Chinese Intellectual History Research Articles

The Subject’s New Clothes: Immanent Transcendence and the Moral Self in the Modern Confucian Discourses

In Modern Confucian philosophy the notion of the moral Self which is expressed through the natural moral substance (xingti 性體) represents both the foundation of each individual and the core of the universal reason. The indivisibility of the moral Self from its concrete activities within the social sphere differs in many various aspects from prevailing Western political and philosophical theories that are based on the separation of the empirical and transcendent subject. Hence, this holistic special feature of the moral Self is closely related to one of the basic paradigms of Chinese intellectual history, i.e. the paradigm of immanent transcendence, which is also known as the paradigm of ‘radical’ or ‘pure’ transcendence. The present article introduces and analyses both above-mentioned, mutually intertwined traditional notions through the lens of modern interpretations, focusing upon the philosophical work written by the representatives of the second generation of Taiwanese Modern Confucians.

XUNZI'S CRITICISM OF ZISI—NEW PERSPECTIVES

AbstractThis study considers Xunzi's criticism of Zisi, Confucius' grandson, providing a detailed analysis of some of the most famous but also difficult passages in theXunzi. By drawing on the newly excavated text, “Wuxing” (The five conducts), the study shows that not only did Xunzi have an intimate knowledge of Zisi's teachings, but in fact he had available to him a certain version of the “Wuxing.” This understanding makes it possible to evaluate Xunzi's role as a reporter of Zisi's teachings, and to the extent that Xunzi reported these teachings fairly and accurately, the study offers specific suggestions for reimagining a period that has been little understood in Early Chinese intellectual history, or the transition from Confucius to Mencius.

The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness by Viren Murthy

Reviewed by: The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness by Viren Murthy Carine Defoort Murthy, Viren. The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Leiden: Brill, 2011. viii, 268 pp. $148 (cloth) Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (or Zhang Binglin 章炳麟) (1869–1936) is known as one of the important revolutionaries of early twentieth-century China. Anti-Manchu, a scholar of "national learning," and a critic of Western influence, Zhang cannot easily be categorized as either conservative, reformer, or revolutionary. Viren Murthy's study shows the intricacies and evolution of Zhang's thought, with a focus on his Buddhist inspiration, more specifically the Yogācārā (Consciousness-only) school. He starts out from Zhang's personal experience of maltreatment and torture, when he was put in jail (1903–06) after being accused of plotting against the Qing regime. Zhang spent the following years in Japan (1906–10), where he was influenced by Japanese thinkers and German idealism. Out of intellectual debates with reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Murthy unravels Zhang's own "unique philosophy of negation" (p. 5) as a criticism of Western categories and institutions, and more particularly of global capitalist modernity. On an even broader scope, Murthy's study also offers an entrance into tensions between old and new, nationalism and universalism, tradition and global modernity. The first chapter, which also functions as introduction to the intellectual scene, immediately throws the reader into a rather dense debate on modernity, capitalism, and Zhang Taiyan. Drawing on Japanese, Western, and Chinese scholarship, Murthy argues that the contrast between Zhang's anti-Manchu nationalism and his Buddhist self-negation was conditioned by global capitalist modernity. He heavily draws on the ideas of the contemporary public intellectual Wang Hui, with whom Murthy worked in Beijing, but also on other scholars such as Takeuchi Yoshimi, Chang Hao, Alex Schneider, and Georg Lukás. The second chapter analyzes shifts in Zhang's views, moving away from Kang Youwei's reformist ideal of a multiracial nation-state toward an anti-Manchu Han nationalism considered modern as well as rooted in the past. The following chapters all concern the integration of Buddhism into Zhang Taiyan's thought. Chapter 3 shows how Zhang differed from Liang Qichao in using Yogācārā Buddhism to counter capitalist modernity and entities entailed by it such as science, universal laws and ethical principles, nation-building, and imperialism. Buddhist insights combined with the Daoist idea of confusion (huo) helped to deconstruct the notion of the subject and to create a provisional subject willing to sacrifice itself in a revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Murthy argues that Zhang negated the ideas of (Hegelian) evolution and historical progress, and that he saw the world as constituted of appearances caused by fluctuations of consciousness resulting from "karmic seeds." Convinced of the world's illusionary nature, Zhang cherished self-negation and the end of history. The fifth and last chapter shows how Zhang warned his contemporaries against the oppressive nature of such notions as "rationality," "equality," and "universal principle" as means to control man and dominate the world. Using Buddhism and inspired by Zhuangzi's idea of "equalization" (qi), Zhang rejected the homogenizing influence of global capitalism in favor of an embrace of particularities and a detachment from words. The conclusion argues that Zhang Taiyan's critical stance against the homogenizing power of capitalist modernity, its evolutionary visions, and its abstract principles is still relevant today. As Murthy notes, "Zhang's work is especially significant in Chinese intellectual history since it is one of the first attempts to overcome the alienation caused by capitalism in thought by invoking Buddhist categories" (p. 242). Murthy tries to show how Zhang's legacy has been critically adopted by his student and cultural critic Lu Xun and by Murthy's own teacher, the "new leftist" Wang Hui. Murthy's book can probably be situated in this line of intellectual heritance. Readers less acquainted with the topic will probably have a hard time following the intricacies of Murthy's arguments. Murthy's work reads as a sophisticated reflection for insiders. Carine Defoort University of Leuven Copyright © 2014 Twentieth-Century China

