Search

The term ‘presentism’ has a variety of applications, but in this piece I shall adapt the analysis made by S. A. Smith in his article within this forum, making reference to Hartog’s idea of a ‘regime of historicity’, of a ‘sense that only the present exists’, to propose a specific argument with regard to one topic: the historical analysis of China’s experience during the Second World War. In the high Cold War era, the topic of China’s wartime experience was taken by many American historians to be part of a continuum that informed a wider debate on the US presence in Asia. In the post-Cold War era, the same topic has been taken up by Chinese historians as a means of creating a new continuum between a wartime past and a politically turbulent present by elision of the revolutionary past. If, in Hartog’s terms, the present is all that exists, the present ‘regime of historicity’ in China creates that present in part by a deliberate removal of some parts of the past which suggest difference rather than similarity with the present.