Chapter 25 Lei Haizong: Fragments of History (2)

At that time, Jiang Tingfu was the head of the department.The first innovative measure he took was to hire Lei Haizong to return to his alma mater to preside over the basic course "General History of China".After Lei Haizong received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the United States, he began to try to establish a macro-theoretical framework for the general history of China with the historical view of cultural forms.Therefore, the History Department of Tsinghua University in He Bingdi’s memory is obviously more diverse. “At that time, Mr. Chen Yinke was the most proficient in textual research, Mr. Lei Haizong focused on comprehensive synthesis, and the head of the department, Mr. Jiang Tingfu, specialized in the history of modern Chinese diplomacy. .

Lei Haizong opened up the atmosphere in the history circle, and he can be called the master of a generation.However, researchers of later generations can see very clearly that his academic concepts and thoughts are not the same as those of the Marxist historical materialist school who later gained the leading position in academic discourse, or even completely contradicted. "Such a prominent bourgeois historical authority was famous for his cultural historical view that was contrary to Marxist historical materialism before liberation. Although, after liberation, after learning Marxism, Lei Haizong felt that he had found Truth, has discovered a new world, 'dialectical materialism and historical materialism worldview' has restored its 'enthusiasm of youth', but in the eyes of those in power, his worldview is still bourgeois, so it must be liquidated."

What happened to him in 1957 was called "disaster" by later generations.Those in power even drew up a two-year "criticism plan", "focusing on criticizing Lei Haizong's bourgeois academic thought, with a total of fifteen topics." The accusations of "a veteran rightist with more than 20 years of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist political experience in the cloak of a historian" continued to hit, and the gentle and gentle Professor Lei finally admitted hoarsely, "My name is Lei Haizong. year……". In 2002, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Lei Haizong's birth, Nankai University held a grand commemorative event.But some observers regret that most of the present commemorators are also witnesses to the history of those years. Reading their memoirs, I still feel that some historical facts are relatively obscure, so I don’t care if I don’t mention them.