" Our
outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct
participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible
and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in-
volved. In other words, outsideness, whether that of Americans addressing the Chi-
nese past or of historians in general addressing the past in general, does not just
distort; it also illuminates. This means that, as I said earlier, our central task is to
find ways of exploiting our outsideness that maximize the illumination and mini-
mize the distortion. "

― , Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past