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."
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