This article interprets the historiography of two modern Chinese historians, Fu Sinian and Chen Yinke, who both have been labeled the Chinese Ranke. Both historians have in recent years attracted a lot of attention in China, due to their prominent and very different concepts of national history. In this article Axel Schneider brings out the characteristics of their approaches to history by, first, situating modern historiography within the context of the philosophical crisis of modernity. By “modernity” he refers to the process of historicization and, hence, relativization of norms and values once conceived as timeless and universal. In Europe, this process has been characterized by a decline of metaphysical and theological assumptions on the structure of the world and a concomitant decline of traditional assertions of ontological and epistemological coherence. In China, this process challenged the inherited, very prominent status of traditional historiography as a core field for political and philosophical debates.