This interview is with Peter Zarrow, author of “The Place of the ‘Republic of China’ in Modern Chinese History” in the October 2025 issue of Twentieth-Century China. His essay is the first in the journal’s new series, Looking Back: Reexamining China’s Twentieth Century from the Twenty-First Century. Peter Zarrow is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and adjunct research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.
Before we start into the article and your research, could you tell us a bit about your academic background?
I can trace some of my interest in China back to high school—like quite a few other members of the “boomer generation” I was attracted both by Eastern religions and, via the antiwar movement, by the New Left and ultimately Maoism, our gateway drugs of choice. Then over the course of a somewhat scattered college career I was inspired by professors at both the University of Connecticut—where, coincidentally, I now teach—and Brown University, where I later transferred to. At Brown, Jerome Grieder put me on the path of intellectual history. I wanted to do a senior thesis on Chinese anarchism, but we agreed my Chinese wasn’t good enough, so I ended up writing on the Maoist concept of permanent revolution. My decision to do graduate work at Columbia was partly influenced by reading Theodore de Bary’s writings as an undergraduate, though of course I maintained my focus on the modern period and did my dissertation on the late Qing anarchists. That said, you can’t make any sense of Republican China without a good knowledge of the longer traditions. From graduate school onward, I’ve focused on intellectual movements and cultural shifts from the late Qing into the Republic—from anarchists and revolutionaries to Confucians and monarchists.
Your essay analyzes the historiography of the Republican era (1912–1949) when the Republic of China governed the mainland. What do you see as the greatest success of Republican-era historiography?
It has to be the wealth of brilliant monographs that have been published in the last few decades. That has certainly been a great success, as I hope my Looking Back piece indicates. In a word, this work represents what Joseph Esherick calls “granular social history” (Accidental Holy Land, xvii).
But my piece didn’t deal with this question of success directly. In his China: A New History, John King Fairbank remarked: “The path of historical wisdom is to find out what issues are still in dispute, to identify major current questions, rather than to try to resolve them all here and now” (xvii). Sometimes I feel all issues are always in dispute, they just temporarily fade from historical consciousness after people are tired of them, only to come back, possibly in new guises, later.
For example, one long-disputed and very central issue has been somewhat settled, I think. That is the nature of the Communist Revolution. We seem to have a good sense of the different stages it went through, the different motives of different participants in different places, its internal power struggles, the lifestyles of leaders and the rank-and-file, contingent and structural factors, and finally, most importantly, a sense of the balance among the appeals of ideology, patriotism, social justice, vengeance, and top-down organization and policing.
The debates over these issues into the last decades of the twentieth century have now, I think, reached a kind of resolution, though again I assume it will be a temporary resolution. (There remains a lot of documentation that, if open to researchers, would doubtless change our views.) And meanwhile, our perspective has shifted dramatically to ask, actually, how important was the Communist Revolution anyway? Important, but not the dominant question of the field today, both because we have moved on thanks to the work of earlier generations and because we don’t have to explain why China is communist today, since it is not communist today.
So, if that’s a historiographical success, it has just led to more questions. Maybe we could call that a Fairbankian cycle. A different kind of example might be an area that has seen great progress but is “still in dispute” I think, and that is the nature of the Nanjing government in the 1930s. I might have said more about both these topics in my article, but now I don’t want to turn this interview into a new article!
Following up on the previous question, what do you see as the greatest issue plaguing Republican-era historiography?
This question I think my piece did deal with. One way to put it is: Now that we know so much about China in this period through all the methodologies and professional turns—political, social, economic, cultural, and so forth—can we synthesize this knowledge into a larger whole? Should we? Is Republican China a field or not? Or, in other words, what are the implications of taking it as a field?
Your essay discusses the rise, fall, and rise again of Republican-era history as a distinct field in Chinese history. How did you come to focus on this topic?
Twentieth-Century China asked me about possibly doing something for this interesting Looking Back series, and I liked the idea but wasn’t sure what to do. I was provoked by the dismissal of Republican-era history that I begin my piece with. Of course, “dismissal” isn’t fair—it may be an objective observation that this history is overlooked today. One could say that the exciting, or at least the hottest, fields in modern China are the Qing on the one hand and the People’s Republic of China on the other. But I don’t think that represents where all the best work is going on.
I also remembered that shortly after I moved to Academia Sinica in 2001, I gave a talk on “Recent Trends in Western Scholarship on Modern Chinese History.” At that time, one point I made was that we had done so much work on the nineteenth century, especially the post–Opium War period, that that field had quieted down for now. The most exiting work was being done on the eighteenth century and on the Republican period.
Clearly, since I made that point, there has only been more great work on Republican China. For this piece, I decided I would just look a little more into the historiography since the 1960s or so. That got me to the idea of a rise and fall followed by another rise.
Your essay describes how some historians have dismissed the Republican era as a transitional period between the Qing dynasty and the People’s Republic of China. How do you see the Republic of China as a distinctive era?
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. On many levels it really is hard to distinguish it from the late Qing at the one end and the People’s Republic of China on the other. For example, the New Culture movement of, say, 1915 had much in common with radical thinking and social movements of the late Qing, and certainly the Leninist organization of the Communist Party moved fairly smoothly from the 1940s into the 1950s. But that very openness doesn’t seem to fit the notion of transition either.
