In 1975, Mao Zedong was having a conversation with one of his secretaries on Sima Guang, the famous Song historian, noting that his Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government – which traced the chronological history of China from the Fifth Century BC – ended just before the foundation of the Song Dynasty in 960 AD. Mao believed that Sima Guang did so because in traditional China, it is considered too sensitive and dangerous for historians to write extensively about the founder of the current regime.[i]Given his own position as the founder of the Peoples’ Republic of China, the irony of the statement could not be lost on Mao.

When he died a year later, the official evaluation of his historical role in China became a major issue of debates among his successors, proving that the difficulty faced by Sima Guang persisted in modern times. After Deng Xiaoping and his reformist faction prevailed in the ensuring power struggles, they did not denounce him the way Khrushchev did Stalin in 1956 – even though they had suffered under Mao. Denouncement of the Chairman, founder of the Communist regime, would adversely affect the legitimacy of the entire Communist government. In the end, the official evaluation pronounced that Mao was “70% right, 30% wrong”. This naturally raised the question of how the mathematical equation was arrived at, namely what exactly constituted the 70% and what went into the 30%. Deng and the others proved vague about this.[ii]

In general, the 70% came largely as a result of Mao leading the communists to victory and establishing the new revolutionary regime in 1949. The 30% seemed to have concentrated on the last two decades of the Maoist era (1957-1976), which saw the disastrous policies of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Even then, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four were to bear the bulk of the blame and arguably became the scapegoats for all that went wrong. The evaluation served its purpose because the 70% protected the legitimacy of the CCP while the 30% provide the platform for Deng to continue with the process of de-Maoization through his Open-Door reforms.

While the official evaluation might have been made, it was not however always accepted by the people. This was especially so with the more opened intellectual environment of the Post-Maoist Era, which allowed for greater access to scholarly works outside of China that do not agree with the official evaluation. Indeed, there has been a huge fascination with Mao among Western scholars – including Jonathan Spence, Michael Franz and Maurice Meisner – who had written on Mao in one biographical form or another. The large volumes of works were such that in 2002, one of Mao’s biographers, Lee Feigon claimed that there are not many more facts left about Mao to expose because:

“Scholars have unearthed and published virtually every word Mao ever wrote and have attempted to describe his every action in exhaustive detail. They have even translated and analyzed the notes that he scribbled in the margins of his boyhood schoolbooks, and have documented his bowel movements before various battles.”[iii]

Feigon’s claim was rather doubtful because there are still many mysteries surrounding Mao and much still to be revealed largely due to the relatively tight archival control of the PRC. However, the majority of biographies by the Western scholars provided many insights to Mao, as alternatives to the official evaluation. Nonetheless, there is one vital area that Western scholarship had in common with the official evaluation. The official evaluation had begun a process of demystifying Mao, who had been regarded as infallible previously. Now, the 30% was an admission that he was a flawed man. This was a trend that also find current in the West, where such biographies as Ross T Terrill’s Mao: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) and Philip Short’s well researched & highly readable Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) portrayed Mao as a flawed human.

Biographies of Mao published in China tended not to stray from the official evaluation. The trend of demystifying could also be seen in those works, especially the memoirs and reminiscences of those who had been close to Mao, such as his personal attendant, Zhang Yufeng, and his bodyguard, Li Yingqiao. Some of the reminiscences had been compiled by writer Quan Yanchi, which included the appropriately named Mao Zedong, Man, Not God (Beijing Foreign Press, 1992).[iv]Mao was remembered positively as a kind and warm-hearted leader, who truly cared about the well being of his people but misled into making the wrong decisions.

Yet, in demystifying and “exposing” his flaws, the real challenge to the official evaluation was whether Mao was just a mere 30% wrong. Interestingly, the two most important books on this aspect came from Chinese who had lived through the Maoist Era, and came to challenge the evaluation by writing and publishing their books as immigrants in a foreign country. It was not surprising that both books were banned in China.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao (London: Chatto & Winus, 1994), authored by Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, was a continuation of the trend to demystify Mao. Yet, it also set a new direction with its focus on the negative aspects of the humanized Mao. His close proximity to Mao allowed him to write an intimate but ultimately unflattering portrayal of a leader he initially admired but grew to fear and even loathed. His account revealed Mao as a degenerated tyrant who had been corrupted by absolute power, and the story was virtually a reflection of the intrigues and factionalism that was reminiscent of the old imperial court in traditional China. Given its content, it was no wonder that his memoir could only be written after he immigrated to the United States.

