Introduction: The Politics of (Maoist) History

Personally, I have always thought that writing history is a political act — and I have always acted on that principle. Almost all China historians in US academia — and for sure all the historians contributing to this special issue — have been trained within or in proximity to Asian studies departments; we were provided with rigorous language preparation and have all had more than a passing acquaintance with what is unfortunately still called “sinology,” meaning the study of “China” as an enclosed, foreign, and distant object. Given that context, Chinese history might look more prone than other national histories to indulge in the curious, the anomalous, or at best the irrelevant: topics such as the horse trade during the Mongol empire and porcelain production in the Ming period are indeed fascinating, but they probably sound, correctly or not, very remote from any contemporary political relevance. Of course, there are also stratified intellectual, racial,