The Writing of History and the Shaping of Cultures: An interview with Q. Edward Wang

You may listen to this interview from HERE. 

Edward Wang (Ph.D.) is Eminent Professor of History and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Rowan University in the US and was Changjiang Professor of History at Peking University (2007-2022) in China. His research focuses on the study of historiography (how history is written) and cultural and intellectual history of Asia, which are also his main teaching areas. Over the past decades, he has published a number of works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history, comparative historiography, historical theory and food history. Among his English publications are Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which won Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Title”; A Global History of Modern Historiography (coauthored with Georg Iggers, Pearson/Longman, 2008; revised edition in 2017), and Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (SUNY Press, 2001). A board member of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography since 2005, Wang is also editor of Chinese Studies in History (published by Taylor & Francis), a journal devoted to publishing works by Chinese historians for English readers.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

I received my higher education in both China and the United States, earning my Ph.D. in the latter. I grew up in Shanghai, then the largest city in China. My parents are intellectuals; thanks to them, I developed an early interest in academic life. However, from elementary school on, I experienced the Cultural Revolution, during which the pursuit of knowledge was demonized. Since school life was haphazard, I hit the books as an adolescent. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, I was given the opportunity to take the college entrance examination, which had been suspended for a decade due to the Cultural Revolution. I was lucky enough to pass the exam and entered college at the age of twenty, after working on a farm for about two years.

My college life was both exciting and challenging. It was exciting because, as the first generation of college students after the Cultural Revolution, my classmates and I cherished the opportunity to pursue knowledge, which we all highly valued. Meanwhile, I was also challenged in my studies, not only by the professors, but also by my classmates who were much older than me. Looking back, I learned as much from them as from my professors. Their seriousness in studying and their sharpness in offering perspectives on issues from their previous work experience was eye-opening to me. All in all, it was a very valuable educational experience that certainly helped shape my future career. In fact, it was the zeal for knowledge that I nurtured in college that led me to seek out opportunities to further my knowledge. Once again, I was fortunate enough to realize my goal of coming to the United States and working for my Ph.D. on modern historiography with Georg Iggers at SUNY/Buffalo and Joseph M. Levine and Norman Kutcher at Syracuse University, where Leopold von Ranke’s library and papers are located. Perhaps my third stroke of good fortune came in 1992, when I was offered a teaching position at Rowan University, where I have remained for the past three decades. Since then, I have published over a dozen books in English and an equal number in Chinese. My research interests include comparative historiography, historical theory, global history, history of food and material culture, and Chinese cultural and intellectual history.

Q2. For those not familiar with the term, what is historiography? Why is it important and what can it teach us about how history is written?

Historiography is the study of how history is written, to use a common expression. It has both a short and a long history. In historical cultures such as ancient Greece, Rome, and China, it began almost as early as the tradition of historical writing, which took the form of criticism of earlier works and was at first quite sporadic. Over time, more systematic discussions of the nature, function, and methods of historical writing emerged. However, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that the study of historiography became a field of research for historians. This transformation had much to do with the establishment of the historical profession at that time. As a community, historians were organized into an association that sponsored professional journals for the publication of their work. In the process, the need arose to educate future historians, which included teaching them about the history of historical writing.

When it became a field of research, historiography covered a wide range of issues, from the ideas of history, which is somewhat called the philosophy of history or historical theory, to the methods of historical research and writing, which are related to issues of epistemology. Since the ideas and methods often differ from each other, different schools of historiography have emerged as a result, which gradually became the main subject for the study of historiography, especially in the years after World War II. From then to the present, the general tendency in historiography has been one of diversification, characterized by a variety of new experiments attempted by historians, ranging from social history, women’s and gender history, and new cultural history to environmental history, the history of emotions, and more recently, neurohistory and digital history. This diversification of historiography over the past half-century, it seems to me, testifies to the importance of historiographical study. It teaches us, historical professionals and the general public, that historiography needs constant updating, and that these updates reflect the changing world while enriching our knowledge of and life in it.

Q3. How does historiography differ in Chinese/Asian traditions from those found in the West? What can we learn from comparative historiography and does this offer us insight into cultures and societies different from our own?

