Awards

• Nominated for Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize 2017

Overview

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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9780674046955

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Reviews

China from Empire to Nation-State , a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China and of the non-West in general than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

China from Empire to Nation-State , a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China and of the non-West in general than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia China from Empire to Nation-State, a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China and of the non-West in general than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia It is continually rewarding, offering up new avenues of inquiry and revisiting links between Chinese modernity and the country's imperial history. Three centuries on from Kangxi, there are still plenty of blanks in the map of modem China. For anglophone readers, this very overdue translation helps us see the lie of the land.--Alex Monro Times Literary Supplement (09/04/2015) The present book is an erudite, stimulating, thought provoking, nuanced, but highly condensed overture to Wang's ambitious macro history of the formation of Chinese intellectual modernity. Sensitive to both continuities and disruptions, Wang engages traditional thought as well as Western and Japanese scholarly discourse...It illuminates 21st-century Chinese discourse and provides ample food for thought for scholars grappling with interpreting modern and premodern Chinese intellectual history.--C. Schirokauer Choice (03/01/2015) China from Empire to Nation-State, a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China--and of the non-West in general--than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

China from Empire to Nation-State, a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China and of the non-West in general than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.--Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

Author Information

Wang Hui is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History at Tsinghua University and founding Director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences. His books include China’s Twentieth Century, China from Empire to Nation-State, The Politics of Imagining Asia, and China’s New Order. Michael Gibbs Hill is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary and author of Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture.

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