World history, like most academic disciplines, stagnated during the Cultural Revolution. This chapter argues that, with Mao’s death, world-historical studies witnessed a new wave of professionalization within the Marxist ideological framework. Following the liberalization of historical studies in the late 1980s, this ideological framework collapsed – even historians who were famous for their ideological correctness like Lin Zhichun abandoned it. In a series of influential debates, these historians searched for alternative paths to global modernity to replace the Eurocentric schema in Marxist historiography. Through this process, these former Marxist historians became increasingly nationalistic, which filled an ideological vacuum in post-Mao China.

In the 1950s, the increasing pressure of state control had a subtle effect on the position of world history within the general discipline of history in China. World historians remained a vulnerable minority among the community of historians. This chapter examines why many historians chose to dismiss the universalism espoused by China’s world historians as a “forced analogy.” For many historians, this universalism was an unwelcome ideological Marxist intrusion into historical studies; moreover, world historians who were working closely with the state were not considered serious scholars. Owing to such attitudes, many historians neglected the significant developments that took place in world-historical studies at the time. Among these, as the chapter contends, were various attempts by world historians to place China within a world-historical narrative that is based on a non-Eurocentric schema. The debates between Lin Zhichun and Tong Shuye on the Asiatic mode of production are indicative of this alternative perspective. These developments planted the seeds for the future development of the field.

In the early People’s Republic, the socialist state sought total control of history as a field of knowledge production. The state introduced Soviet concepts of Marxist historiography, established a standard curriculum, and put a new academic infrastructure in place that was characterized by a teaching and research unit (jiaoyanshi) system. This development placed the world-historical discipline in a difficult position and shaped the key dynamic for the later rise of nationalism among Chinese historians. This chapter analyzes the paradox facing world historians Lin Zhichun and Tong Shuye as they tried to negotiate this emerging and complex academic, political environment. On the one hand, as up-and-coming professionals eager to develop their careers, they were inclined to collaborate with the state; on the other hand, as academics, they still cherished the ideal of intellectual autonomy. Their experiences with the regime formed a sharp contrast to those who were less willing to be coerced by the regime, such as Lei Haizong and Wu Mi. The latter found themselves constantly facing the distrust, surveillance, and oppression of the totalizing state.