The Place of the “Republic of China” in Modern Chinese History

Abstract: This essay discusses attempts in the West to understand Republican China as “field” from the 1970s to today. In the decades since the 1970s, there have been a great many specialized studies on aspects of the period, but, at the same time, it became harder to tell a coherent story of the Republic, which has tended to dissolve into the late Qing at one end and into the People’s Republic at the other. As we look back from the twenty-first century, the Republican period (1912–1949) appears transitional and revolutionary. However, in spite of a great deal of political upheaval, it was also creative and coherent in its own right. As a field, the study of Republican China has much to tell us about the nature of Chinese modernity.