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung

Reviewed by: The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung Leigh K. Jenco (bio) Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). xv, 319 pp. $90.00 (cloth). In this book Edmund S. K. Fung synthesizes an enormous range of intellectual materials generated during China's Republican period, dating primarily from the May Fourth period (1915-1923) to 1949. Fung argues that intellectuals of this era confronted the same crisis of modernity with which intellectuals, in both East and West, continue to wrestle today. These Republican conversations, he claims, provide the foundational vocabulary through which contemporary Chinese elites debate the direction of their society. Fung masterfully and carefully surveys both Chinese- and English-language scholarship to provide one of the most comprehensive and richly detailed pictures of these intellectual debates available in English. He carefully examines positions and thinkers that have been strangely overlooked in much academic work on the era, but that played decisive roles in shaping ideologies of the time. These include the Chinese "humanism" of the Critical Review Group (pp. 70-72); Chen Xujing's "total Westernization" thesis, which prompted Hu Shi to revise his views on cultural radicalism (pp. 46-60); and the political thought of the "Warring States School," which vested Chinese salvation in a revival of Qin-era concern for national security and military capacity (pp. 120-126). The broad scope of Fung's analysis belies his somewhat simplistic organization of thinkers and debates into an inadequate (and sometimes unhelpful) liberal-conservative-socialist trichotomy. He draws repeated attention to how thinkers and themes continually reappeared in diverse conversations, transcending the very labels he uses to describe them. As Fung effectively argues in Chapter 1, the Westernized radicalism of Chen Duxiu and other May Fourth thinkers betrays an unexpectedly conservative resistance to cultural pluralism and historical change, possibilities embraced by the so-called "conservative" thinkers examined in Chapters 2 and 3. His discussions therefore enable readers to draw connections between themes, thinkers, and materials usually thought of as isolated or distinct. For example, in Chapter 3 Fung points out that conservative impulses in China were not opposed to modernity but in fact saw tradition as an important part of modern development. One of the strongest elements of the book is Fung's discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of the statist elements of liberalism and related ideologies in China. Rather than interpret Chinese liberals' emphasis on the need for strong state power as an aberration or misinterpretation of "true" liberalism, Fung uses the work of political theorists such as Stephen Holmes to show that extreme individualism did not necessarily always win out over socialist economic policies and strong nationalist states within such liberal thought (p. 140). By pointing out European precedents for these broader possibilities, Fung succeeds in his task of situating these intellectuals within global rather than merely "Chinese" conversations about modernity. He does, however, miss an opportunity here to reverse the gaze and to portray Chinese liberal thought as an independently significant contribution to global liberalism, not simply one of its many interpretations. The one flaw of the book is its failure to examine Marxism in China, at least in terms of addressing how Marxism transformed the landscape through which past and contemporary intellectuals debate the "modernity" mentioned in the book's title. Fung avoids this topic because, in contrast to many of the other intellectual debates the book brings to light, it has been so well-covered elsewhere (including by Fung himself). The importance of drawing attention, as Fung does, to the role played by non-communist elite discourses in modern Chinese intellectual history cannot be overstated, especially given their relative neglect among historians of China. In a book, however, with a title promising examination of "the intellectual foundations of Chinese modernity," it is not entirely obvious how Marxism "is outside the scope of [the] study" (p. 5). By the end of the book, for example, the author himself declares the "ultimate" triumph of Marxism and Mao Zedong thought over "all other schools of thought" (pp. 255, 262)—implying a historical discontinuity that troubles his depiction of a continuous, "ongoing conversation" between...