If Li’s scandalous but intimate memoir was a challenge to the official evaluation, then a bigger bombshell would come a decade later with the publication of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). While they could not claim to have the first-hand knowledge of Mao, they backed their work with extensive researches and archival sources. Extreme and often spiteful in its portrayal of Mao, they turned him into the single most evil man in the Twentieth Century, if not in all time.

The path of demystifying had taken the extreme route and came almost full circle. In Chung and Halliday’s biography, Mao appeared less as a human and more a personification of pure evil, responsible for “well over 70 millions deaths”. As expected, this biography created a wave of controversy upon release. The majority of scholars – e.g. Jonathan Spence, Andrew Nathan and Wang Gungwu – find the book very bias and its use of sources questionable. Others, such as Arthur Waldron, lauded the book for its vigorous research and exposure of the monstrous Mao.

Despite the controversy (or more likely because of it), the book was on the best-selling lists inmost countries. The communist leaders too had to worry about underground copies in China and the impact on the Chinese readers. The communist leadership had to manage the process of demystifying Mao, as they still needed to protect his name (and its own legitimacy) against the attempt to turn him into a monster.

However, it is possible that the majority of Chinese would still form their own opinion of the Chairman. In my travels to China over the past decade, I had come across people with vastly different views about Mao Zedong and his legacy.

One was an old peasant from Yunnan, a province that has been relatively untouched by the reforms of the post-Maoist Era, compared to the coastal provinces. He commented that both Mao and Deng were men of great accomplishments but Mao was the greater man because he “conquered and unified the land to make China what it is today” (是靠他打下这大片江山，才有今天的中国).

Another was a young man from the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, well educated and very cynical of Chinese Socialism as a whole. He joked that “the Revolution had already been successfully completed, now we can all start making money” (革命已经成功了，现在可以开始赚钱).

Such opinions are likely based on their own collective memory (or that of their parents) during the Maoist Era, as well as the impact of the socio-economic changes that the Post-Maoist era have on them, rather than the availability of new historical evidence or documents.

The author is a M.A. candidate at the Department of History in NUS, studying the relations between state and historians in Early Maoist China. He likes to travel and read historical works.

[i] Xue Zeshi 薛泽石, Geng mao zedong xueshi 跟毛泽东学史 (Learning History From Mao Zedong), pp.991-992.

[ii] One major influence for the 70-30 formula could well come from Mao himself in his assessment of Stalin following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956. The initial decade of the PRC was very much modeled on Stalinist USSR. Moreover, Stalin had been raised to the same level of Communist pantheon in China as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The denouncement of Stalin by his successor, Khrushchev, would therefore have serious implication on the faith of the Chinese people towards the CCP regime. Eventually, Mao took the view that Stalin was “70 percent a Marxist, 30 percent not a Marxist”. In giving Mao the same assessment as Mao had given Stalin, Deng was probably playing on a historical irony. This is because he had as much grievances against Mao as Mao had against Stalin but still had to protect the respective names due to the issue of legitimacy.

[iii] Lee Feigon, Mao: A Reinterpretation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), p.11

[iv] Mao Zedong, Man, Not God covered the reminiscences of his bodyguard, Li Yingqiao, and was interesting because he painted a rather sympathetic picture of Jiang Qing or Madame Mao, though she was reviled in the official history.

Continuing Studying Ancient Chinese History in Singapore (Part One)…

4) Libraries at the National University of Singapore (NUS)

The Central Library at NUS has a fairly good collection of English-language academic books on Chinese history, and frequently purchases newly-published works. If you make a request for them to buy a new book, they are likely to get it within two weeks.

The Chinese Library has a huge and constantly growing collection of books on Chinese history, although many of the older ones are in Closed Stacks (including books from the old Nanyang University library) and have to be requested online or at the loans desk. Ordering new books through the Chinese Library does not work well, however, because they don’t have an effective system for ordering books from China at present.

