SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The continuity of Chinese history, through the unfolding of the ‘dynastic cycle’ of its successive imperial regimes, has been taken as one of the great truisms of discourse on China. Yet assertions of cultural continuity in China have emerged in recent research much more as tendentious fictions, cultural artefacts themselves designed to stitch together disparate elements over time—the daotong or ‘Transmission of the Way’ proposed by Neo-Confucians, is one good example. And looking at Chinese history as a sequence of political powers, the transmission of what was seen as a form of imperium, zhengtong, or ‘Correct Succession’, has also long been considered as technically problematic. The modern scholar Rao Zongyi has a well-researched monograph on these debates that deserves to be better known, especially as history as an element in Chinese identity is now coming to assume an increased contemporary importance.