春秋左氏伝
Kang's theory was supported by several subsequent Chinese scholars in the late 19th century, but was contradicted by many 20th-century studies that examined it from many different perspectives. In the early 1930s, the French Sinologist Henri Maspero performed a detailed textual study of the issue, concluding the Han dynasty forgery theory to be untenable. The Swedish Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren, based on a series of linguistic and philological analyses he carried out in the 1920s, concluded that the "Zuo Zhuan" is a genuine ancient text "probably to be dated between 468 and 300BC." While Liu's hypothesis that the "Zuo zhuan" was not originally an "Annals" commentary has been generally accepted, Kang's theory of Liu Xin forging the "Zuo zhuan" is now considered discredited.