Another good thing about the NUS libraries: both have a large number of academic journals (in English and Chinese) that deal with Asian and Chinese history, and also subscribe to online electronic databases of journals (also in English and Chinese). Many journal articles fill in important gaps that are not covered by books, but get too little attention from non-academics because they are much harder to find outside a university.

If you are not currently an NUS student, a NUS library membership may not cheap but could prove to be a worthwhile investment, as there are centralised resources in the libraries which you may not find anywhere else in Singapore.

5) Attending Talks and Exhibitions

Attending talks and exhibitions also allows interested historians to learn more about their fields of research. For instance, the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) is currently showcasing an exhibition of archaeological artifacts from Sanxingdui in Sichuan. Throughout the exhibition period, ACM invited several speakers from China and the US to give talks on topics related to Sanxingdui. The museum’s coverage of Chinese history and archaeology is also likely to increase as it builds more links with Chinese museums and archaeologists, so now is a good time to subscribe to their mailing list.

As a side note, the importance of archaeology’s in supplementing textual sources on ancient Chinese history has been steadily increasing since the early twentieth century; to the point where few historians can afford to leave archaeological evidence out of their research entirely. In the case of Sanxingdui, archaeology is the main source of knowledge and information about a civilisation that is barely traceable in texts and documents.

6) Banding Together: The China History Forum (CHF)

Singaporeans with an interest in ancient Chinese history may get the depressing illusion that they are the only member of their species in the world. I certainly did in the past, and have met others who thought the same. But we are not alone!

The China History Forum (www.chinahistoryforum.com) has probably done more than anything else to change that perception and to bring fellow historians of China together. Founded in 2004 by a Taiwan-born Singapore Permanent Resident, it is now the largest and most important online community dedicated to the discussion of Chinese history in the English language. CHF has a surprisingly large number of Singaporean members interested in Chinese history, and holds occasional gatherings for members (sometimes to attend ACM talks). The membership is also international in out-look and includes active members from New Zealand, Russia, Western Europe, India, the Americas, and of course China.

CHF thus compensates for the small number of Chinese history enthusiasts in most of its members’ countries by connecting them with enthusiasts around the world. Naturally, members from different countries will occasionally get into quarrels each other (particularly on issues relating to Taiwan and Japan!). But the forum’s governing philosophy of political neutrality, inclusiveness, and non-nationalistic objectivity usually serves to keep propagandistic and polemical content at a minimum.

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The above pointers are of course derived from my personal journey studying Chinese history. They have been most useful and will continue to help me in my pursuit of historical knowledge on Ancient China. I do hope they can also help fellow historians of China in similar ways.

The author graduates in August 2007 with a Masters (Arts) in History, from the Department of History, National University of Singapore. He will be studying for his Ph.D in UC Berkeley come August 2007.

It is not easy for a Chinese Singaporean to specialise in ancient China history because there are so few historians interested to begin with. Little Chinese history is taught in either the History or Chinese Language syllabi in Singapore schools. Chinese history also rarely figures in the media, except for some ‘historical’ drama serials aired by Channel 8 and occasional documentaries on Discovery, the National Geographic Channel, and Channel NewsAsia.

But whether you aspire to be a professional ancient China historian, or just want to know more about ancient China history, it can be done. I didn’t know anything when I started out, but I gradually figured out how to get a fairly good grounding in Chinese history. Here are some tips.

1) Learn Classical (wenyan) Chinese

Most ancient Chinese history sources havenever been translated into English, and even for those that have been, you will learn much more from reading the original text. For that reason, an ability to read the classical prose these texts are written in will be essential. In 2005, a team of Chinese historians finally finished translating the 24 Dynastic Histories into ‘normal’(baihua) Chinese. However, this translated edition is not readily available at this point in writing.

If you have trouble reading normal Chinese, don’t fret. Reading more books on Chinese history written in simpler contemporary Chinese (these are mostly published by China) will help you improve until you are confident enough to try classical. The ‘A’-Level Chinese and Higher Chinese syllabi in Junior Colleges introduces a number of classical passages. But your ultimate goal should be to read at least some of the 24 Dynastic Histories, or part of the monumental Zizhi Tongjian by Sima Guang (which covers nearly 1,400 years of history up to AD 959).