There were both differences and similarities between the historiographical traditions in Asia and the West. In terms of differences, the first was the origin of historiography. In ancient China, and later copied by its neighbors in East and Southeast Asia, historiography began with the need to keep records, whether of natural or human affairs. This need led to the creation of the position of scribe and/or astrologer in government. But from the very beginning, scribes also recorded historical matters, so it is reasonable to call them historians. The other difference was related to the first one – the records kept by the scribes took different forms, although annals and chronicles were the most favored. Later, annals and chronicles included more and more narratives, although annals and chronicles remained important in the tradition of Chinese and Asian historiography.

In contrast, historiography in the West began as a private pursuit, largely out of an interest in preserving the public memory of certain important events. The lack of official sponsorship of historical writing led historians to tailor their work to the public interest. Narrative history, or the telling of great stories, naturally came to be favored by them as the primary form of historical writing. This tradition has more or less persisted to the present day, although there have been periods when historical writing has been sponsored by either the church or the state. In the Middle Ages, for example, annals and chronicles also became a major form of historiography, mostly compiled by Christian monks in monasteries.

The great similarity between the historiographical traditions of the West and Asia and beyond was, among other things, the historian’s desire and effort to record history truthfully. Of course, this was by no means easy, as historiography is usually subject to a variety of political, religious, economic, and cultural influences. It seems to me, however, that how historians of different cultures, past and present, deal with these influences and maintain the autonomy of historical writing is one of the most valuable themes that comparative historiographical study can offer us. For it involves a variety of issues, both theoretical and practical. Learning and analyzing them from a comparative perspective is very informative and eye-opening.

Q4. How was history in traditional China taught? Was it ever a subject of the imperial examination system (科舉)? Was there a standardized set of historical texts that all educated students were expected to study and memorize or was historical education very much specific to the priorities of individual families?

“History is philosophy teaching by example,” if I may quote a well-known saying of Dionysius of Halicarnassus of ancient Rome, although the maxim is now often attributed to Thucydides. I like it because it speaks to the use of history from a cross-cultural perspective. That is, knowledge of history helps us better understand the more abstract ideas about life and the world by providing useful examples from the past. Compared to the Western tradition, where history was a part of rhetoric until the early modern era, history became an independent field of study earlier in ancient China.

When the civil service examination was instituted in mid-imperial China, candidates studied history because knowledge of it was needed to answer questions and to provide examples for better illustration and persuasion in developing their thesis. For this purpose, history textbooks were compiled, which were essentially abridged versions of the great histories of the past. But none of them was considered a standard text for every aspiring candidate to take the exams. In this sense, history education remained individualistic, especially since before the establishment of a nationwide education system in modern times, there were various ways for Chinese students to receive education. Although schools were established in communities, for instance, many still chose to study at home with a tutor if their family could afford one.

Q5. History is written by individuals or groups who are influenced by any number of factors or motivations. Modern history offers many records and source materials which can provide an opportunity for varied interpretations and debates. But, for ancient history where we have few historical records, and often just the word of chroniclers like Sima Qian or Herodotus, how do we know what is objective or “true”?

No history is entirely objective or true, whether it is a surviving text from the past or the work of a professionally trained writer. In other words, historical writing is influenced by various factors, just as you said. Historiographers over the centuries have studied and discussed the notable “flaws” found in the works of Sima Qian and Herodotus. Meanwhile, they have also analyzed problematic issues that exist in modern historical scholarship. Since the problems in ancient works are perhaps more obvious than those in modern historiography, more efforts have been made to find ways to address them. In fact, it was this desire that led historians to rewrite history based on sources beyond the works of ancient historians.

This kind of rewriting of history became, in my opinion, an important driving force for the transformation of historiography. A striking example was Barthold Niebuhr’s writing of Roman history in the early nineteenth century, which is generally credited with initiating the modernization of historiography in Europe. Of course, it remains an open question whether Niebuhr’s writing of Roman history, or that of any subsequent Roman historian, is necessarily better than that of ancient Roman historians such as Livy and Tacitus. But the effort to seek new perspectives and methods in historical writing has been both meaningful and valuable, for it can ideally help readers of history to gain more knowledge about the past, even if that knowledge remains forever incomplete.

