Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of China's arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twentieth century: the Republican Revolution that overthrows the Qing dynasty in 1911; the Communist Revolution that leads to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949; the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); and so forth. Amid the fiery rhetoric of revolution,…