds of the Ming-Qing transition were planted around that time. There are many connections running between all these events.

So the modern transformation as we understand it shouldn't be confined to a 150-year stretch; it should be seen over four or five hundred years.

Q: While Discovering East Asia was running as a column, what feedback did you get from readers?

Song Nianshen: Two kinds. One came from The Paper — honestly not that much, but there were careful readers catching mistakes. The other came from friends around me. The people in my circle are, like me, teaching in North America, or teaching at Chinese universities. They pushed me hard to keep writing it.

I explained how the book came about in the preface. It wasn't that I wanted to write it. An editor at The Paper, a good friend of mine, asked me to.

In 2015 we were marking the 70th anniversary of victory in the war against fascism. There was a big military parade that year too. So Shan Xueling came to me and asked me to write about the First Sino-Japanese War. I told her I wasn't familiar with that war — it isn't my field. So I recommended another friend, Wang Yuanchong, instead. He wrote a series of about ten pieces, or a bit fewer, on what actually set off the First Sino-Japanese War, mostly from the Korean side.

The response was good, and I thought it was very good too. He wrote without footnotes, in plain and sometimes even humorous language. But it wasn't a dramatized retelling — it was entirely a historian's rigorous way of telling a story. That encouraged me. Later Shan Xueling said I absolutely had to write a column for her, and I said, all right, fine.

Only after I started did I realize I'd been had. It's harder than writing academic papers — harder as narrative and as writing. Academic writing has a set of conventions, and as long as you meet them, nobody much cares whether it reads well. The small circle of scholars judges by that same standard. For me this was good training, and it also pushed me to think about what historical writing ought to be.

People keep saying that fewer and fewer people read what historians produce. That has to do with how academic work gets made. Because we put so much weight on publishing in core journals, most of our effort inevitably goes that way. A lot of energy goes into meeting what core journals want. The reviewers at core journals are a small group of people, and you write to make them feel the work has quality. But that overlooks the fact that all writing in the humanities has to face the public in the end — you can't simply give up the job of influencing the general public.

So one person I particularly admire is Professor Luo Xin. He can write academic papers and at the same time put what his research has taught him into essays. He isn't the only one; many teachers do this.

Independent online publishing is everywhere now, and so is information. If serious historians don't take part in shaping how society thinks, all kinds of dramatized, unserious views of history will move in. Historians and the public have come apart. The public can't understand what you write, and you don't try to make it understandable — you're just thinking about publishing more research. That leaves a vacuum where history should be.

Q: What are you researching now?

Song Nianshen: The next book I want to write is urban history. I'm researching a neighborhood in Shenyang; I want to study its 400 years. From the 17th century to now is a bit under 400 years — more than 370.

Q: Why do you want to do this?

Song Nianshen: Because it can tie together so many elements from Chinese history and Central Asian history. First, Shenyang was one of the Qing dynasty's capitals. It is known as the auxiliary capital, but it was in fact a capital before Beijing: after Nurhaci founded the Later Jin he made Shenyang his capital, when it was called Shengjing. Then, after Hong Taiji founded the Qing, its capital was Shenyang. It is a city with a very strong flavor of Qing political and religious culture.

In the modern era the Northeast was also a region hit hard by colonial modernity. The rise of the railroad is bound up with the rise of modern Shenyang. Railroads were first brought in by the Russians, and later the Japanese set up the South Manchuria Railway there, a company built to serve colonial state policy. So Shenyang's urban modernization is tied closely to that colonial experience. Later Shenyang became China's most important heavy-industry base. In the socialist era, of the whole Northeast, Shenyang was the most important geographic node — you could say it is the region that has contributed the most to China's industrialization.

After the Cold War it was again the city most affected by the new post-Cold War economic arrangements — in plain terms, layoffs. Then came the decline of the state-owned enterprises. So through this one neighborhood I'm trying to reflect the whole course of China, even of Northeast Asia, from early modernity to today. To reflect it through one small space.

Q: How long does something like this take?

Song Nianshen: My plan is five years. It's just getting started. My first book has only just come out, so I have the energy for the next project.

Q: You mentioned that your master's thesis was on the "Goguryeo dispute." What did that thesis say, and what drew you to it?

Song Nianshen: When we talk about East Asia, we all know relations between East Asian countries are bad. Much of that comes from historical issues that have never been settled. When we think of historical issues we think of Japan and World War II — but you'd never guess that a kingdom that disappeared 1,200 years ago would become an intractable problem today.

The conflict at the time was fierce. Korean protesters cut off their own little fingers in front of the Chinese embassy — I didn't report on that, mind you. They felt it was an enormous violation. Every Korean knows the term "Northeast Project"; none of us had ever heard of it. What we saw reported over here was Koreans saying Confucius was Korean too, this was Korean, that was Korean.