Q6. Looking at China specifically, how has the writing of history changed from imperial times through the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and into the modern China of today? Was the replacement of individual historians by government history committees in 14^th century China significant and are there any parallels with today?

History became an official enterprise in the middle imperial period, or the Tang dynasty (618-907), if not earlier. During the Tang, historians appointed by the court compiled a number of dynastic histories that formed the mainstream of traditional Chinese historiography. But during the late imperial period, this kind of official history writing became more and more schematic and dogmatic, losing its luster. Private history writing flourished as a result. So the modern transformation of Chinese historiography had its roots in the earlier periods. Nonetheless, it was more transformative and epochal in that from the turn of the twentieth century, especially during the May Fourth period, the form of history writing has changed irreversibly to narrative history. In other words, like their counterparts around the world, modern Chinese historians write history in the same way, despite the long historiographical tradition the country has had.

This change was associated with the change of both ideas and methods about both history and historiography. Instead of centering on the monarchs and ministers, who used to figure centrally in traditional dynastic histories, historians in modern China have paid much more attention to the changes in social structure, political power, and economic conditions and the role played by the masses in these processes. Their choice of narrative history has also stemmed from the interest in exploring and expounding causal relations in historical development. As of today, this remains more or less the general tendency, although the analytical tools used by them have varied from those of the early twentieth century when the modern form of historical practices began.

Q7. As someone who teaches history in the US and China, what differences have you observed in terms of your students, as well as the academic environments in which you operate? What are the external pressures you face as an historian in both countries?

I feel very fortunate to have been able to work in both countries for most of my career. This naturally prompts me to acquire a comparative perspective, which is beneficial to my professional development as well as to my study of history and historiography. If I have taken some turns in my career, such as writing food history, which I can explain more below, it is mostly due to working in two manifestly different cultural environments. The academic culture in China is different from that of the U.S. or the West in general in that education is more highly valued, perhaps due to the long practice of the civil service examinations. It contributes to the relatively higher social status of someone with an advanced degree.

Chinese students are deferential to their teachers, which is both good and bad: while they seem more receptive to your teaching, they also question you less. For me, the latter requires you as a teacher to be more explanatory in your teaching and writing. In the US, on the other hand, teachers are respected, but by and large the profession is not treated so differently from other professions. This democratic atmosphere helps you to be more grounded or down-to-earth in your thinking. Of course, it also allows you to think more freely, whereas in China, whether because of cultural tradition or political pressure, you are more aware of your role as an educator.

Q8. A challenge for those who study (or govern) China is its long history and the desire by various parties to draw parallels and linkages to this history for any number of objectives. In your view, how should the immense weight and complexity of Chinese history be applied when attempting to analyze or even govern modern China? Is this history a blessing or a curse as China tries to find its own path into the future?

This is definitely both a blessing and a curse. Having lived outside of China for most of my life and thanks to my knowledge of Chinese history, I can often see how many things in China today are based on history. Since we were talking about the civil service examination system, this can be a very telling example. The practice of selecting officials from the pool of talent screened by the system has, in my view, helped the Chinese government, and more broadly the country as a whole, to progress more than its counterparts of a millennium ago. And thanks to this tradition, the Chinese are more attuned to the value of education, which is seen as a means of climbing the social ladder. In contrast, before the modern era, countries in Europe and other parts of Asia remained strictly hierarchical, which limited upward social mobility.

But over time, the civil service exam as a cultural tradition has also shown its flaws. For one thing, as every member of Chinese society pursued educational success, it discouraged them from pursuing improvement in other occupations. Worse, as education became a tool for social advancement, those who succeeded in education tended to lack the commitment to persevere in the profession. This is becoming increasingly evident in China today. Chinese students are great overall because they are diligent in their studies. But after achieving a certain level of success, some of them decide to change careers, such as going to government. There are many examples of this, both in the Republican period in the first half of the twentieth century and in the more recent decades of the post-Mao period. In my own teaching career, I have also intimately observed this lack of professional commitment among the Chinese students I have taught. It is truly disappointing and would be detrimental to China’s efforts to raise the level of its scientific research.

