Huang Xianfan

Huang Xianfan: The Man Who Gave the Zhuang a History

In November 1937 a scholar returned from Tokyo Imperial University to a China at war and became the first university professor ever produced by the Zhuang, the largest ethnic minority in the country. Twenty years later he was denounced as one of the "five rightist historians" and forced to confess crimes he had not committed. In 1988, six years after his death, an 882-page volume appeared under his name: the General History of the Zhuang — the first general history his people had ever possessed.

Gan Jinying of Qujiu

He was born on 13 November 1899 in the village of Qujiu, Fusui County, Guangxi, in the last decade of the Qing. His name at birth was Gan Jinying; he was adopted by the Huang family and renamed. His biological father, Gan Xinchang, was a Zhuang farmer with a classical education and a reputation for severity, who started his son on the Four Books and Five Classics at six.

The schooling that followed was a long climb out of a village: a traditional school at nine, Qusi Primary at fourteen, a higher primary school at Quli at eighteen, and in 1922 the Guangxi Third Normal College. He found the examination curriculum stifling and read the Records of the Grand Historian instead.

Beijing and Tokyo

In 1926 he entered Beijing Normal University and stayed nine years, taking a diploma, a bachelor's degree and postgraduate study under two of the most formidable scholars of the Republican era: the historian Chen Yuan and the philologist Qian Xuantong. He supported himself teaching at a private Beijing high school and in 1932 co-founded an academic press, Beilei Xueshe. He was already publishing — an Outline of Chinese History appeared in 1932 and 1934, a study of the Song dynasty imperial-academy students' patriotic movement in 1936, and work on Tang society in 1936–37.

From 1935 to 1937 he studied at Tokyo Imperial University under the Sinologists Wada Sei and Katō Shigeru — the Japanese school then leading the world in the documentary study of Chinese and Inner Asian history. He returned in November 1937 and taught at Guangxi University, Sun Yat-sen University and Guangxi Normal University, serving variously as researcher, department head, curator and librarian.

Into the Field

What changed his career was mud. From 1943 he began leading ethnographic expeditions through Guangxi and Guizhou among minority communities — unusual work for a historian trained in textual criticism, and the decision that made everything after it possible. After 1949 he expanded it enormously: systematic investigations across Guangxi's ethnic regions from 1951 to 1953, under and alongside Fei Xiaotong's national mission, and in 1954 a survey of Zhuang social and historical conditions that his colleagues described as the largest and deepest investigation of ethnic history and traditional culture ever undertaken in Guangxi. The materials his teams collected fed directly into the ethnic identification work that led the State Council to recognise fifty-six nationalities in 1956, and became the foundation of Guangxi's institute of ethnic studies, established in 1957.

Out of that fieldwork he built a method he called the tri-evidence approach: archaeological material, historical documents and ethnological observation, each checked against the other two. Intellectually it was a fusion — the evidential rigour of Qing dynasty philology, in which Chen Yuan had trained him, married to the questions of the American "New History," which asked what ordinary people had done rather than what emperors had decreed.

The Bagui School

In the mid-1950s, at Guangxi Normal University, the group around him consolidated into what became known as the Bagui school — by general account the first school of ethnic studies in China. Its core was eighteen disciples, mostly but not exclusively Zhuang, among them Huang Zengqing, Zhang Yimin and Li Guozhu, who went on to hold chairs and research posts across Guangxi. Its programme was field-based study of Zhuang history, archaeology, folklore and institutions, and its explicit politics were anti-chauvinist: it held that Chinese history had been written as Han history, that this conflation was itself a form of ethnic chauvinism, and that the remedy was equality among nationalities pursued through evidence rather than assertion.

His own scholarly credo was stated more bluntly: insist on independent academic research, and "stay honest and not obey the authorities." It was a dangerous thing to believe in China in 1957.

The Man Who Said There Were No Slaves

His most contentious argument was not about the Zhuang at all. Orthodox Marxist historiography, official doctrine in the People's Republic, held that every society passes through five stages, of which slave society is the second. Huang argued that China had never had one — not among the Zhuang, and not in Chinese history as a whole. He began advancing the case in 1957 and stated it formally in 1979, becoming the acknowledged leader of what came to be called the Wunu, or "no-slave," school. His book No Slave Society in Chinese History appeared in 1981, the year before he died.

Rightist

He had been an insider after 1949: director of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a deputy to the first National People's Congress from 1954, a member of its ethnic affairs committee, and a figure in the government of the new Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Then, during the Hundred Flowers opening of 1956–57, he criticised Communist education policy. When the line reversed he was attacked in the Anti-Rightist campaign, made to confess publicly, labelled one of the "five rightist historians," and in 1958 removed from the NPC's ethnic committee. During the Cultural Revolution he was abused by Red Guards, put to menial labour, and barred from publishing scholarship at all.

His rehabilitation came in 1979, at eighty. The verdict was reversed; he was made a counsellor to the Chinese Ethnic Association, ethnic editor for the Encyclopedia of China, counsellor to the Institute for Studies on Southwest Minorities, and vice-chairman for the study of Chinese ethnic history, and was elected to the fifth CPPCC. In 1981 he founded the Li Jiang Sparetime College, becoming a pioneer of private higher education in the People's Republic. He died in Guilin on 18 January 1982, aged 82.

Why Huang Is Called a Genius

Of the reputations built on this word, Huang Xianfan's is among the more defensible, because it rests on something concrete: he founded a field that did not exist. Before him the Zhuang — by any measure China's largest minority nationality — had no general history, no archaeology of their own, and no place in the national story except as a marginal note to Han expansion. He is called the father of Zhuang studies and the first Zhuangologist because both descriptions are literally accurate. He also did something harder than writing a book: he built the institutions and trained the eighteen scholars who could continue the work after the state had silenced him, which is why the General History of the Zhuang could be finished by his students and published in 1988, six years after his death.

The methodological claim is real too. The tri-evidence approach — documents, archaeology, living ethnography, cross-checked — was an intellectually serious answer to a genuine problem: how do you write the history of a people who left few written records of their own? And the no-slave-society thesis took a kind of nerve that is easy to underrate from outside. To argue, as a minority scholar in a Marxist state, that the official five-stage periodisation of history did not fit China was to invite exactly the treatment he received.

The honest qualifications matter. Huang is not a globally known figure; he is a great regional and national scholar whose reputation is largely sustained within Chinese and specifically Guangxi academia — much of the laudatory assessment comes from the school he founded, the university that houses his scholarship fund, and the students he trained, which is a reason for caution rather than dismissal. The Wunu thesis is described by its supporters as widely accepted, but the periodisation of early Chinese society remains genuinely contested, and it would overstate matters to treat the question as settled in his favour. What is not in doubt is priority and courage: he was first, he was right that the field was missing, and he paid for saying so.

Legacy

The Guangxi Zhuang Studies Society was founded in 1991; the first international conference in the discipline he created met in April 1999 with scholars from eight countries. Guangxi Normal University held a centennial forum for him in November 1999 and published commemorative volumes; both the university and a Guilin high school maintain scholarships in his name. His works kept appearing long after his death — Nong Zhigao in 1983, the General History of the Zhuang in 1988, an introduction to Chinese ancient books in 2004, a critical biography of the Zhuang revolutionary Wei Baqun in 2008. His household, in which he, his wife Liu Lihua and most of their children taught, was formally designated a family of educators. For a farmer's son from Qujiu who was told at six to memorise the classics, it is a reasonable epitaph.

Achievements

• Notable work: General History of the Zhuang