Thirty years ago, Association for Asian Studies President Ho Ping-ti summarized the state of Qing studies in his address, “The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History” (Ho 1967). Since that time, there have been major shifts in scholarly perceptions of the nature and significance of Qing rule that bear directly on contemporary issues of nationalism and ethnicity. I will survey the recent secondary literature, compare current formulations of Qing history with those enunciated by Professor Ho, and appraise their implications for our understanding of China.

When Robert Sewell inaugurated the modern study of the South Indian state of Vijayanagara with his classic A Forgotten Empire (1900), he characterized the state as “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1), thereby formulating one of the enduring axioms of Vijayanagara historiography. From their capital on the banks of the Tungabhadra river, the kings of Vijayanagara ruled over a territory of more than 140,000 square miles, and their state survived three changes of dynasty to endure for a period of nearly three hundred years, from the mid-fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries (Stein 1989, 1–2). According to Sewell, this achievement was to be understood as “the natural result of the persistent efforts made by the Muhammadans to conquer all India” ([1900] 1962, 1). Hindu kingdoms had exercised hegemony over South India for most of the previous millennium, but were divided among themselves when the Muslim forces of Muhammad bin Tughluq swept over the South in the early decades of the fourteenth century: “When these dreaded invaders reached the Krishna River the Hindus to their south, stricken with terror, combined, and gathered in haste to the new standard [of Vijayanagara] which alone seemed to offer some hope of protection. The decayed old states crumbled away into nothingness, and the fighting kings of Vijayanagar became the saviours of the south for two and a half centuries” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1).

Change, or impending change, can often inspire the creation of myths, for it both threatens and promises. It threatens the security of the established, while providing hope to the disestablished. Change thus produces anxiety and discomfort on the one hand, euphoria and optimism on the other. Those in a position to be harmed by the change often create “negative” myths about the potential implications of that change; those not, glorify it. To misquote Claude Levi-Strauss, myths are created to control the present, hence, by implication, also the future (Levi-Strauss 1979).

The death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, followed more recently by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has indeed incited a degree of historical awareness among Japanese from all walks of life. In the wake of an enigmatic period of social self-restraint (jishuku) during the final months of the Shōwa period (1926–89), fettered reflections of Shōwa Japan inundated the media. Despite a few outspoken critics at the margins, retrospectives appearing on Japanese television and in mainstream print media after Hirohito's death have largely glossed over touchy subjects such as war atrocities, war responsibility, and the continued existence of the emperor system in the postwar era. No doubt that threats of right-wing terrorism aimed at even the mildest of critics of Japan's involvement in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) have done their share in encouraging such self-censorship. By most accounts, such efforts have proved effective in diffusing critical public opinion and in pruning public memory. Yet, the ending of the era has provided an extra impetus and a rhetorical rationale for a reckoning of everyday life in Shōwa Japan by the masses whose lives coincided with it: it is over, so now we can tell its story.

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitled Scène (his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.