THE INTELLECTUAL PERSUASION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A CONVERSATION WITH PETER K. BOL

Interviewer’s Note: Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. A leading scholar in the field of Chinese intellectual history, the much-published Professor Bol has long been an active figure in academic conferences and research collaborations. Professor Bol’s influential works on Neo-Confucianism, especially the monograph, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China and his recent book, Neo-Confucianism in History, present a compelling delineation of the transformation and magnification of intellectuals’ roles from the seventh century to the seventeenth century. Professor Bol is also a distinguished Harvard faculty member, being its first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis, first director of the China Biographical Database project, and department chair from 1997 to 2002. He won the prestigious honor of College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.I first met Professor Bol in the spring of 1997 when I participated in a symposium he organized for graduate students in the field of premodern China. During the 2008–09 academic year, I was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and had the opportunity to tour his Center for Geographic Analysis and meet with him from time to time to discuss the CBDB project. I also visited his class and interacted with his students. I sensed that Professor Bol’s vision and passion as a humanist and his dedication to education are very similar to those of Neo-Confucians of the Song-Yuan-Ming eras, save for his acute interest in global politics and, especially, the state of affairs in the US and China. Inspired by this encounter, I made a request for interviewing him for CHR readers. Professor Bol graciously accepted my request. Here is the interview.

傅斯年的史學思想

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 傅斯年是中國近現代思想學街史上著名學者。他創辦史語所開創了中國現代文科學衍。傅斯年提出的“史學即史料學”是一種現代史學的方法理論，提倡以史料為導向進入過去事實，主張史學研究應該從事考證和考古，而免於意識形態和政治關係的干擾。本文論述了傅斯年史學思想的內容和形成，并就傅斯年的科學思想、“史料”概念、歷史學和語言學的關係、考古學以及詮據法五個方面予以解讀分析和理解的批評。
 Fu Sinian (1896-1950) was an eminent scholar in early modern Chinese intellectual history. His establishment of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, marks the advent of modem liberal arts scholarship. His modern methodology is revealed in his theory that “the study of history is the same as the study of historical sources.” He advocated that historical sources be used as a guide to enter the past world and that the study of history be related to archeology and textology but free from the interference of ideology and politics. The present essay discusses the content and the formation of Fu Sinian’s study of history. The discussion will focus on the interpretation, analysis, comprehension, and critique of five aspects, namely his scientific thought, concept of “historical resources,” the relationship between history and linguistics, archeology, and evidence method.

Mastery, Authority, and Hierarchy in the “Inner Chapters” of theZhuāngzǐ

Mastery, Authority, and Hierarchy in the “Inner Chapters” of the<i>Zhuāngzǐ</i>

Transfiguring Modern Temporality

Although Zhang Taiyan is famous for being a late Qing nationalist and revolutionary, scholars have yet to explore fully the significance of his Buddhist writings, especially as they relate to time and history. This article closely examines Zhang’s writings about time and history and points out that Zhang made two interrelated but potentially conflicting arguments. On the one hand, he invoked Yogācāra Buddhism and Zhuang Zi to expound a relativistic vision of time and history. From this perspective, each nation has its historical particularity and cannot be judged from an external standard. However, on the other hand, in a context where intellectuals were uncritically adopting a framework of history as progress, Zhang grounded the theory of evolution in a theory of karmic seeds to develop an interpretation of history as a double movement in which the good gets better and the bad gets worse. The article delves into the significance of Zhang’s arguments by highlighting the symmetries between Zhang’s exposition of history and the logic of capitalism. Such structural similarities suggest that Zhang could think about time and history in this way precisely because he inhabited a world mediated by the dynamic of capitalism. His writings on Zhuang Zi and Buddhism should be seen as an example of a resistance to capitalism that is not based on a narrative of progress. In the context of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, where narratives of progress and evolution are a dominant chord, Zhang’s counterpunctual critique of evolution is especially inspiring.

A Dialogue on The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought: Liberating the Object and an Inquiry into the Modern

In this dialogue, Wang Hui explains his writing of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, especially how he started from Lu Xun studies to the research of Chinese intellectual history. He interprets the connotations and meanings of the thesis he raised in this four-volume book around topics covered by each volume, titled repectively, “Principle and Things,” “Empire and Nation-State,” “Gongli and Anti-Gongli,” and “The Community of Scientific Discourse,” as well as argues for his methodology of “liberating the objects.”