It's an absurd situation. East Asia is a major player in globalization as a whole. China is the second-largest economy, Japan the third; their positions used to be reversed. South Korea's economy matters a great deal too. Look around the world, at a region this important... North America has it, Europe has it — a drive toward regional integration. East Asia doesn't. It can only fall back on a mechanism like "10 plus 3" — Southeast Asia plus China, Japan and South Korea — as a platform where China, Japan and South Korea can sit down and discuss some cooperation between states. That makes no sense.

Why are historical issues such a large obstacle to regional cooperation in East Asia? If I explain my master's thesis in the framework of political science, one idea is that we've misapplied a framework of historical understanding. We've fully internalized the machinery of the modern nation-state and used it to explain ancient history. Take the pointless argument over whether Goguryeo was part of Chinese history or part of Korean history. Go ask someone from Goguryeo whether they belonged to China or to Korea — at the time there was no concept of China and no concept of Korea. China and Korea as nation-states are very recent ideas, only about a century old. And even granting that they're nation-states, why can't different nation-states share a history? The whole thing is absurd.

When it comes to Chinese characters, when it comes to Confucianism, who says these are China's exclusive property, off-limits to everyone else? That's wrong, and history shouldn't work that way. So a simple thought at the time led to that conclusion. Back then I was thinking about it entirely from the angle of international relations; I hadn't had any training in history. Once I went to Chicago to study history I basically kept going down this road.

Q: Was it writing that thesis that made you switch to history?

Song Nianshen: Actually, at the time, everywhere I applied except Chicago was for political science. It seemed natural — you did political science for your master's, so you should do political science for your PhD. Only at Chicago did I apply in history, because I badly wanted to study with Bruce Cumings and Prasenjit Duara. And to be honest, the University of Chicago was my first choice anyway.

I read their books while I was studying in Britain, because the work I was doing then required it, and I found their views eye-opening. I had no grounding in history as a discipline at all, and reading them — Prasenjit Duara's Rescuing History from the Nation above all — inspired me enormously. Bruce Cumings has a book on Korea that inspired me a great deal too, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (a Norton paperback). It's actually his textbook, and it also focuses on the modern and contemporary history of the Korean Peninsula. I loved it.

Q: In your book you quote a line from Wang Anyi, roughly: writing is using unreliable material to build an unreliable existence. You say this applies not only to fiction but to history and journalism. When I read that I thought we should think harder before putting them all together — it made me a little wary.

Song Nianshen: You know an American historian just died, Hayden White. Back in the 1980s he wrote a novel called Metahistory. In it he argued that news writing, fiction and history are the same thing — all of them products of construction. So accepting that statement is no problem at all for me, because the historical training I've had all along is about constantly criticizing established narratives and established concepts.

Where exactly do we say history and fiction differ? Sometimes, setting aside the technical level, it really isn't what we imagine. When I teach this course I have my students read novels, because some historical content can only be expressed most fully, most movingly, inside an invented setting like a novel.

For instance, I also discuss the book Silence in the course; that's a book I made required reading. When teaching the Korean War I also assign a novel by Ha Jin, War Trash. Why? Because in places like that you can't find sources — they're all small people nobody paid much attention to, some of them possibly illiterate. But can you say these people have no history?

They have history. But in what form can that history be told? We can't do it the historian's way, because there are no archives. So can a novel reflect history? That's a question I want my students to think about, and I think in some cases it can. A lot of people now say history is archival science, that history is about building an archive. True, and we do need to insist on that kind of rigor — but it isn't the whole story. Because many people, especially those at the bottom, were bullied and humiliated, and they left no history behind. Yet they have history.

Q: "Writing is using unreliable material to build an unreliable existence" — you say this has a negative side, but a very positive side too?

Song Nianshen: One thing postmodernism or postcolonialism often gets criticized for is that you're always taking apart an established narrative but never trying to build one. I think there's something to that, but the first thing we have to do is look critically at the knowledge we take for granted. Only once we've done that can we discuss what kind of historical narrative we need.

Once we've built a historical narrative, we also have to see that it isn't the only one. There is no absolute correctness — it's simply the narrative that this particular historical moment requires, built for a present need.

A hundred years ago, no historian would have said that ordinary people, apart from kings, nobles and generals, were worth writing about. Today many people pay attention to those at the margins and at the bottom. That's because our understanding of society has changed. Over the 20th century, especially since the late Cold War and the post-Cold War years, our understanding of the state and of society as a whole has changed.

We've found that some people matter a great deal — women matter a great deal, Black people matter a great deal, laborers at the bottom matter a great deal. Only after we built that narrative did historians start saying, I want to write these people's history for them. That is the result of a whole set of social movements over the 20th century, especially since the 1960s.

Without those movements, the history we write now might still be the history of kings, nobles and generals, still the history of the state. So we should never say that what's written now is History, the settled account. There's no such thing. Decades from now we may well have newer angles. It may not even take decades — maybe just ten-odd years. We'll find something we never paid attention to that turns out to matter enormously.

