File Authenticity Debate

Author: Liu Gengsheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-05-01
Features: Throughout history, all human efforts and struggles have been aimed at learning from the past to understand the present, using historical experience and lessons as a guide for action. Therefore, to study history, one must provide evaluations of historical issues that align with their true nature—praising without exaggeration and suppressing without distortion. Historians must possess the integrity of "Zhi Shi of Qi" and "Dong Hu of Jin" to write a trustworthy history that serves as a guide for the present and a model for the future. This allows readers to gain inspiration from historical facts, understand historical patterns, and ultimately establish principles they believe in. Thus, the pursuit of truth is the cornerstone of historical research.
However, any heroic figure or awe-inspiring endeavor can only occur once and cannot be repeated like a chemical reaction in a laboratory. In the blink of an eye, they become relics, vanishing into the relentless flow of history described as "the past flows like this, day and night." They leave behind only historical evidence—the archives. This is history's generous gift to us, enabling modern people to understand the intricate social phenomena or poignant tragedies from archives. The famous Qing Dynasty scholar Gong Zizhen once said in Respecting History, "To emerge from history, to enter the Dao. To know the great Dao, one must first study history," which encapsulates this principle.
Archives are natural records formed during human activities and cognitive processes. Generally speaking, their content is authentic and reliable, and their information does not suffer from knowledge obsolescence, which is why people trust their authority. However, the factors behind the creation of archives are highly complex, and some falsified or altered archives may be mixed among them, making it difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. Readers must exercise extreme caution.