The simplest way sometimes is to simply jump in and start trying to make sense of the text. You should get the hang of it relatively quickly - the classical prose in Histories is usually simple rather than ornate, except for edicts, memorials, and essays recorded verbatim. Get a good Chinese-to-English dictionary that also includes definitions in Chinese, and a dictionary of archaic Chinese. These will be very useful for getting around tricky/rare words or phrases.

You will find that most good editions of the Dynastic Histories are in the Fanti script, not the Jianti script that is commonly taught in China and Singapore. This is true even for PRC editions. One reason for it is that the Jianti script has erased a large number of characters by merging them with similar-sounding characters, and this can sometimes create ambiguity when ancient texts get rendered in Jianti - a character that didn’t use to have so many meanings now does in Jianti.

This is potentially inconvenient for Singaporeans who are mostly educated in Jianti Chinese. My suggestion is to gradually make a list, in alphabetical order by Hanyu Pinyin, of Fanti characters and their Jianti equivalents. If in doubt, just check your dictionary - the good ones will give the Fanti version of a character in brackets.

2) Read good books by historians

This is an obvious but crucial point, especially in Singapore where good books on China are hard to come by. Borders and Kinokuniya have a small selection of ancient China books in English, although not all are written by professional historians. Even books written by PhD-holders can be extremely inaccurate - Ann Paludan’s Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors is one notable example. Another drawback of English-language books is that the good ones (e.g. Cambridge History of China series) are often expensive, whether buying in Singapore or online. Alternatives are also slightly lacking. The National Library does not have enough of such books even in its Lee Kong Chian Reference Library; though the NUS Central Library does have quite a good collection - see Point 4.

However, we cannot rely on English-language works alone. They are more accessible for a reasonable introduction, but eventually we have to delve into the much larger body of works by Chinese historians writing in Chinese. Kinokuniya’s Chinese section has several, but they are mostly published in Taiwan and Hong Kong (therefore in Fanti), and of uneven quality. Do not buy anything from the large Chinese historical novel section - none of those novels is a credible historical source!

Vista Culture at Paragon Shopping Centre has some good PRC-published books, and so do the various bookstores at the Bras Basah Complex. The annual World Book Fair also brings in a large variety of Chinese books, and is worth going to unless you are able to make trips to China to buy the same books at much lower prices (see Point 3). Again, the NUS Chinese Library is a good alternative to buying.

One series I’d personally recommend is Bai Yang’s translation of the Zizhi Tongjian from classical into Fanti Chinese, which is available in more than thirty slim volumes. What’s more, you need not buy all but only those volumes covering periods that are of interest to you. The generally cost $19-20 each, and include maps as well.

3) Visit China and Taiwan

Besides getting to visit some historical landmarks and museums you have read about, the best thing about travelling to China as a history student is that the major cities have plenty of bookstores, and those bookstores are usually well-stocked with good Chinese history books at affordable prices. The publishing industry in the PRC has expanded considerably since the 1990s, and many books are now well-illustrated with maps and pictures, and are printed on good quality paper. The Zhonghua Shuju edition of the 24 Dynastic Histories, which remains authoritative, is also easily found in Beijing and Shanghai, especially in bookstores near universities.

Taiwan (and especially in Taipei) has just as many bookstores and its own range of locally-published books. But books are generally more expensive there and are printed in unfamiliar Fanti. The advantage of Taiwanese books is that they are often more historically sound than the PRC ones. By this I mean that they do not carry the Marxist ideological and methodological baggage that many PRC books suffer from, and are also not as constrained by considerations of political correctness in issues touching on ethnic relations.

Two reference books that should definitely be in your library as soon as possible, and can probably only be found in China: a dictionary of official titles and ranks in ancient Chinese governments, and the Historical Atlas of China edited by Tan Qixiang.

Continued in Studying Ancient Chinese History in Singapore (Part Two) …

The author graduates in August 2007 with a Masters (Arts) in History, from the Department of History, National University of Singapore. He will be studying for his Ph.D in UC Berkeley come August 2007.

