• FROM RANKEAN “SCIENTIFIC HISTORY” TO CHEN YINKE’S HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP: Objectivity and Culturalist Sentiments between Western and National Learning

This paper examines how modern Chinese historiography emerged through the transnational circulation of historical methods and ideas, focusing on the influential historian Chen Yinke (1890–1969). While scholars have often celebrated Chen as a symbol of intellectual independence and cultural integrity, less attention has been paid to the relationship between his rigorous historical methodology and his deep concern for cultural continuity. By situating Chen within the broader global history of historical scholarship, this study explores how the nineteenth-century German ideal of “scientific history,” associated with Leopold von Ranke, was adapted and transformed in Republican China. Understanding this process sheds light on the formation of modern Chinese historical consciousness and the tensions between scholarly objectivity, nationalism, and cultural identity.

The research combines intellectual history, historiographical analysis, and close reading of primary and secondary sources. Drawing on Chen Yinke’s published writings, lectures, notebooks, correspondence, and archival materials related to his studies at Harvard  and Berlin, the paper traces the transmission of philological and source-critical methods from Europe to China. It also analyzes Chen’s interpretations of medieval Chinese history, particularly his Lectures on the Six Dynasties, alongside later literary-historical works and contemporary scholarship on historiography.

The paper argues that Chen Yinke embodied a productive tension between empirical historical research and culturalist sentiment. Although deeply influenced by Rankean source criticism and philological rigor, Chen viewed historical scholarship as more than the reconstruction of facts; it was also a means of preserving cultural memory and responding to the challenges of modernity. His work demonstrates that modern Chinese historiography was not simply a national tradition nor a passive adoption of Western methods, but rather a complex synthesis forged through cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Chen’s scholarship reveals how historians negotiated the relationship between objectivity, cultural identity, and historical change in twentieth-century China.