Many written examples survive of ceremonial inscriptions, divinations and records of family names, which were carved or painted onto tortoise shell or bones.
The anonymous Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical work composed of sporadic materials on the Warring States period between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC.
Typically, rulers initiating a new dynasty would employ scholars to compile a final history from the records of the previous one, using a broad variety of sources.
The book describes the general pattern of the official dynastic histories with regard to the structure, method, arrangement, sequence, caption, and commentary, dating back to the Warring States period.
Emperor Yingzong of Song ordered Sima Guang and other scholars to begin compiling this universal history of China in 1065, and they presented it to his successor Shenzong in 1084.
They included Chang Chi-yun, Gu Jiegang, Fu Sinian, and Tsiang Tingfu, who were PhDs from Columbia University; and Chen Yinke, who conducted his investigations into medieval Chinese history in both Europe and the United States.
Unlike Hesiod's system, however, the Duke of Zhou's idea of the Mandate of Heaven as a rationale for dethroning the supposedly divine Zi clan led subsequent historians to see man's fall as a cyclical pattern.
Thus, despite the fact that Chinese history has had many lengthy and contentious periods of disunity, a great effort was made by official historians to establish a legitimate precursor whose fall allowed a new dynasty to acquire its mandate.
Similarly, regardless of the particular merits of individual emperors, founders would be portrayed in more laudatory terms, and the last ruler of a dynasty would always be castigated as depraved and unworthy – even when that was not the case.
Such a narrative was employed after the fall of the empire by those compiling the history of the Qing, and by those who justified the attempted restorations of the imperial system by Yuan Shikai and Zhang Xun.
Two historiographic traditions: of unity in East Asia as a historical norm for this region, and of dynasties successively reigning on the Son of Heaven's throne allowed Chinese elites describing historical process in China in simplified categories providing the basis for the concept of modern "unitary China" within the borders of the former Qing Empire, which was also ruled by Chinese emperors.
[12] As early as the 1930s, the American scholar Owen Lattimore argued that China was the product of the interaction of farming and pastoral societies, rather than simply the expansion of the Han people.
Lattimore did not accept the more extreme Sino-Babylonian theories that the essential elements of early Chinese technology and religion had come from Western Asia, but he was among the scholars to argue against the assumption they had all been indigenous.
This expanded view encompasses internal and external tributary lands, as well as conquest dynasties in the history of a China seen as a coherent multi-ethnic nation since time immemorial, incorporating and accepting the contributions and cultures of non-Han ethnicities.
Historians engaging with archaeological progress find increasingly demonstrated a rich amalgam of diverse cultures in regions the received literature positions as homogeneous.
Some world-systems analysts, such as Janet Abu-Lughod, claim that analysis of Kondratiev waves shows that capitalism first arose in Song dynasty China, although widespread trade was subsequently disrupted and then curtailed.
Tanigawa reviewed the applications of these theories in Japanese writings about Chinese history and then tested them by analyzing the Six Dynasties 220–589 CE period, which Marxist historians saw as feudal.
[22] There was a gradual relaxation of Marxist interpretation after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976,[23] which was accelerated after the Tian'anmen Square protest and other revolutions in 1989, which damaged Marxism's ideological legitimacy in the eyes of Chinese academics.
Joseph Levenson and Mary C. Wright, and Albert Feuerwerker argued in effect that traditional Chinese values were a barrier to modernity and would have to be abandoned before China could make progress.
[28] Wright concluded, "The failure of the T'ung-chih [Tongzhi] Restoration demonstrated with a rare clarity that even in the most favorable circumstances there is no way in which an effective modern state can be grafted onto a Confucian society.
The Chinese nobility had been in decline since the Qin dynasty, and while the exams were largely meritocratic, performance required time and resources that meant examinees were still typically from the gentry.
[31] When Wittfogel published his Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, critics pointed out that water management was given the high status China accorded to officials concerned with taxes, rituals, or fighting off bandits.
[32] While Wittfogel's theories were not popular among Marxist historians in China, the economist Chi Ch'ao-ting used them in his influential 1936 book, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, as Revealed in the Development of Public Works for Water-Control.
From the time of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1992) on, there has been a drift towards a Marxist-inspired Chinese nationalist perspective, and consideration of China's contemporary international status has become of paramount importance in historical studies.
Long abandoned as a research focus among most Western scholars due to postmodernism's influence, this remains the primary interest for most historians inside China.
Postmodern scholarship largely rejects grand narratives altogether, preferring to publish empirical studies on the socioeconomics, and political or cultural dynamics, of smaller communities within China.
[41]: 67 There has been an increasingly nuanced portrayal of Chiang Kai-shek, particularly in more favorably evaluating his leadership during the Second Sino-Japanese War and highlighting his position as one of the Big Four allied leaders.
[41]: 67 Recently released archival sources on the Nationalist era, including the Chiang Kai-shek diaries at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, have contributed to a surge in academic publishing on the period.
The more modernist works focus on imperial systems in China and employ the scientific method to analyze epochs of Chinese dynasties from geographical, genealogical, and cultural artifacts.
The traditionalist school of scholarship resorts to official imperial records and colloquial historical works, and analyzes the rise and fall of dynasties using Confucian philosophy, albeit modified by an institutional administration perspective.