Many historians of China and the world have long worked within certain paradigms that are increasingly recognized to be excessively Eurocentric, linear, and teleological. This article draws on both primary and secondary sources to propose a theory of Chinese history that is more sinocentric, cyclical, and open-ended. The theory takes seriously the well-known Chinese emphasis on establishing and maintaining cultural centrality and Chinese interest in learning from the past to influence the present and shape the future. It argues that these concerns have resulted in a spiral or helical pattern of Chinese historical development. It goes on to suggest that the Chinese spiral might help us to conceptualize world history in a way that respects all peoples of the world and all periods of history from the origins of our subspecies to the present. History is in one sense what actually happened in the past and historiography is how people interpret it to meet present needs and realize future aspirations. Given acceleration in the pace of change and expansion in the arena of action, historians can tell us little about what to expect in the future, but they may enhance the range of possibilities by bringing to light various past experiences. In this article I examine how the Chinese experience might assist us in fashioning a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world order.

According to Yue Fei’s biography, when the legendary general was slandered and interrogated for treason, he tore the shirt off his body, exposing four characters tattooed on his back: “Exhaust one’s loyalty in service of the state.” This study looks at two components of the Yue Fei story—patriotic tattoos, and tattooed generals—and examines their meaning in the broader stretch of Song dynasty history. Yue Fei was not the Song dynasty’s only tattooed general who came to a tragic end. The Northern Song’s Di Qing was a tattooed soldier whose military merit allowed him to rise to the highest levels of power in the empire. Di Qing’s story makes it clear that tattooed generals were objects of suspicion and ridicule at court due to their military tattoos, a trait that linked them to the criminals and lower class men that manned the Song armies. Though military tattoos sometimes had a loyalist ring to them, they were carried out on a mass scale, and were a characteristic of coercion rather than fervent loyalism. This study shows that underneath the nationalist historical narrative of the Song dynasty, of which Yue Fei is a famous example, there lies a different story of social conflict within the Song state. Rather than a story of Chinese fighting non-Chinese and of traitorous and cowardly officials struggling with loyal patriots, this study offers a narrative of a social conflict between high-born clear-skinned officials and low-born tattooed military men.

Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han on repeated occasions after the conquest but failed due to women’s resistance. Moreover, Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Manchu and anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further. A second set of assumptions claims that the overwhelming cultural allure and popularity of footbinding proved irresistible to banner women, who, thwarted by banner regulations forbidding the practice, covertly imitated footbinding by wearing platform shoes that hid natural feet and created an illusion of smallness. This paper scrutinizes the evidence put forward by Qing historians for the first of these two sets of assumptions. The claims are found to be unsubstantiated and evidence is offered that contradicts them. I argue that the weight of evidence shows that there was no prohibition on footbinding imposed in 1645 or at any time during the Manchu conquest, and that a 1664 proposal to ban footbinding was withdrawn before it could be implemented, for reasons misunderstood by historians of footbinding. Therefore there could have been no “resistance” by Han women or men to a ban on footbinding, and claims that footbinding became a politically charged ethnic marker of anti-Qing sentiment in the seventeenth century are groundless. With regard to the second set of assumptions, I provide evidence in a separate paper to be published elsewhere that banner women had distinctive roles and fashions uninfluenced by the culture of footbinding, and that in Beijing and the Northeast Manchu styles were emulated by Han, not vice versa.