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JOHN J. NOLDE
The problem of historical relevance is especially troublesome in the field of modern Chinese history, where, I suggest, three distortive forces have been at work.
The first of these has been the tendency to think of China as a single entity, a monolithic whole, as if it had the cohesiveness of an England or a France. One example is a recent book on local government which treats the problem in terms of all China throughout the entire Ch'ing period. Another study is concerned with the techniques of imperial control in rural China, and while the treatment is limited to the nineteenth century, the author attempts to bring all China within his scope, presumably from Kwangtung to Sinkiang and from Yunnan to Shantung.
The problem is, of course, that China is not a uniform whole. The differences between north and south China are vast indeed, and the Kwangtung fishing village is as unlike a Hopei farming community as the life of a Loire valley peasant differs from that of a Swiss herdsman. No one questions the fact that there are universals in Chinese history and culture: the written language, Confucianism, ancestor worship. But the differences are surely as great as the similarities, if not greater: linguistic variations, differences in economic organization, religious ceremonies and festivals that are peculiar to special areas, even racial differences. Important, too, is the attitude of the people themselves on this point. The northerner may still hold the southerner, especially the Cantonese, in some contempt, and the Cantonese still speak of people from other provinces as wai sheng jen, “outside province people”.
A second distortive influence, and this is closely related to the first, has been to give Chinese history a "north China slant”. There has been a tendency to assume that the cultural, linguistic, social patterns, indeed, the very history of the north, were typical of all China, and even if it is admitted that other areas differ widely from these patterns, it is somehow assumed that the other patterns are aberrations, variations from the ideal. Furthermore, there has been a tendency to think that the problems of north China were the problems of all China and that the troubles of Peking officialdom were somehow important in other parts of the empire.
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