Cosmopolitanism Nationalism And Individualism In Modern China

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China analyzes important aspects of Chinese intellectual life and cultural practices that formed and informed the historical phenomenon known as the New Culture era. Through examining an influential newspaper supplement published in Beijing during 1918–1928, along with other contemporary sources, the book explores the full dimensions and rich textures of the intellectual-literary discourses of the time period and contributes to a re-consideration and re-appreciation of the New Culture phenomenon in modern China. It highlights a key intellectual-moral paradox in Chinese discourses between cosmopolitanism as an idealistic aspiration and nationalism as a practical imperative, both in complex relationship to individualism, a paradox that ultimately speaks to the constant negotiations between Chinese tradition and Western culture in the making of Chinese modernity. These issues have remained vitally relevant to China and the world nearly a century later.

This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America. It points to the desirability of a middling Chinese modernity.

Offering an entirely new approach to understanding China’s journalism history, this book covers the Chinese periodical press in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on five cases, either occurring in or in relation to the year 1917, this book emphasizes the protean nature of the newspaper and seeks to challenge a press historiography which suggests modern Chinese newspapers were produced and consumed with clear agendas of popularizing enlightenment, modernist, and revolutionary concepts. Instead, this book contends that such a historiography, which is premised on the classification of newspapers along the lines of their functions, overlooks the opaqueness of the Chinese press in the early twentieth century. Analyzing modern Chinese history through the lens of the newspaper, this book presents an interdisciplinary and international approach to studying mass communications. As such, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, journalism, and Asian Studies more generally.

Through a study of the readership of the most popular commercial daily newspaper in China during the early twentieth century, Reading Shenbao investigates ideas of nationalism, consumerism and individuality, looking at the relationship between advertising, modern lifestyles and changing social attitudes in China as it underwent modernization.

In 1965, Joseph R. Levenson began working on a new trilogy to follow his earlier study of modern Chinese intellectual history, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. By 1969, he had already sketched out basic outlines of the work, which was to be called Provincialism, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism. It was to consist of three volumes: one sounding the general themes of the arrangement, and two other elaborating its motifs. Accidental death tragically cut short Levenson's life and the preparation of the work. He did leave behind, however, an embryo of it in the form of this book, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism. Based upon a careful analysis of a wide selection of Western plays translated into Chinese during the twentieth century, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism tries to set the Communist Cultural Revolution into a new kind of historical perspective. Beginning with the demise of a Confucian China which "new youth" intellectuals found too provincial for their palates, Levenson shows how those same cosmopolitans in the 1920s and 1920s damed later Communist intellectuals of the 1950s for being to receptive to non-Chinese values. As Red Guards attacked symbols of a feudal Confucian past and a bourgeois foreign present, China slipped into a new sort of provincialism. Levenson analyzes their transformation with profound subtlety. Convinced that revolutionary China cannot forever seal itself off from universal cosmopolitan influences, he expresses sympathy throughout with the dilemma of rootless intellectuals in a society searching for a particular non-intellectual identity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Vasily Eroshenko was one of the most remarkable transnational literary figures of the early twentieth century: a blind multilingual Esperantist from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the famous modernist writer Lu Xun in China. Born in a small Ukrainian village in imperial Russia, he was blinded at a young age by complications from measles. Seeking to escape the limitations imposed on the blind, Eroshenko became a globe-trotting storyteller. He was well known in Japan and China as a social activist and a popular writer of political fairy tales that drew comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales presents a selection of Eroshenko’s stories, translated from Japanese and Esperanto, to English readers for the first time. These fables tell the stories of a religiously disillusioned fish, a jealous paper lantern, a scholarly young mouse, a captive tiger who seeks to liberate his fellow animals, and many more. They are at once inventive and politically charged experiments with the fairy tale genre and charming, lyrical stories that will captivate readers as much today as they did during Eroshenko’s lifetime. In addition to eighteen fairy tales, the book includes semiautobiographical writings and prose poems that vividly evoke Eroshenko’s life and world.

Presenting a comprehensive portrayal of the reading of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early twentieth-century German thought, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought examines the implications of these readings for contemporary issues in comparative and intercultural philosophy. Through a series of case studies from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Eric Nelson focuses on the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in German philosophy, covering figures as diverse as Buber, Heidegger, and Misch. He argues that the growing intertextuality between traditions cannot be appropriately interpreted through notions of exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers' interpretation of Asian philosophy, Nelson also throws new light on the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens up the possibility of a more inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy.

This book examines the development of Chinese translation practice in relation to the rise of ideas of modern selfhood in China from the 1890s to the 1920s. The key translations produced by late Qing and early Republican Chinese intellectuals over the three decades in question reflect a preoccupation with new personality ideals informed by foreign models and the healthy development of modern individuality, in the face of crises compounded by feelings of cultural inadequacy. The book clarifies how these translated works supplied the meanings for new terms and concepts that signify modern human experience, and sheds light on the ways in which they taught readers to internalize the idea of the modern as personal experience. Through their selection of source texts and their adoption of different translation strategies, the translators chosen as case studies championed a progressive view of the world: one that was open-minded and humanistic. The late Qing construction of modern Chinese identity, instigated under the imperative of national salvation in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War, wielded a far-reaching influence on the New Culture discourse. This book argues that the New Culture translations, being largely explorations of modern self-consciousness, helped to produce an egalitarian cosmopolitan view of modern being. This was a view favoured by the majority of mainland intellectuals in the post-Maoist 1980s and which has since become an important topic in mainland scholarship.