China, and about her ethnical development, where formerly we could only grope in the dark.  The claim that “the Chinese race” produced the high Chinese civilization entirely by its own efforts, thanks to its special gifts, has become just as untenable as the other theory that immigrants from the West, some conceivably from Europe, carried civilization to the Far East.  We know now that in early times there was no “Chinese race”, there were not even “Chinese”, just as there were no “French” and no “Swiss” two thousand years ago.  The “Chinese” resulted from the amalgamation of many separate peoples of different races in an enormously complicated and long-drawn-out process, as with all the other high civilizations of the world.

The picture of ancient and medieval China has also been entirely changed since it has been realized that the sources on which reliance has always been placed were not objective, but deliberately and emphatically represented a particular philosophy.  The reports on the emperors and ministers of the earliest period are not historical at all, but served as examples of ideas of social policy or as glorifications of particular noble families.  Myths such as we find to this day among China’s neighbours were made into history; gods were made men and linked together by long family trees.  We have been able to touch on all these things only briefly, and have had to dispense with any account of the complicated processes that have taken place here.

The official dynastic histories apply to the course of Chinese history the criterion of Confucian ethics; for them history is a textbook of ethics, designed to show by means of examples how the man of high character should behave or not behave.  We have to go deeper, and try to extract the historic truth from these records.  Many specialized studies by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars on problems of Chinese history are now available and of assistance in this task.  However, some Chinese writers still imagine that they are serving their country by yet again dishing up the old fables for the foreigner as history; and some Europeans, knowing no better or aiming at setting alongside the unedifying history of Europe the shining example of the conventional story of China, continue in the old groove.  To this day, of course, we are far from having really worked through every period of Chinese history; there are long periods on which scarcely any work has yet been done.  Thus the picture we are able to give today has no finality about it and will need many modifications.  But the time has come for a new synthesis, so that criticism may proceed along the broadest possible front and push our knowledge further forward.