Q9. Chinese historical writing was seemingly confined to secular and political events. Was there ever an initiative to record the history and evolution of religions or philosophies in China, given the strong influences of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism?  

Yes, there were. The three religions had different influences on Chinese historiography. For example, Daoism shaped early Chinese historical thinking in understanding and explaining the rise and fall of dynastic rule. Its influences faded in later periods, but traces of it remained visible in many Chinese historical writings, usually associated with descriptions of certain uncanny events and episodes in life.

Buddhism began to be a part of Chinese cultural life in the late Han period and after the fall of the Han dynasty in the third century. Its influence was seen in two ways. One was the introduction of a metaphysical consideration of the change of history, which helped Chinese thinkers and historians to pursue what we can call the philosophy of history, especially during the Song period (960-1279). The other was to have strengthened the interest in establishing moral exemplars through hagiographical writing integrated with historical writing.

Compared to the previous two religions, Confucianism has been an integral part of the Chinese tradition of historiography since its formative period in high antiquity. To a large extent, as I tend to argue, Confucius should also be regarded as the father of history in China, rather than Sima Qian, as is most commonly done in and outside the country. The reason is that Confucius influenced both the idea and the method of writing history, even though he did not author a historical text. Sima Qian, on the other hand, was greatly influenced by Confucius, save for his own ingenuity and contribution. And after Sima Qian, Confucianism became more and more influential in Chinese historiography and Chinese culture in general. For example, historians in mid- and late-imperial China were always faced with the thorny issue of evaluating the legitimacy of past dynasties. Confucian doctrine usually set the standard for such evaluation.

Q10. Shifting gears, you wrote a book on the history of chopsticks. What motivated you to write this book and what are some of the things that most surprised or delighted you over the course of this project?

As I alluded to above, my career development has a good deal to do with my bicultural work environment. My turn to food history is a case in point. It stems from my general interest in historiography as well as my comparative and bicultural perspective. The two are also related in that, over the decades of teaching in both countries, I have developed a keen interest in observing the rise of new historiographical schools in the postwar years. The new cultural history, which reflects and extends the postmodern critique of modern European historiography, is one of them. While I write and teach about it, I am also interested in experimenting with it, or the approach to historiography from below. On the other side, my bicultural experience has sharpened my awareness of Asian and Western cultural differences, including food culture in general and the way of transporting food in particular, such as whether it is done with a tool or just with your hands.

The culture and history of chopsticks becomes for me such an experiment in which not only a new cultural history is practiced, in which historical changes are examined from the point of view of an everyday experience, but it also allows me to seize the opportunity to show that a unique cultural phenomenon originated in ancient China and spread from there to the entire Sinitic cultural sphere. Indeed, like the importance of Chinese characters in the development of writing systems in the sphere, chopsticks are another cultural symbol that deserves our attention. I am delighted that the book has been well received in the Anglophone world, as evidenced by a number of invitations I received after Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History was published in 2015. I am also pleased that the book was quickly translated into three major Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, in order of appearance.

Q11. With the rise of “fake news”, social media echo chambers and AI-created content, are you worried that the discipline of history will end up a reflection of these trends or are they fundamentally no different from the influences historians have always had to face? Can the tools/skills/training of historians serve to protect the discipline in the years ahead or will historians have to adapt? Will there come a time when documented history itself becomes suspect or of dubious veracity?

This is a very good question out of genuine concern. But I am not so worried. Perhaps because I have studied the history of historiography in the world for a couple of decades, I have seen many challenges that the field of history has faced and how it has also flourished after overcoming the challenges. I am not a postmodernist per se, but I have sympathized with its assault on modern professional history, especially in the area of losing the traditional connection of historical writing to a more general readership. As professional historians, we write for ourselves or our peers, which is certainly a great benefit to the development of our profession and the improvement of our research. At the same time, however, it distances our work from the public and from the broader concerns and interests of our society. That “fake news” spread by social media can be so influential in some cases speaks to the downside of the professionalization of history in our time. As historians, we need to engage with the general public in a more direct and active way, addressing the issues that interest ordinary people in our writings and communicating our knowledge in a more accessible way.

