The Historical Inheritance of China's General History

The Chinese nation has a long history of 5,000 years, and its strong cohesion and endless vitality are the spiritual temperament and life heritage of every China person. History contains the ups and downs of a nation for generations, as well as the way to success or failure and the inherent laws hidden behind the appearance of events. Examining the reality from the perspective of history and drawing wisdom and nutrition from it is a subject that every China person must face squarely, and it is of great practical significance to study history. A large number of historical books and records describe the changes of five thousand years. From the official twenty-four histories to various unofficial history, notes and romances, China people attach importance to and cherish their own national history, which makes them worthy of the reputation of "historical nation". However, old ideas, obscure words and voluminous real history are undoubtedly a gap isolated from history for modern readers.

So, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the bitter experience of19th century, the reflection of old historiography and the arrival of new historiography at the beginning of the new century, a new general history of China came into being. The so-called "General History of New China" is a genre of compiling historical books relative to the traditional old historiography. Before the new general history of China came out, Sima Qian's biographical general history and Sima Guang's chronological general history were two ancient general history masterpieces. As for the compilation of Chronicle of Tong Jian, A Compendium of Tong Jian and Zhi Yi Lu in the Compendium, they can all be used as general history classics to meet different needs. On the other hand, A General History of New China breaks through the classic mode and takes "textual compilation" as the representative genre. As far as narrative content is concerned, most traditional general history books mainly describe the political history of emperors, while the narrative content of A General History of New China has shifted from dynasties to countries, from traditional "aristocratic elites" to social people, from politics and institutions to culture, economy, society, religion and art, and most of them no longer focus on "praising and criticizing characters and listing events". Chapter-by-chapter, chapter-by-chapter, and section-by-section are conducive to giving full play to the flexible advantages of freely tailoring and organically weaving narrative content, and it is easier to express the internal logical relationship between the author's intention and content narrative than traditional division.