Historical Thinking and Source Analysis: 史料实证, 时空观念 and 历史解释
What this domain tests
The five 学科素养 - 唯物史观, 时空观念, 史料实证, 历史解释, 家国情怀 - tested through source-based items. You must say what a source can prove, whose voice it carries, and whether a conclusion is warranted. Marks are lost by reading a source's opinion as fact.
Rules for evidence
- Classify: 一手史料 (contemporary, from participants - 档案, 契约, 器物, the press of the day) versus 二手史料 (later reconstruction - 史书, research papers). Neither is automatically better; fitness for the question decides.
- 孤证不立: one source cannot establish a claim; corroborate across independent sources. 王国维's 二重证据法 pairs excavated documents with transmitted texts.
- Ask of every source: who wrote it, when, for whom, with what interest, and what it omits. A 奏折 records what an official wants the throne to believe; a 方志 records what a locality wants remembered.
- Separate 史实 (what happened), 史料 (what survives), 历史叙述 (how it is told) and 历史解释 (why it happened).
- 时空观念: place an event on a chronological and a spatial map before explaining it - 洋务运动 only makes sense as post-1860, coastal, treaty-port activity.
Worked example
A 1930s rural survey reports that the tenants of one village pay 60 per cent of the harvest as rent. What can it support? Reasoning: identify the type first - a survey is 一手 evidence for local rent levels if conducted on the spot, but its sampling and the investigator's reformist purpose must be weighed. It supports a claim about high tenancy rents in that village and about how investigators framed the rural crisis. It cannot alone establish a national rate, and it cannot show tenants' own view of the arrangement. So use it for the local figure and for contemporary perception, corroborate with 地租契约 or tax records for the wider claim, and state the limit explicitly.
Traps
Quoting a source's opinion as established fact; ignoring authorship and audience; dismissing later histories as worthless (they show how the past was interpreted); answering “it is subjective, so it is useless” instead of specifying what it is reliable for; using 唯物史观 as a slogan rather than analysing 生产力与生产关系 or class relations.