In fact, advances in modern technology over the past few decades have benefited our research, writing, and presentation of history. For example, it is now almost unthinkable and/or unacceptable for us to teach our classes and present our research without the use of PowerPoint slides or similar computer-based devices. The use of this new technology is helping us to share our knowledge and research of history in a good way. In addition, I have also seen what I would call a “game change” in our book culture. Hard copies, or actual books, are on their way out in place of digital copies – our libraries are getting rid of books to make room for computers is proof of this. Personally, I have been reading more and more books in PDF format rather than turning the pages of a printed book. Is that a big challenge? Of course it is. But we have no way of stopping it; instead, we perhaps should adjust ourselves to it and even embrace it, even with some mental pain. This change makes it necessary for us to educate future historians differently; historiographical study becomes useful again in this regard.

Q12. As someone who operates across China and the US, does the growing friction between the two countries concern you? Has it impacted the ability of historians on both sides to collaborate? So much of the negative rhetoric is linked to relatively recent interactions, perceived threats/challenges and domestic politics. Does US/China history offer an alternative foundation on which better relations could be built? Alternatively, is Great Power friction a consistent theme across all history and thus we can expect more of the same?

Of course, I am very concerned about the recent friction between the United States and China, especially in the last decade after the change of leadership in both countries. The impact is greater in China than in the United States, because political pressure has certainly increased there, changing the relatively liberal atmosphere when the country was just beginning to modernize in the 1980s. Academic exchanges between the two countries have also been negatively affected, as many China scholars and experts I know in the United States have had their access to China revoked. This is very unfortunate and harmful to the scholarly communities in both countries. This misfortune has been caused by both long-term and short-term factors.

Historically speaking, China’s rapid rise to become the world’s second largest economy is alarming to some in the United States, who are motivated to find ways to contain China’s influence and diminish its strength, as great powers have tended to do to their adversaries in the past. In terms of short-term factors, then, it is clear that China’s foreign policy has undergone a marked change over the past decade, reflecting the new ambition of the country’s leadership to seek, much more actively than before, an alternative to the path of development into the future. Academically speaking, this is a worthwhile endeavor, because there are many problems that the so-called advanced countries of the world are facing today. But it seems to me that it is a bit premature to extend the search from the academic arena to the policy-making level and its implementation. At present, it seems to me, this policy change has done more harm than good to the relationship between the two countries and to the strengthening of China’s position in the world. All this would also have an undesirable effect on maintaining and managing unstable factors for the increasingly precarious development of world history in the years to come.

Q13. Please share any favorite books, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of historiography, comparative history, food history, etc.  

Since I have a wide range of interests, my readings have also spanned many fields. In the area of historical theory and historiography, I like the work of Lynn Hunt, although her main research interest is in modern French history. However, in recent decades, or after she co-authored the well-received book – Telling the Truth about History – in the last decade of the last century, she has written several texts on recent trends in historiography, such as Writing History in the Global Era and, more recently, History: Why It Matters. She is global in outlook and insightful in analysis; it is a pleasure to read her books.

The other scholar whose writings I like is Peter Burke, who was a professor of cultural history at Cambridge. Equally prolific, Burke does not write about historiography per se. Rather, he has written on various topics that help us understand the development of cultural and intellectual history since the early modern period. His style is very fluent and his way of thinking lucid. I have followed his publications from Renaissance of the Past in 1969 to recent ones such as Ignorance: A Global History and A Social History of the Media. But my favorite is The French Historical Revolution, which covers the rise and characteristics of the Annales school. It is succinct in content, which is Burke’s usual style, yet also rich in details that help the reader gain insight into the research and writing of the French historians under his pen.

My interest in global history and food history arose after reading Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Biological Imperialism. Of course, like many others, I prefer the former. Crosby is both critical in perspective and global in scope. I am particularly impressed by his insight in examining the relationship between food supply and population growth after the so-called Age of Discovery by Europeans. The inspiration I gained from reading his work has led me to complete my own writing of a global history of the sweet potato, which is currently under contract with Columbia University Press. In this book, I present a multifaceted picture of the American food crop after its introduction to Europe and then to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East from the early sixteenth century to the present. Unlike Crosby, I don’t see the spread of New World crops around the world as an organic and uniform process. Instead, I use the history of the sweet potato to argue for plural paths of development in modern world history.

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