Ironically, even though historians and social theorists routinely describe the Chinese upheavals of 1911-49 as comprising one of the world’s great social revolutions, the social history revolution was surprisingly slow to make an impact upon western scholarship dealing with twentieth-century China, and it has only been quite recently that traditional types of historical narratives (i.e. ones that focus upon high politics, diplomatic issues or the lives and thoughts of ‘great men’) have ceased to dominate the field. Why did it take so long for western scholars to begin to apply the techniques and methodologies of the new’ history to problems relating to the Chinese Revolution? And, once they began to do so, how did the conventional picture of that event begin to change? These are the main questions addressed in this article, which focuses primarily upon trends of the 1970s and early to mid-1980s.
