중국 고대문명 연구 100년: 쟁점과 전망 = One Hundred Years in the Studies of Early Chinese Civilization: Issues and Prospect

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study reviews the scholarship of early Chinese civilization since the 1900s focusing on the keywords of “regionalism” and the “doubting or believing antiquity.” The two issues, perhaps more substantially than any other regions, seem to be rooted on particular historical conditions inherent in China such as the dominance of antiquarianism and the celebrated traditional scholarship as well as being a response to the Western impact.
Chinese archaeologists’ long-term endeavor to disprove the Western origins of Chinese civilization argued by Johan G. Anderson in the 1920s marks the transition to Sinocentric regionalism, which was propelled by the growth of indigenous scholarship, from Eurocentric regionalism. As represented by Su Bingqi’s “regional systems and cultural types” (quxileixing 區系類型) and K.C. Chang’s “Chinese interaction sphere,” the new regionalism results in a contradiction between the centrifugalism prevalent in the multiregional Neolithic archaeology built on current Chinese territory and the centripetalism ingrained deeply in traditional Chinese historiography. While Chinese scholars tend to reconcile the pluralistic phenomena into the monolithic linear trajectory, Western scholars gives more stress on muitiregional trajectories.
Another methodological dispute on the authenticity of early Chinese texts underlies these controversies. It was the “doubting antiquity” (yigu 疑古) theorized by Gu Jiegang in 1920s following Tominaga Nakamoto, Cui Shu and Shiratori Kurakichi’s lead that took the studies of early Chinese civilization in the 20th century by storm. But the new archaeological discoveries since the late 20th century, including the Chu bamboo slips, led Chinese scholars to revisit the doubting antiquity discourse to the extent that in the 1990s, Li Xueqin urged to “step out of the doubting antiquity.” This declaration has affected the current trend of “believing antiquity” in Chinese academia. More and more influential Chinese-American scholars further seem to have reshuffled the academia in the West, which was previously in exclusive support of “doubting antiquity.” Especially, it is expected that the revisionist approach overcoming the extreme of doubting or believing antiquity both in China and the West will open a new vista in the studies of early Chinese civilization.