China's ancient culture has a strong sense of historicism and tradition, and China's ancient aesthetics is no exception. This situation is described in China people's own words as "respecting the past and cherishing the present". This historical thinking logic has brought the following characteristics to China culture: First, the rationality of experience. China's humanistic culture is almost the accumulation of experience. They are based on cases and encyclopedias. They have not developed into abstract deduction of the so-called "rules and laws" in the west, nor into detailed rational analysis in the west, but into "empirical rationality", "practical rationality" and "historical rationality". Second, this historical consciousness has created an academic and cultural tradition of "Confucian classics", worshiping ancient sages and explaining and annotating their classics. Confucian Classics is an extremely important subject in ancient China. The originality of China's ancient academic and aesthetic culture was carried out under the banner of ancient sages, and most of China's political reforms were "changing from ancient times". Similarly, China's aesthetic culture has a strong historical accumulation. This historical tradition also led to the development of two trends. On the one hand, it is historicism loyal to real history, on the other hand, it is pseudo-historicism that forges history, so-called "six classics note me" Thirdly, under the control of this historical consciousness, preservation and inheritance are more important than development and innovation, because development means that the latter will deny the former, and today's people will deny the ancients, which runs counter to historicism, while preservation and inheritance are different, which can make the ancients and saints stand high for a long time. Therefore, the brilliant achievements of China's aesthetic culture, such as calligraphy and aesthetic theory in Wei and Jin Dynasties, poems in Tang and Song Dynasties, novels and dramas in Ming and Qing Dynasties, have become more insurmountable under this historical consciousness.

The deep accumulation of historicism is the characteristic of China's aesthetic culture, and it is also an obstacle to the communication between China culture and other cultures, because to understand China's aesthetic culture, we must first understand the history of China. Almost every work of China's aesthetic culture is a representation and deduction of its long history, which is mixed with too much historical content.