Sociology as social memory: Narrative identity and knowledge construction in the study of “Chinese modernization” in postwar Taiwan

Man is a story-telling animal and sociologists are not an exception. Sociological works are often more informed by historical narratives that function as particular forms of social memory than sociologists would have admitted. The purpose of my article is to demonstrate how sociology may be a major agent of social memory and identity formation by analyzing the sociological study of “Chinese modernization,” especially the case of Kwan-hai Lung (1906-1983) as one of the major founders of sociology, in postwar Taiwan. The study of Chinese modernization in social sciences in general and in sociology in particular were promoted primarily by scholars of Chinese Mainlander background who exiled to Taiwan after 1949 owing to the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in China’s civil war. These scholars constituted the major part of the first and second generations of social scientists in postwar Taiwan and dominated social sciences up to the 1980s. The two generations of exilic Mainlander sociologists were haunted with the bitter memory not only of their displacement, but of modern China’s cultural trauma caused by foreign oppression. Embracing Chinese nationalism and the modernization theory imported mainly form the U.S., they hoped that China (Taiwan as “Free China” at the time or an envisioned unified China which included Taiwan and the Chinese mainland) could become a rich and powerful nation by modernizing itself. By integrating two time frames or historical narratives, the metanarrative of global modernity and the metanarrative of Chinese modernization, into their sociological works, they became a major story-teller that narrated the past, present, and future of Taiwan. As an important source of public narratives, the sociological study of Chinese modernization helped in the construction of social memory and national identity in postwar Taiwan.