Overview

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic view of reflections on progress in modern China. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses on progress shape Chinese understandings of modernity and its pitfalls. As this in-depth study shows, these discourses play a pivotal role in the fields of politics, society, culture, as well as philosophy, history, and literature. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Chinese ideas of progress, their often highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism of modernity they offered, opened the gateway for reflections on China’s past, its position in the present world, and its future course.

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9789004426535

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Reviews

""The essays in this volume edited by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich deal with a crucial topic, namely discourses around the concept of progress in China. Although numerous authors, including Prasenjit Duara, Luke Kwong and others,have dealt with this issue, this volume goes further by examining the details of the interpretation of ideas of progress and showing that the incorporation of linear time in China was far from linear... All of the essays in the volume are well-researched and provide a helpful angle onto how Chinese thinkers dealt with the problem of progress."" - Viren Murthy, Philosophy East & West, Volume 72, Number 3 (July 2022) ""Written by prominent experts in the history of late imperial and republican China, the chapters of this volume use a variety of different approaches to tackle the topic, ranging from conceptual history to political thought and literary studies, and from bird’s-eye overviews to specific case studies. This variation across the common theme produces a largely coherent, but kaleidoscopically diverse and highly instructive ensemble. The chapters represent the state of the art in sinological research and in many places considerably advance our knowledge of Chinese intellectual history. Fröhlich and Schneider’s volume is an excellent complement to the substantial existing body of literature on how Chinese intellectuals coped with feelings of decay and weakness, reaching even to the fear of an imminent “national demise” (wangguo)."" - Egas Bender De Moniz Bandeira, Contributions to the History of Concepts (Spring 2023)

Author Information

Thomas Fröhlich is Professor of Sinology at Hamburg University. He has published monographs, edited volumes, and many articles on modern Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, including Staatsdenken im China der Republikzeit (Campus, 2000) and Tang Junyi. Modern Confucianism and the Challenge of Modernity (Brill, 2017). Axel Schneider is Professor of Modern Sinology at the University of Göttingen. He has published monographs in German and Chinese, several edited volumes and many articles on modern Chinese intellectual history, especially academic history and the philosophy and politics of Chinese conservatism.

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