To me the biggest problem here is the absolutist terms your friend used. All history is written from contemporary vantage, and so informed by present biases (given the current discussion of CRT in US media I don't think I need to belabor this point). Instead, we might be better served by asking about common features of Chinese historical writing, and what work becomes necessary to not only take sources at face value, but also read them against the grain, looking for what was omitted or elided and attempting to triangulate that in forming a more objective historical opinion. Obviously I will speak in broad strokes because history as a genre has existed for nearly as long as a unified China (2 millennia), and the past as a site of contemporary interest and longing for still longer.

The first major historian we can identify is Sima Qian, who held the inherited position of "Grand Astrologer" in the Western Han court (202 bce - 9 ce), and dedicated his life to completing his father's book the Shiji (Records of the historian). Sima finished his book at great personal cost after winding up on the wrong side of a factionalist power struggle at court. His work was obviously shaped by contemporary pressures, but nevertheless it's an extant source of pre-Han and early-Han history written by a single (set of) authors, and thus intensely useful. Did Sima face contemporary pressures that may have limited his authorial choices? You can bet your junk he did. But remarkably, he also talked about those pressures! In his famed letter to his friend Ren An explicitly, and implicitly through his selection and inclusion of biographies of men who were politically or personally wronged (the physician Chun-yu Yi, stories of noble assassin-retainers dying for their cause) Sima cast himself as one working within a system he challenged.

If anything, it's fascinating to read archeological evidence against the Shiji and see how much of further back, more mythic dynasties might actually have been more accurate than one might think. Archeological finds where we can identify Shang dynasty sources like oracle bones, or Zhou dynasty bronzes, or Warring States manuscript copies of now famed texts like the Daodejing, only began in the very late 19th century, ramping up since. Such finds have made early China a hot field in Sinology, with history increasingly being written because we can now triangulate and read across multiple types of sources (material as well as textual, but also buried manuscripts as well as texts coming thru the received tradition).

After Sima's work, others imitated, and in relatively short order keeping records and writing history became the work of court officials. It was common for dynasties to write the history of the predecessors, leading up to the institution of the (glorious) present. Thus, your friend is correct that there was always a kind of implicit mandate in historical writing to justify dynastic transition: if the emperor was the son of heaven, how could his overthrow be justifiable? Only if the emperor has lost his mandate to rule through unvirtuous conduct. This assumes that when a dynasty collapsed, problems therein were due to moral failing of the old ruler/s, and if/when a new dynasty formed, it formed under a virtuous leader whose charismatic power both helped and justified his acts.

The more I think about this, the more I think your friend is skeptical of histories written by victors. In the Chinese case there is some reason to be skeptical of extant sources, given the number of literary inquisitions over time that have steeply culled their ranks - from the burning of all books not related to agriculture, medicine, and other technical fields, or, histories of the State of Qin under Qin Shihuang di, the first emperor of China, to the Qing Qianlong emperor's (r. 1735-1796*) Siku quanshu project, which under the guise of collecting ALL THE BOOKS EVER WRITTEN also culled and purged anything deemed heterodox or dangerous to Qing authority. However, since when do historians take sources at face value? Our work is always to triangulate, to infer, to question and read between the lines. Cultural history is often predicted by an "against the grain" reading style, and to reject all of the (dozens if not hundreds) of extant works of history in China because they weren't objective enough would be not only foolish, imho, but also... a kind of scholarly Orientalism? Why would we engage histories of the Chinese past produced by Chinese officials any differently than we'd engage histories of the Roman or Ottoman or Spanish empires?

I'm not positing sources because I spoke at such a general level here that nearly everything I wrote is common knowledge to an historian of imperial China, but if anyone has a more specific follow-up question about what I've written here I'm happy to point you to secondary scholarship backing up that point.

I really hope you will get a new answer from one of our users, but as you are waiting you can read this discussion with answers from u/wotan_weevil and u/EnclavedMicrostate focused more on debunking Chinese sources being uniquely biased rather than them being interpolated. There is also this very summary comment by u/Tiako. It seems Chinese history is not especially unreliable compared to other cultures.'

So your friend may have had a mix of things leading up to this claim; A bit of truth can make a lie, even a racist one, seem more credible. Take a tiny kernel of truth and build the lie around it. u/ardhanarisvara and u/10thousand_stars have set out that it wasn't unknown for writings to be changed and the ever helpful u/gynnis-scholasticus has provided good links on the subject of trustworthiness of Chinese history. So someone then takes that truth and builds it up into all dynasties, only the Chinese do it, and only the Chinese histories can't be trusted.

Victors write the history seems to play a part here. It is a starting point to act as a warning that, when studying history, one needs to be aware of bias. When studying history, one also needs to learn who wrote it, how reliable they are, what perceptions and biases they had and how that shaped them. One such thing will be "serving the victor", after all going "our founding emperor was an evil lying weasel" would probably not be a great way to ensure your career success.

