Beyond the Warring States

The intellectual impact of the First World War in China is often understood as having led to a disenchantment with the West and a discrediting of the authority of “science”, while at the same time ushering in a renewed sense of cultural as well as national “awakening”. Important developments such as the May Fourth Movement, the rise of Chinese Marxism, and the emergence of modern Confucianism have become integral parts of the narrative surrounding the effects of the “European War” in China, and bear witness to the contested relation between tradition and modernity in twentieth-century Chinese thought. Through a case study of a number of wartime and post-war texts written by the “cultural conservative” thinker and publicist Du Yaquan (1873–1933), this paper tries to draw attention to the complexity and occasional ambiguity of responses to the “Great War” in modern Chinese intellectual history. More specifically, the following pages offer an analysis of Du’s critique of “materialism” in the context of his quest for social freedom and cultural continuity, his enduring commitment to scientific notions of social evolution and political governance, and his approach to the relations among war, the nation-state, the individual, and the international interstate order developed against the background of the First World War.

The “Learning of Life”

While the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) has left behind one of the most thought-provoking and intensively studied bodies of philosophical writings in modern Chinese intellectual history, his own life and its relation to his philosophy (or “learning”), a theme at the centre of his Autobiography at Fifty from the mid-1950s, has so far remained largely unexamined. After some introductory remarks on the context and outlook of the Autobiography, my paper turns to the close relation between Mou’s conception of life and his approach to the “cultural life” of China as a nation. In doing so, I examine the notion of a distinctly Chinese (more precisely, Confucian) “learning of life” in his writing and explore the motif of “life in itself” running through the ­Autobiography. I argue that this motif is crucial for gaining a better understanding of Mou’s relation to his teacher Xiong Shili (1885–1968), his own father, the social conditions of his childhood in rural Shandong, as well as his overall approach to subjectivity as a space for articulating socio-political concerns.

From Religion to Revolution…and Nationalism

The work of the Marxist historian Jamāl al-Dīn Bai Shouyi (1909–2000), a member of the Chinese Muslim Hui ethnic group, offers a window into the close and complex relation between the contested categories of politics, religion, and ethnicity in modern Chinese intellectual history, particularly with respect to the historical development of Chinese Muslim identity in its encounter with Marxist historical materialism. In this article, I provide a limited case study of this broader problematic by analysing Bai’s writings on Hui identity. In doing so, I attempt to contextualise his arguments with reference to the changing status of religion in contemporary Chinese Marxist discourse, and reflect on the entanglement of nationalism, religion, and ethnopolitics in modern China.

Humanities Encounters Science: Confronting the Challenge of Post-humanism

Post-humanism has recently come to China and challenges traditional humanism and the humanities. The author first offers a reflection on the evolution of humanism in modern Chinese intellectual history. To the author, we are now in a ‘post-theoretical era’, in which the function of theory is no longer so powerful and ubiquitous as it used to be. It is then argued that the rise of the ‘post-humanist’ trend in the West during the past decades indicates that, in the present era, humankind is only one of many species on earth, whose existence and development, to a large extent, depend on natural law. At the same time, post-humanism tells us that humankind may no longer be able to control some of its own creations. The author concludes by calling for digital humanities to bridge the gap between science and humanities and to establish a new relationship between the two.

Modern Chinese Political Thought

Although debates abound as to when “modernity” in China began, modern Chinese political thought is here taken to mean thought on politics (broadly conceived) produced after the late 19th century, when Chinese intellectuals began a critical evaluation of their received traditions in light of domestic instability, the success of Japanese modernization, and growing European influence via military, missionary, commercial, and intellectual interaction. These early evaluations had a crucial impact on later republican and communist ideology, because reformers throughout the 20th century continued to wrestle with dilemmas first articulated in the 1890s: What is China’s place in a wider global order, now that it is seen as one among many nation-states rather than as the unifying center for civilization? How might it transform its society and economy, given the increasing pace of globalization, the pressures of industrialization, and the need to sustain a growing population? What role might be played by “traditional” Chinese thought in the modern age, and how should that thought be assessed? As these questions show, Chinese thought during this era was typically holistic, and its inquiry encompasses diverse disciplines such as literature, history, sociology, economics, and philosophy. This article attempts to present “Chinese political thought” not only as an object of historical research but also as a self-reflexive and self-referential body of work that grounds philosophical discussion and political inquiry still meaningful today. My focus therefore will be on primary and secondary work concerned with normative and conceptual questions related to political philosophy; I therefore offer only a selective rather than comprehensive overview of work in modern Chinese intellectual history. Early studies of this period, such as Ssu-yu Teng and John King Fairbank’s China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Teng and Fairbank 1954a, cited under English-Language Anthologies), misleadingly reduced China’s political thought to a response to the “Western impact.” The works of Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph Levenson, Thomas Metzger, Lydia H. Liu, and others have shown the degree to which these questions emerged out of a interaction between existing concerns and categories: Chinese scholars interpreted, with growing sophistication and in novel ways, culturally diverse rather than monolithically “Western” ideas and institutions. Indeed, one striking feature of thought during most of this period is its richness and diversity. Far from parroting official orthodoxy, political thinkers at the turn of both centuries embrace emerging popular media—whether newspapers or the Internet—to express a huge range of critical perspectives. To emphasize this diversity, this article focuses on nonofficial thought, with topics on Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Chinese Communist thought covered elsewhere in this series of Oxford Bibliographies. Finally, although modern Chinese political thought typically refers to thought on politics produced by Chinese people during the modern era, it also includes work by non-Chinese scholars and by Chinese scholars (inside and outside the People’s Republic of China) working in English and other languages, who recognize the worth of Chinese political ideas for modern academic study.