Chinese Visions Of Progress 1895 To 1949

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic study of Chinese reflections on “progress,” its multifaceted expressions, contesting interpretations, highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism it encountered.

"A Global Enlightenment is a book about the idea of Western progress, told through a series of conversations about Chinese science. Its protagonists - an ex-Jesuit missionary, a French statesman, a Manchu prince, Chinese literati, European savants, and other figures of the late Enlightenment world - exchanged ideas across cultures. In telling their stories here, Alexander Statman shows how Chinese science shaped a signature legacy of the European Enlightenment: the idea of Western progress. By focusing on the orphans of the Enlightenment, those who sought to vindicate ancient wisdom as others left it behind, Statman reveals that ideas about the uniqueness of the West - and the mystery, inscrutability, or otherness of the East - did not follow from the Enlightenment idea of progress but had to be invented. The orphans of the Enlightenment believed that the knowledge of the past and the East still had value for modern Europe, and their efforts to recover and explain it, in turn, uncover an unknown story of European engagement with Chinese science. In contrast to the common view, that over the course of the Enlightenment non-Western ideas were banished from European thought, Statman found that the opposite is true. Toward the end of the Enlightenment, Europeans only grew more interested in Chinese science, and this has had lasting effects, from the eighteenth century to today"--

This volume presents a fresh picture of the historical development of “conservatism” from the late 17th to the early 20th century. The book explores the broader geographies and transnational dimensions of conservatism and counterrevolution. The contributions show how counterrevolutionary concepts did not emerge in isolation, but resulted from the interplay between ideas, media, networks, and institutions. Like 19th-century liberalism and socialism, conservatism was the product of traveling ideas and people. This study describes how exile, mobility, and international sociability shaped counterrevolutionary identities. The volume presents case studies on the intersection of political philosophy, scholarly practices, international politics, and governmental bureaucracies. Furthermore, Cosmopolitan Conservatisms offers new approaches to the study of conservatism, including the prisms of ecology, gender, and digital history. Contributors are: Alicia Montoya, Carolina Armenteros, Simon Burrows,Wyger Velema, Michiel van Dam, Glauco Schettini, Nigel Aston, Brian Vick, Lien Verpoest, Beatrice de Graaf, Jean-Philippe Luis, Joep Leerssen, Amerigo Caruso, Joris van Eijnatten, Emily Jones, Aymeric Xu, and Axel Schneider.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education. Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901–1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.

Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth.

This volume provides the first study of the history of sinology (aka China studies) as charted across several communist states during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China was created in the first years of the Cold War, with its early history and foreign policy intimately bound up in that larger geopolitical fight. All the seismic changes in China’s geopolitical landscape—from its emergence and close relationship with the Soviet Union, to the Sino–Soviet split and the eventual rapprochement with the United States—resulted in a great deal of interest by journalists, politicians, and scholars. Yet, although scholars across the Soviet Bloc produced an impressive body of work on a range of sinological studies, with rare exceptions most of those scholars and their work remains unknown outside their own intellectual circles. This book redresses this dearth of knowledge of sinological scholarship, providing invaluable and unique glimpses of Soviet Bloc sinologists and their work during the Cold War, including cutting-edge research on lesser-studied communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and others. International in scope, this book is ideal for scholars and researchers of modern history, Chinese studies, sinology, and the Cold War.

"With Xi Jinping's project to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era, new analyses of pan-Asianism have proliferated. Most of these narratives focus especially on the "rise of China" as the natural leader of new capitalist bloc, foretelling a shift of power from the West to the East. What these approaches lack, however, is any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. Viren Murthy explores the writings and specific historical contexts of key pan-Asianist intellectuals in Japan, China, and India from the early 1900s to the present to clarify how current discourses distort the very foundations of pan-Asianism. At the heart of this thinking was the notion of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the "advanced world" on equal terms. But there was more: pan-Asianists envisioned a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. That the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding"--