Power, Ethics, and the Practices of Naming in PRC Historiography

This article investigates how historians studying PRC history refer to individuals drawn from historical sources in their scholarship. A survey of English-language scholarship reveals a wide spectrum of approaches, yet most historians remain silent about the rationale behind their choices. I argue that naming is not simply a matter of anonymization versus the use of real names, but of how anonymization is enacted, the extent to which anonymity is applied, how real names are presented, and what these decisions signify. Naming practices raise methodological and ethical concerns relating to credibility, privacy, agency, and accountability, but more fundamentally, they illuminate the dynamics of power in the three-way relationship between historical subjects, historians, and readers. By examining case studies of historical writing on sexual violence in the PRC, this article contends that naming is an epistemological issue central to the production of historical knowledge.