The Chinese Enlightenment

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.

Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought examines the ideas of China in the works of three major thinkers in the early European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries: Pierre Bayle, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the Baron de Montesquieu. Unlike surveys which provide only cursory overviews of Enlightenment views of China, or individual studies of each thinker which tend to address their conceptions of China in individual chapters, this is the first book to provide in-depth comparative analyses of these seminal Enlightenment thinkers that specifically link their views on China to their political concerns. Against the backdrop especially of the Jesuit accounts of China which these philosophers read, Bayle, Leibniz, and Montesquieu interpreted imperial China in three radically divergent ways: as a tolerant, atheistic monarchy; as an exemplar of human and divine justice; and as an exceptional but nonetheless corrupt despotic state. The book thus shows how the development of political thought in the early Enlightenment was closely linked to the question of China as a positive or negative model for Europe, and argues that revisiting Bayle’s approach to China is a salutary corrective to the errors and presumptions in the thought of Leibniz and Montesquieu. The book also discusses how Chinese reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on Enlightenment writers’ different views of China as they sought to envisage how China should be remodeled.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power. China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

This volume examines the historical basis of the debate over sudden versus gradual approaches to enlightenment in Chinese Buddhism seeing it as part of a recurrent polarity in Chinese history and thought. Sudden and Gradual includes essays by Luis O. Gomez on the philosophical implications of the debate in China and Tibet, Whalen Lai on Taodheng`s theory of sudden enlightenment, Neal Donner on Chih-i`s system of T`ien-t`ai, John R. McRae on Shen-Hui`s sudden enlgihtenment` and its precedents in Northern Ch`an, Peter N. Gregory on Tsung-.i`s theory of sudden enlightenment .

For a millennium and a half in China, Christianity has been perceived as a foreign religion for a foreign people. This volume investigates various historical attempts to articulate a Chinese Christianity, comparing the roles that Western and Latin forms of Christian theology have played with the potential role of Eastern Orthodox theology.

What is enlightenment? Wei Zhang brings together the fabled consideration of enlightenment by Kant, his contemporaries, and modern respondents such as Habermas and Foucault with the question "What is Chinese enlightenment?" Kant and his peers began a discussion of the notion of enlightenment in the pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift when that newspaper's editor posed the question "Was ist Aufklärung?" in 1784. Chinese intellectuals began a similar consideration in the wake of the May Fourth cultural movement of 1919, which marked a self-conscious break from the feudal past and a new engagement with the West. Zhang asks to what extent European enlightenment can be regarded as purely philosophical and isolated from political events and, alternately, to what extent the Chinese enlightenment can be split into separate political and intellectual discourses. Her work yields a new set of conceptual questions and practical issues and provides new energy to the dialogue on political and cultural modernity. In cross-cultural context, Zhang finds the answers to the question "What is enlightenment?" are multiple, pluralistic, dynamic, and self-renewing.