Professor Chien Mu (1894-1990) was one of the most influential historians in modern China. His research on Chinese history has been highly appreciated but at the same time controversial, and the most often debated topic has been that of his obvious Confucianism style. This essay tries to analyze and evaluate, through a thorough study, the fundamental structure of Chien’s historical concept and its basic value system underneath. The author argues that, although most of Chien’s contemporary critics have treated him as a conservative in confronting China’s modernization challenge, Chien’s basic issue was always a genuine modern one, that is: how to situate and interpret China in world history. He believed that nation, culture, and life style were three aspects of one thing and, among these three, the guiding and dynamic force in China has always been the traditional value system of the Chinese. In order to construct and defend his theory, he adopted an organic viewpoint that in some ways resembled that of the German historian Oswald Spengler (1880~1936). But, Spengler’s historical morphologys as presented in Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (1918-1922) ,was based upon an explicit relativism, which left no room for any “perennial” cultural form. In contrast to this pessimistic point of view, Chien emphasized that cultural systems in some cases did survive and escape the destiny that Spengler held to be doomed and hence inevitable. Chien’s entire lifetime work of interpreting Chinese history was to trace out the fundamental essence of the culture and to compare it with the other world cultural systems. His concern was to mount a strong defense against the prevailing Marxist historical determinism. His efforts to see history as a creation of man’s search for values has bequeathed a clue for other historians to reconsider China's history and its potential contribution to the world in general.