Download or read book Chinese Intellectuals and the West 1872 1949 written by Y. C. Wang and published by . This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872-1949
Download or read book Worrying about China written by Gloria Davies and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-31 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we do about China? This question, couched in pessimism, is often raised in the West but it is nothing new to the Chinese, who have long worried about themselves. In the last two decades since the “opening” of China, Chinese intellectuals have been carrying on in their own ancient tradition of “patriotic worrying.”As an intellectual mandate, “worrying about China” carries with it the moral obligation of identifying and solving perceived “Chinese problems”—social, political, cultural, historical, or economic—in order to achieve national perfection. In Worrying about China, Gloria Davies pursues this inquiry through a wide range of contemporary topics, including the changing fortunes of radicalism, the peculiarities of Chinese postmodernism, shifts within official discourse, attempts to revive Confucianism for present-day China, and the historically problematic engagement of Chinese intellectuals with Western ideas.Davies explores the way perfectionism permeates and ultimately propels Chinese intellectual talk to the point that the drive for perfection has created a moralism that condemns those who do not contribute to improving China. Inside the heart of the New China persists ancient moralistic attitudes that remain decidedly nonmodern. And inside the postmodernism of thousands of Chinese scholars and intellectuals dwells a decidedly anti-postmodern quest for absolute certainty.
Download or read book China s Intellectuals and the State written by Merle Goldman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Today’s intellectuals in China inherit a mixed tradition in terms of their relationship to the state. Some follow the Confucian literati watchdog role of criticizing abuses of political power. Marxist intellectuals judge the state’s practices on the basis of Communist ideals. Others prefer the May Fourth spirit, dedicated to the principles of free scholarly and artistic expression. The Chinese government, for its part, has undulated in its treatment of intellectuals, applying restraints when free expression threatened to get “out of control,” relaxing controls when state policies required the cooperation, good will, and expertise of intellectuals. In this stimulating work, twelve China scholars examine that troubled and changing relationship. They focus primarily on the post-Mao years when bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution and China’s renewed quest for modernization have at times allowed intellectuals increased leeway in expression and more influence in policy-making. Specialists examine the situation with respect to economists, lawyers, scientists and technocrats, writers, and humanist scholars in the climate of Deng Xiaoping’s policies, and speculate about future developments. This book will be a valuable source of information for anyone interested in the changing scene in contemporary China and in its relations with the outside world."
Download or read book Obedient Autonomy written by Erika E.S. Evasdottir and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the west, the idea of autonomy is often associated with a sense of freedom – a self-interested state of being unfettered by rules or obligations to others. This original anthropological study explores a type of “obedient” autonomy that thrives on setbacks, blossoms as more rules are imposed, and flourishes in adversity. Obedient Autonomy analyzes this model, and explains its precepts through examining the specialized and highly organized discipline of archaeology in China. The book follows Chinese students on their journey to becoming full-fledged archaeologists in a bureaucracy-saturated environment. Often required to travel in teams to the countryside, archaeologists are uniquely obliged to overcome divisions among themselves, between themselves and their peasant-workers, and between themselves and bureaucratic officials. This analysis reveals how these interactions provide teachers of archaeology with stories used to foster obedient autonomy in their students. Moreover, it demonstrates how this form of autonomy enables a person to order and control their future careers in what appears to be a disorderly and uncertain world. A masterly contextualization of archaeology in China, Obedient Autonomy shows how the discipline has accommodated itself to a Chinese social structure, and uncovers the moral, ethical, political, and economic underpinnings of that context. It will be accessible to students of anthropology even as it will provoke Euro-American archaeologists and interest social theorists of science, philosophers, gender theorists, and students of Chinese society.
Download or read book Imagining the People written by Joshua A. Fogel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much attention has been focused on the rise of the modern Chinese nation, little or none has been directed at the emergence of citizenry. This book examines thinkers from the period 1890-1920 in modern China, and shows how China might forge a modern society with a political citizenry.
