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The master narratives of modern China: their origins, evolution, and reconstruction – a review of Li Huaiyin’s Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

There have been plenty of critical scholarly retrospectives and reflections on the paradigmatic shifts in modern Chinese historiography since the turn of the twentieth century. While many have noted the close relationship between present accounts of the past and historical realities, few have produced cool-headed, in-depth analysis of the way social context, competing ideologies, and power relations have shaped historical writings. Even fewer have addressed the question of how an individual historian’s intellectual proclivity and interpretive framework fashion a particular account of past events. Against this backdrop, Li Huaiyin’s Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing deserves our attention. As someone fully engaged in the academic worlds of both China and the United States, Li has intimate knowledge of the scholarly trends and developments in historical studies of mainland China as well as familiarity with the different perspectives from which American China scholars examine China. This unique position as both an insider and an outsider gives him an advantageous vantage point. In addition, he was one of the pioneers in introducing Western theories on modernization into China in the 1980s and published numerous articles about Western studies of China’s modernization. His participation in the 1980s in a research project on modernization from a comparative perspective led by Luo Rongqu, a leading scholar in the field, prompted Li to critically reflect on the