Now the problem with the idea or the way it gets used is people stop at that line and use it for all sorts of inaccurate things. Conspiracies, historical inaccuracies and people just using it as a lazy get-out clause when facing something uncomfortable. The idea of victory writes the history as golden truth rather ignores a lot of things: that not every piece of history is from those that served a victorious power, the limitations of said victorious powers, that other factors and biases come into play with the history texts. It denies moments where historians poked at the regime or went against the wishes of their master.

To use my era of expertise, the three kingdoms (190-280 CE), the main source is the records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou, a private work. Chen Shou served the victorious Jin dynasty and does that have an impact? Yes, Chen Shou's use of titles reflects Jin's claim to legitimacy and he daren't go too openly on some things. Did he work against the Sima claims? Yes, for example, he undercut Sima's claims that they were right to force the abdication of Cao Fang due to poor character including lack of study by listing every part of his education. Chen Shou is noted for his remarkable neutrality including his use of terms to describe things, something that victor writes history takes away from him.

It also ignores other factors at play. Chen Shou was a proud man of Yi, a part of the education tradition and a man of the Shu-Han court. That is reflected in his treatment of his native Yi scholars but also in his writings about some of the outside Jing scholars he was less complimentary about. It is reflected in that he wrote other works of history about Yi and about Shu-Han's Prime Minister Zhuge Liang. He was of the gentry, he was a male, of his time, he was a political figure, he had personal relations with figures of his time. Things that played a part in how and what he wrote.

It ignores that the records are compiled from all the three kingdoms, influenced by little biases within them, leading to claims that contradict each other so requires reading through to get a coherent (if sometimes contradictory) picture and then working on the contradictions. It ignores that the Liu-Song scholar Pei Songzhi added annotations of other works, including voices like Yuan Shao's proclamation against Cao Cao before his major defeat at Guandu (Yuan Shao's branch of the Yuan family was then wiped out in the years after). Memorials and works from the Wei dynasty that countered the Jin dynasty's claims helped justify their usurpation of Wei including bringing the regicide of Cao Mao into more accurate detail. Of works of propaganda and history projects from those who had lost, personal and private histories as well as official state ones.

I wonder if your friend had much of a look at Chinese history or even western experts (funnily enough, Western academia about Chinese history are happy to use Chinese history, would that tell you something?). If it was being constantly rewritten on the scale your friend imagines, it would be poorer in terms of quality but weaken our understanding. But also more cohesive, everything would agree with each other and be much simpler rather than dealing with disagreeing facts (even an Emperor's birth year can be confused), claims, and propaganda. Studies would be less about the writers themselves but on how the last dynasty changed it as much as could know.

Take Sima Yi's Jinshu, where the Tang historians did alter from the original texts as they compiled the new history but didn't go back and rewrite the copies of the history. It would no longer be feeling the pull between Emperor Taizong and his Tang officials over how to portray him, as a clever servant who upholds the dynasty and is an example or a traitor to be scorned for his disloyal seizure of power. Nor would the Jinshu disagree with older texts in tone and words (nor could we go check older records and go "hang on a minute") but be one easy smooth narrative agreed on by the last dynasty.

There may be an issue of... an old stereotype of Chines dynasties that you see in games and modern media at play here. Powerful bureaucracies, central control, and all commanding Emperors, all play into this. A sense of China never really changing, of an eternal China that sees powerful centralized empire after powerful centralized empire. A Cathy if you will. That image of China, then surely such Empires could easily change history?

This is not a true version of Chinese history. My era saw the start of regional histories were written by men like Chen Shou's mentor Qiao Zhou, there was a recognition places had their own identity and culture (even if sometimes people could be scathing about other regions) in law and how officials acted. Emperors were rarely all-powerful and even the subject of marriage was subject to balancing the interests of other powers and imposing their will on their historians was not absolute. Not all Chinese dynasties were powerful even from the moment of unification, Jin dynasty, for example, had risen via being pro-gentry to overthrow a more centralized regime so could not impose a proper census on its lands.

I think one others thing is also worth noting, history writing could take time. Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian (the translation Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance might give a hint that this was not just "my masters Song rules") was a year-by-year overview of history. First pitched in 1064, further work got official support (access to imperial libraries), sponsorship and resources (all papers and writing materials paid for, officials assigned to help) in 1066, it took till 1084 to complete. He didn't live to see it printed in 1086.

When Emperor Taizhong of the Tang dynasty decided to push through, including writing himself, a history of the Jin dynasty took a few years (646-648 CE) which is seen as unusually fast and reflected both attention and new methods. The previous work of Five Dynasties history took from 629-636 and would perhaps be a better reflection of time. If the Tang decided to go and rewrite/create new versions of the authoritative versions of the past (I'm just choosing ones that would later be part of the 24 histories), that would be tying down resources and members of his court for over four decades. This is leaving out all the other works of history that were not part of that 24 histories. That is a big ask for every single dynasty to do.

Part 1 of 2