recent years. Increased communication between scholars in the Peo-
ple's Republic and the West (and in Japan), and greater ideological
flexibility on all sides have begun to yield not only patterns of re-
ciprocal influence, ¹²⁸ but also an emerging view of China's socio-
economic development that appears more sophisticated, less doctri-
naire, and freer from ethnocentric bias than visions held in the past.

What we today would recognize as "social history" of modern China
began in the 1920s and 1930s in Japan, where it has continued to
develop at a very high level, and in China itself, where its progress
has been more uneven. Despite the fact that both these traditions
had roots in European social thought, serious study of modern Chi-
nese social history in the West can hardly be dated to any time earlier
than the 1950s, and in the United States probably a decade later. The
Japanese, Chinese, and Western approaches have evolved with con-
siderable independence from one another. This kind of isolation, of
course, has its strengths as well as its weaknesses--it allows the work-
ing out of separate problematics which, when eventually compared,
can invite useful reexamination of premises and priorities. One such
shock of recognition came with the American discovery of Japanese
sinology in the late 1960s, a process that is still underway. A second
has only just begun, with the renaissance of historical scholarship in
the People's Republic and new openings for cross-fertilization with
outsiders from Japan and the West. As I have indicated at several
points in this essay, the early results have been encouraging. It cer-
tainly appears we are entering an era of scholarship that promises
unprecedented excitement and productivity.

What specific directions this new scholarship will take cannot be
predicted at this time. Let me, however, express a hope that they will
include a move away from the attempt to fit China into categories
derived from the European historical experience. "Feudalism" and
"capitalism" are probably an improvement over "tradition" and "mo-
dernity"--the debates over their application have proven quite useful
as points of entry into the realities of the Chinese past--but the evi-
dence suggests that, as general constructs, they either do not work
or conceal more than they reveal. This is perhaps nowhere better
seen than in the predicament of T'ao Hsi-sheng, an intelligent histo-

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