Surely it was a very creative era. It was a very ugly era in many respects—social breakdown, war, invasion, famine, gangs, and, yes, exploitation—no wonder many Chinese regard it as a historical nadir. However, many of the old rules no longer applied, and new rules had not yet been cemented in place. Peasants could leave their villages for jobs in the city. Students could form communes. All kinds of new schools were popping up. There were ways around censorship. Obviously, tradition did not disappear tout court, but many small traditions were challenged or just abandoned.
In my piece I said this is the period when “we find modern Chinese consciousness coming into being” (200). That formulation is a little too grand for me to be entirely comfortable defending. But I’m thinking of the dramatic changes of the period—in some ways more dramatic than the revolutionary programs of the 1950s and 1960s, even—and a sense that the old order was crumbling, a greater consciousness of individuality, other new identities including of course national identity, and a multitude of attempts to shape a new order.
You have written extensively on the history of modern China. How do you see your work as fitting into the field of Republican history?
Actually, I tend to identify myself as a “late Qing–early Republic” specialist. I want historians of the Republic to acknowledge the massive importance of the 1911 Revolution on the one hand, and the debts Republican-period intellectuals and other cultural actors owed their immediate ancestors on the other hand. Of course, it was often literally the same people active before and after this one particular year, but there was also a clear generational shift and a new Republican-era vibe (so to speak).
One of the challenges in Chinese history is confronting the historical divides of 1911 and 1949. Some historians question these boundaries, while others emphasize these years as defining breaks in history. How do you see this issue and how would you characterize 1911 and 1949 in history?
I don’t think I have any original insights here. I do see those dates as marking turning points, maybe best understood through theories of revolution, always remembering that revolution never means that everything changes. To be slightly less murky, I see them narrowly as culminations of political-military power seizures. Maybe more controversially, I also see both as ideologically charged, shaped to an enormous extent by particular visions and practices carried by men and women, often quite young, who wanted to shape a new world. More broadly, with a somewhat larger historical perspective, we might say that, in terms of the power shifts, 1911 marked a continuing breakdown of at least central power, while 1949 marked an incredibly successful reassertion of central power precisely dedicated to social reconstruction before evolving into Thermidorian reaction.
While scholars comparing 1911 and 1949 generally agree that the latter date was more significant, in a longer-range historical perspective, we can also see 1911 as marking the more fundamental collapse of the two-millennia-old imperial system, which in turn was followed by a series of struggles of which 1949 marks just one. After all, 1949 after just about one generation has led to the kind of state-led capitalist system that has its roots in the Republic and even in the late Qing. In the end, 1911 and 1949 are useful for some questions but not others.
In the essay, you argue that Republican history is stuck in “historiographical binary between narratives of revolution and of modernization” (189). How would you suggest the field move beyond these teleological paradigms?
I haven’t got a dramatic new program to suggest. When we try to construct some kind of narrative coherence, it’s not that we should utterly reject any kind of teleology, much less that we should avoid large historical judgements, say about progress or the lack thereof. But rather that we recognize contingencies, human decisions, and generally speaking write with nuance. We ought to recover the fact that events could have gone differently and especially that people at the time did not know where they would end up—even while making sense of how things did end up. Neither revolution nor modernization are adequate frames anymore—here is where our twenty-first century perspective “looking back” helps—but they can’t be entirely abandoned either.
In what ways would you like your essay to impact Chinese history as a whole?
That’s up to readers! I think my essay is more observational than programmatic. The idea of “looking back” from the twenty-first century seems like a good time to take stock. That said, I certainly want to convince people that the history of Republican China is important and that if it really has been shunted aside, that is a big mistake.
For readers interested in learning more about the Republican period, what historiography would you recommend?
This is an impossible question because there is so much on so many different issues. Interested readers might check the works cited in my China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949 and Xavier Paulès’s The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949. Maybe instead of mentioning specific monographs, I’ll try to name a few of the scholars whose whole body of work I admire—hence skewing the list a bit older. After the classic studies of Lloyd Eastman and Tse-tsung Chow (in no particular order): Wen-hsin Yeh, Hans van de Ven, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Prasenjit Duara, Parks Coble, Joseph Esherick, Gail Hershatter, Rana Mitter, Vera Schwarcz, Yung-fa Chen, Diana Lary, David Der-wei Wang, Frederic Wakeman, Joan Judge, Guoqi Xu, Stephen Averill, Arif Dirlik, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Lucien Bianco, Jerome Ch’en, John Fitzgerald, Henrietta Harrison, Rebecca Karl, Elizabeth Perry, Kristin Stapleton, David Strand, Di Wang…
Outside of this essay, can you tell us a bit about your current research?
I am writing a history of the Forbidden City from 1900 to today (with, indeed, my main focus placed on the Republican period). Put simply, this is a story of museumification, but one that turns out to have many twists and turns. Fundamentally, the Forbidden City, becoming the Palace Museum (Gugong), came to represent the national heritage. I’m not interested in the art, which many people have written about, but the site itself. It was always subject to debates over what it meant in contemporary China, even proposals to tear it down, and visitors have always reported a variety of experiences. I think it serves as a lens on modern Chinese history, contested in many ways, a story of rival intellectuals, radicals, artists, architects, warlords, monarchists, nationalists, communists, foreign visitors, and ordinary tourists. The Forbidden City with all its holdings was a site where people sought to balance a critical view of the monarchy (oppression, exploitation—a view not limited to communists by any means) with a love for the great accomplishments of Chinese civilization and the essence of the nation. The modern history of the Forbidden City is intertwined with imperialism, nationalism, ethnic consciousness, architecture, urban planning, and global tourism. It was and is a palace complex whose meaning is in constant flux.