Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

<p>Brilliantly reveals a China that has always been lively and pluralist in its political thought...His analysis has immense relevance for China today. <br>-Rana Mitter Foreign Affairs <p/><b>The definitive history of China's philosophical confrontation with modernity available for the first time in English.</b> <p/>What does it mean for China to be modern or for modernity to be Chinese? How is the notion of historical rupture--a fundamental distinction between tradition and modernity--compatible or not with the history of Chinese thought? <p/>These questions animate <i>The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought</i> a sprawling intellectual history considered one of the most significant achievements of modern Chinese scholarship available here in English for the first time. Wang Hui traces the seventh-century origins of three key ideas--principle (<i>li</i>) things (<i>wu</i>) and propensity (<i>shi</i>)--and analyzes their continual evolution up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Confucian scholars grappled with the problem of linking transcendental law to the material world thought to action--a goal that Wang argues became outdated as China's socioeconomic conditions were radically transformed during the Song Dynasty. Wang shows how the epistemic shifts of that time period produced a new intellectual framework that has proven both durable and malleable influencing generations of philosophers and even China's transformation from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In a new preface Wang also reflects on responses to his book since its original publication in Chinese. <p/>With theoretical rigor and uncommon insight into the roots of contemporary political commitments Wang delivers a masterpiece of scholarship that is overdue in translation. Through deep readings of key figures and classical texts <i>The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought</i> provides an account of Chinese philosophy and history that will transform our understanding of the modern not only in China but around the world.</p>