Pliable History; Shaping the Past
- andrewsingerchina
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
“The past is what happened, history is what is written about it.”
This favorite quote from James Carter, Professor of modern Chinese history, has weighty implications for society and governance broadly. It also arises in less flashy, if not less important, venues. The questions raised are the same no matter the context. What is the past? Who gets to document this past in our histories for today and tomorrow?
One of the less flashy triggers of these questions crossed my path recently when I read an article by Professor Misha Tadd breaking down why and how Wang Bi, a man who died almost 1,800 years ago at the tender age of 23, is today credited with being the seminal commentator on the foundation text of Daoism.1
For most of the previous two millennia, Wang Bi was just one in a crowded ocean of commentators arguing a cornucopia of different interpretations on Daoism. In terms of importance and impact, Wang was for the longest time effectively a rowboat in a harbor of yachts. Historical change, however, was in the air.
A few, lonely seeds were planted during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). These blossomed and spread in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and first half of the twentieth century when Wang’s text was reprinted, re-assessed, and increasingly highlighted, promoted, and accepted by influential people as authoritative and ultimately dispositive.
Thus, the most definitive version of Daoism, what is read and studied, the basis from which people regularly ponder and philosophize this great tradition, that which is historically accepted, comes down to us as a result of a concerted effort over centuries that emphasized this and downplayed or ignored that. This is ironic given Daoism’s emphasis on natural flow, non-action, and following the Way. In this case as in so many more, the past, whatever it was, didn’t and couldn’t change. What did evolve was the history that curated this past.
Back to the more flashy. China is both debated and touted as being a civilization state. From China’s perspective, such a label lends gravitas to the country’s re-emergence on the global stage, to reclaiming its rightful place as ancient world leader. The effort also serves implicitly to contrast China with other polities, mere nation states, that boast more anemic timelines. How did this narrative arise?
Authoritarian governments and would-be authoritarians around the world want to tell their own story, to highlight this and erase that. Hiding, shaping, and warping the past by deflating and inflating traumas and glories, respectively, promotes and justifies visions of the present and foreshadows desired futures. The tradeoff is that controlling narratives often takes place at the expense of accuracy and truth.
Knowledge is power. The first Emperor of China knew this. The great Qing Dynasty Emperors knew this. So too did Mao Zedong and now Xi Jinping, though the former wanted to erase the past while the latter wants to deify it. President Xi has indeed proven adept at repackaging and promulgating China’s past for maximum domestic and increasingly international effect.
The people knowingly and unknowingly play a role in this, whether by coercion, conditioning, consent or a combination thereof. They star in a corollary of the above, clamming up. Professor Margaret Hillenbrand has written,
“Public secrecy of the kind practiced in China vis-a-vis the troubled past is akin, in certain ways, to the forms of passive or aggressive non-acknowledgment found in other historical contexts. Self-evidently, knowing what not to know is a stricture as pervasive in liberal-democratic states as it is in authoritarian ones.”2
Americans’ (and before that Europeans’) views of China and the Chinese have similarly been shaped by a centuries-long process of manufacturing, of presenting China for popular consumption. These views have generationally swung hot and cold under the weight of ideas, impulses, and biases promoted over time in the fields of politics, economics, philosophy, and academia.
In the words of Ho-fung Hung, these views seesaw between “the archetypes of the two poles of Western representation of China [over the prior eight centuries]—simplistic idealization and disdainful fear.”3 There is a common theme in these two poles. Otherness. China and the Chinese are alien. They are different. Whether welcoming or repelling in turn, this is the message.
American Statesman Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an admirer and proponent of Confucius’ moral philosophy as a model for society. In a 1749 letter to George Whitfield, he wrote “[o]n this principle [leading a good and exemplary life] Confucius, the famous eastern reformer, proceeded. When he saw his country sunk in vice, and wickedness of all kinds triumphant, he applied himself first to the grandees; and having by his doctrine won them to the cause of virtue, the commons followed in multitudes.”
More than a century later, American writer and poet Bret Harte (1836-1902) wrote a poem in 1870 titled “Plain Language from Truthful James.” It was intended to be satire, but lives on instead as “The Heathen Chinee” in the annals of anti-Chinese racism. Over ten stanzas, Harte laments the “not understanding,” “pensive and childlike” Ah Sin who outcheats the cheat at cards. The poem opens with “Which I wish to remark,/And my language is plain,/That for ways that are dark/And for tricks that are vain,/The heathen Chinee is peculiar,/Which the same I would rise to explain.”
A short decade plus after this poem, the Chinese Exclusion Act was adopted. In the almost century-and-a-half since, Americans’ views of China have continued to be swayed between Sinophilia and Sinophobia. The Chinese, whether paradigms of virtue or harbingers of inscrutable evil, are not like us. This has never wavered.
Who documents the past and affirms what we remember? As we read histories, this is the question we must continually ask. No history can be necessarily unimpeachable. They are the survivors or new entrants over shifting time, deserving and demanding critical analysis because some are more worthy than others.
Notes
1 Misha Tadd, “Revising the Place of Wang Bi’s Laozi Commentary in Laozegetics History,” Springer Nature, 26 June 2026
2 Margaret Hillenbrand, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, Duke University Press, 2020, Page 2
3 Ho-fung Hung, The China Question, Cambridge University Press, 2026, Page 15