Download or read book Mastery of Words and Swords written by Jun Lei and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the “Man Question” within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully reveal the evolving masculine models of a “scholar-warrior,” this book employs an innovative methodology that combines theoretical vigor, archival research, and analysis of literary texts and visuals. Situating the changing inter- and intra-gender relations in modern Chinese history and Chinese literary and cultural modernism, the book engages critically with male subjectivity in relation to other pivotal issues such as semi-coloniality, psychoanalysis, modern love, feminism, and urbanization. “Jun Lei’s brilliant book offers a wealth of information and insights on how intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Lu Xun shaped notions of Chinese masculinity in the tumultuous late Qing and May Fourth periods. Its account of how China’s interactions with the West and Japan impacted ideas of masculinity in modern times is compelling reading.” —Kam Louie, author of Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China and Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World “What are political and cultural consequences when a Chinese man looks and behaves like a woman? Jun Lei probes the psychic, intellectual, and nationalist underpinnings of that question. This provocative book offers an engaging story and insightful analyses about how male writers grappled with the effeminate look and strove to revitalize manliness.” —Ban Wan
Download or read book Voices from the Chinese Century written by Joshua A. Fogel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s increasing prominence on the global stage has caused consternation and controversy among Western thinkers, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. But what do Chinese intellectuals themselves have to say about their country’s newfound influence and power? Voices from the Chinese Century brings together a selection of essays from representative leading thinkers that open a window into public debate in China today on fundamental questions of China and the world—past, present, and future. The voices in this volume include figures from each of China’s main intellectual clusters: liberals, the New Left, and New Confucians. In genres from scholarly analyses to social media posts, often using Party-approved language that hides indirect criticism, these essayists offer a wide range of perspectives on how to understand China’s history and its place in the twenty-first-century world. They explore questions such as the relationship of political and economic reforms; the distinctiveness of China’s history and what to take from its traditions; what can or should be learned from the West; and how China fits into today’s eruption of populist anger and challenges to the global order. The fifteen original translations in this volume not only offer insight into contemporary China but also prompt us to ask what Chinese intellectuals might have to teach Europe and North America about the world’s most pressing problems.
Download or read book The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History written by Timothy Cheek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid account of Chinese intellectuals across the twentieth century that provides a guide to making sense of China today.
Download or read book The Great Encounter of China and the West 1500 1800 written by D. E. Mungello and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Chinese, the drive toward growing political and economic power is part of an ongoing effort to restore China's past greatness and remove the lingering memories of history's humiliations. This widely praised book explores the 1500–1800 period before China's decline, when the country was viewed as a leading world culture and power. Europe, by contrast, was in the early stages of emerging from provincial to international status while the United States was still an uncharted wilderness. D. E. Mungello argues that this earlier era, ironically, may contain more relevance for today than the more recent past. Building on the author's decades of research and teaching, this compelling book illustrates the vital importance of history to readers trying to understand China’s renewed rise.
Download or read book The Chinese Enlightenment written by Vera Schwarcz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.
Download or read book China from Empire to Nation State written by Hui Wang and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.
Download or read book Russia and the Idea of the West written by Robert D. English and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.
Download or read book Unlikely Partners written by Julian Gewirtz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country’s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation’s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China’s productive exchanges with the West. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China’s rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, China’s economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe’s economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the push from China’s senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China’s economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China’s complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.
Download or read book Wealth and Power written by Orville Schell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two leading experts on China evaluate its rise throughout the past one hundred fifty years, sharing portraits of key intellectual and political leaders to explain how China transformed from a country under foreign assault to a world giant.
Download or read book Ancient Chinese Thought Modern Chinese Power written by Yan Xuetong and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-25 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From China's most influential foreign policy thinker, a vision for a "Beijing Consensus" for international relations The rise of China could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will China look like in the future? What should it look like? And what will China's rise mean for the rest of world? This book, written by China's most influential foreign policy thinker, sets out a vision for the coming decades from China's point of view. In the West, Yan Xuetong is often regarded as a hawkish policy advisor and enemy of liberal internationalists. But a very different picture emerges from this book, as Yan examines the lessons of ancient Chinese political thought for the future of China and the development of a "Beijing consensus" in international relations. Yan, it becomes clear, is neither a communist who believes that economic might is the key to national power, nor a neoconservative who believes that China should rely on military might to get its way. Rather, Yan argues, political leadership is the key to national power, and morality is an essential part of political leadership. Economic and military might are important components of national power, but they are secondary to political leaders who act in accordance with moral norms, and the same holds true in determining the hierarchy of the global order. Providing new insights into the thinking of one of China's leading foreign policy figures, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in China's rise or in international relations.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of Modern China written by Merle Goldman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-16 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the only comprehensive book on modern China's intellectual history.
Download or read book Qing Travelers to the Far West written by Jenny Huangfu Day and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing reveals how Sino-Western engagements transformed traditions, institutions, and networks of communications.