People now write histories of tea, because it was a particularly important commodity in early colonialism and carries enormous historical value. There are people writing histories of animals, even insects, or plants. Of course, that doesn't mean we've shifted the human vantage point to a donkey's or anything else's. It isn't that; it's still a human angle. But out of our interest in how this society is put together and how it runs, we've begun to find things that used to be overlooked.

Q: On how modern China came to be, you mention a lot of received wisdom. Is there a piece of it that bothers you more than the rest?

Song Nianshen: There is. A while ago I went to see an exhibition at the National Museum of China. Whenever we bring up Qing history it's always "closed off from the world," and I think that piece of received wisdom is a big one. This isn't just a matter of fact — there's a whole set of judgments behind it.

Historians don't say it anymore, but outside the field people still feel, consciously or not, that we had a barbaric, closed-off, benighted past. We had to throw it off before we could make our brilliant turn toward the present — and it's precisely that logic that strikes me as wrong. Because you can pass this judgment on yourself, and you can pass it on others.

You use this logic to explain why you were so powerless under Western colonial aggression. And then later, once you're strong, when you explain why someone else is powerless you fit them into exactly the same logic: because you're closed off, because you're uncivilized, because you're backward and barbaric — at home or abroad.

Q: In the book you use words like "rejuvenation" and "nationalism." I get the sense that people around me hold fairly absolute, extreme views on them — some are fervent about them, thrilled, delighted to bring them up, while others don't want to discuss them at all and are contemptuous. Your own view doesn't seem especially absolute.

Song Nianshen: Of course, of course it shouldn't be absolute. But on the whole I'm critical of nationalism. Broadly, I think nationalism and colonialism are two sides of the same coin, consistent in their logic. As for whether China's national rise is a "rejuvenation" — I think you can understand it this way: in economic terms, if China returns to the international standing it ought to have, that can be seen as a return. Because historically, as an economy, China has always been one of the largest in the world. From that angle, is it a rejuvenation? Yes.

But that raises a question, and it's the last thing I want to say, though it isn't possible to state the view that clearly in the present environment: OK, your economy has risen. So what are you going to do politically? That's my biggest concern. Of course you can't say it outright; you can only use the form of historical narrative to remind us to ask whether we should have a fuller understanding of the modernization we're so keen on.

From the standpoint of development, today really is a rejuvenation, but what I mean is: shouldn't we reflect on the logic of developmentalism itself? What we need to reflect on is how a developmentalist view of modernization history will shape the future of human society. Because if you're going to put forward a political vision, you can't say economic takeoff is enough — is it still this same developmentalist-modernization vision?

Q: I don't quite follow the concept of "developmentalism."

Song Nianshen: Developmentalism is a concept from political science — developmentalism. Simplified, it's essentially what China has been doing all along: economic development. Using market logic to allocate resources, then relying on the market to build a powerful economy, one connected to a larger market.

In Western political science, the Four Asian Tigers are a classic case of developmentalism. A country wants to develop, and to develop economically, and what that emphasizes above all is efficiency. What we face today is partly a problem of efficiency, but the bigger problem is fairness — fairness at home and fairness abroad. And on fairness, you can't look at it from a developmentalist angle.

Q: There's a question we ask everyone we interview: what do you worry about, or what do you think people worry about too much?

Song Nianshen: Writing this book was itself an expression of a worry. What I worry about is China's fetish-like worship of modernization. That phrasing isn't quite right — I mean the worship of Western modernity, and a modernity that quite visibly carries the coloring of colonialism. Maybe I'm worrying too much.

Put it this way: the problem China faces now is very similar to the problem Japan faced after World War II. Not identical, definitely not identical, but intellectually it resembles the "overcoming modernity" group of intellectuals I wrote about in the book.

That is, we have both become aware of the problems of modernism, and some people try to move past it. What sort of way will we choose in the end? Do we use the same logic Japan put forward then to move past it, or do we have to find another logic altogether?

Some people say we should reject Western logic and find our own native logic — and what does that give us? Precisely another highly essentialist approach: Chinese civilization is this and that, unbroken for 5,000 years, we're unique, and so on. Rejecting every outside culture and influence, the West included, and then overbuilding an unchanging, rigid idea of "China." That idea is deliberately shaped to set itself apart from the West. That's what I worry about.

Didn't Japan also say at the time that Japanese civilization was superior to Western civilization, and that Japan should use its own spirit to transcend the West? It used that logic to dress up what was in fact colonialism and imperialism. Those intellectuals did see the problem of colonial modernity, and the problem is real, not fake.

But the solution they proposed amounts to saying: I am something entirely closed off that has nothing to do with you; I'll find my own essence inside myself, carry it forward, and produce something even better than the other side. That is a logic to be very wary of.

Cover image courtesy of Thinkingdom Media Group