I learn a lot from my students during tutorials, sometimes more than they do from me. During one tutorial when we were discussing some aspects of early twentieth century Singapore history, a student of Chinese nationality suddenly spoke up, “Sun Yan Zi played a very important role in connecting overseas Chinese and China.” The whole class went silent trying to digest what had just been said, and then burst out laughing hilariously! The student had unwittingly mixed up the two ‘Suns’ – Sun Yan Zi the pop singer, also known as Stephanie Sun; and Sun Yat Sen, widely regarded as the founding father of Republican China.

However, the student could be right to some extent. Stephanie Sun DOES play a very important role in connecting China and Singapore today. About a century ago, there was no independent Singapore as we know it today. The majority of the migrant population in colonial Singapore was Chinese sojourners. Most of them saw China as their real home and took a greater interest in the political, economic and social developments in their homeland, rather than in the place they came to work in. The Chinese people sent relief to the victims of various disasters in China. They remitted money back home to build up industries, infrastructure and education. Hence, Sun Yat Sen was able to make use of this emotional connection to drum up support for his revolutionary plans during his visits to Singapore, (which indirectly culminated in the 1911 Revolution).

After Singapore gained independence in 1965, the Chinese in Singapore had to see themselves as Singaporeans; while the Chinese in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) look upon Singapore as a foreign country. Since then, the economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries have been quite close, but these high-level considerations do not always directly affect the daily lives of the general public in both countries. Rather, it is the various aspects of popular culture which connects both Chinese and Singaporean youths – for instance, pop music, literature, gaming etc.

External cultural influences are unavoidable with increasing globalisation. Western (or more accurately American) popular culture is perhaps the strongest, permeating most areas of the globe. Intellectuals and scholars have highlighted the negative effects of “Westernisation” – for instance, movies from Hollywood, MacDonald’s – all of which are common sights in China nowadays. The world becomes even closer with the advent of new media – such as the Internet. Chinese youths can now share information almost instantaneously with their American counterparts online. For instance, Chinese fans can watch an episode of Prison Break online just a day after it is released in America.

However, it is interesting to note that despite the apparent hegemony of Western moving pictures, Chinese music is still dominant. One notices that in the music collection of most Chinese youths (usually in digital format nowadays), they listen more to Mandarin pop music. The singers usually hail from the Chinese Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, and in some rare cases, from Indonesia or even Thailand. Bearing Chinese names and features, it is difficult to distinguish off-hand who is who, and from which region. While music is able to cross national and regional boundaries, it does seem unable to transcend the language boundary just as easily. Excluding the really famous and popular foreign music stars, Chinese youths generally only listen to those who sing in Mandarin.

Stephanie Sun is one of them. During my college days, her songs were among the most popular ones during karaoke sessions. While most Chinese youths cannot tell the difference between Hokkien and Hakka – I did not even know that they were two different dialects until I came to Singapore, they nonetheless can all sing “ti o o” (literally meaning “sky is getting dark”) in S. Sun’s song Cloudy Day (Tian Hei Hei). Other Singaporean pop stars are also becoming popular in China, e.g. Wayne Lin Junjie and Huang Yida, who could be said to be even more popular than Stephanie Sun presently. These pop stars bring Singapore, or at least some aspect of it, to the Chinese youths. Their ideas and perceptions of Singapore are not shaped by school textbooks – which seldom mention Southeast Asia; not by the newspapers – which are usually focused on local and international important news, and certainly not by the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park. Instead, Chinese youths know Singapore through the Singaporean-produced songs they listen and sing along to.

Historically, the actions of Sun Yat Sen in Singapore leading up to the 1911 Revolution are significant. When I had highlighted other contributions of Singapore Chinese had made to China – aside from the revolution, they also made contributions of money and military equipment to support their brethren during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945); some of them even went back to fight – I know Chinese students do appreciate these historical facts.

But I also realised that for the youths of China, Singapore only becomes more relevant when talking about Sun Yan Zi, rather than Sun Yat Sen.

The author is a Chinese national, who was awarded a Masters in History from the National University of Singapore. She is currently doing her Ph.D. at the Department of History, National University of Singapore.