Happiness, Ownership, Naming: Reflections on Northern Song Cultural History

This essay talks about a significant moment in Chinese intellectual and literary history, centrally involving the nature of human happiness, which remains one of the great questions in all philosophical traditions. The Northern Song version of this question continues to have resonance in the contemporary world because we often still link happiness with particular situations and often, like our Northern Song predecessors, with particular sites and possessions. These questions can indeed be found earlier in the Chinese tradition, but in the major social transformations of the Northern Song—a growing commercial culture, and an elite defined by cultural prestige rather than by family background—this question came to enjoy a new intensity of discursive reflection.

The Failures of Contemporary Chinese Intellectual History

This article explores the failures of modern approaches to Chinese thought among both Euro-American and Chinese scholars of classical learning in China. What to date has been called Chinese intellectual history usually has been a less technical version of the history of Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism. Despite important exceptions, there have been many subjective elements in the prioritizing of Confucian philosophy in Chinese intellectual history—at the expense of Daoism, Buddhism, and Islam, not to mention popular culture or women's history, even when rhetorically denied. This essay explores how study of the history of classical learning in China might proceed after the challenge of postmodern theory.

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rise of Buddhist scholasticism in Republican China (1911–1949) through the career of one of its most outspoken leaders, Ouyang Jingwu (1871–1943). Ouyang Jingwu, a lay Buddhist intellectual, charismatic teacher and polemical writer, is most recognized for his critique of the East Asian Buddhist tradition, and this critique stands at the heart of the dissertation. In addition to presenting this critique, this dissertation explores one of the most innovative hermeneutical alternatives offered by this influential and creative thinker. To date, scholars have overlooked the importance of Ouyang for later intellectual developments. I argue here that understanding Ouyang's critique is crucial for later developments in Chinese intellectual history both within and outside of Buddhism.

Envisioning eternal empire: Chinese political thought of the Warring States era

This ambitious book looks into the reasons for the exceptional durability of the Chinese empire, which lasted for more than two millennia (221 B.C.E. - 1911 C.E.). Yuri Pines identifies the roots of the empire's longevity in the activities of thinkers of the Warring States period (453-221 B.C.E.), who, in their search for solutions to an ongoing political crisis, developed ideals, values, and perceptions that would become essential for the future imperial polity. In marked distinction to similar empires worldwide, the Chinese empire was envisioned and to a certain extent 'preplanned' long before it came into being. As a result, it was not only a military and administrative construct, but also an intellectual one. Pines makes the argument that it was precisely its ideological appeal that allowed the survival and regeneration of the empire after repeated periods of turmoil. Envisioning Eternal Empire presents a panoptic survey of philosophical and social conflicts in Warring States political culture. By examining the extant corpus of preimperial literature, including transmitted texts and manuscripts uncovered at archaeological sites, Pines locates the common ideas of competing thinkers that underlie their ideological controversies. This bold approach allows him to transcend the once fashionable perspective of competing 'schools of thought' and show that beneath the immense pluralism of Warring States thought one may identify common ideological choices that eventually shaped traditional Chinese political culture. The result is a refreshingly novel look at the foundational period in Chinese intellectual history.

Religious Origin of the TermsDaoandDeand Their Signification in theLaozi

AbstractThis article applies a synthetic approach of philological, religious, philosophical, and cultural studies to explore the original meaning of the termsdao道 andde德, two primary concepts in traditional Chinese intellectual history. Through an etymological analysis of the charactersdaoandde, and supported by both received and discovered texts and materials, this article demonstrates thatdaooriginally represented the spirit of the Pole Star/High God and the movement of Heaven, andde, in relation todao, originally represented the impartial virtue and power of Heaven. In terms of this new interpretation, the article further discusses the signification ofdaoanddein the Laozi to uncover the mystic aspects of the text.

Intercultural Interpretative Difficulties of Modern Chinese Intellectual Development: A Hermeneutical View

This study is constituted by three components. The first will examine how Chinese scholars and Western sinologists have characterized modern Chinese intellectual history and what directions they have proposed for future intellectual development in China. The second section will construct a hermeneutic model of intercultural understanding and discuss its implications for the evaluation of modern Chinese intellectual development. I will show that an understanding of modern Chinese intellectual development in hermeneutical terms can circumventing many of the entrenched and misleading dichotomies in the field. In the third section, I will investigate three intercultural difficulties that modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals face in the study of their own society and tradition. The recognition of these intercultural difficulties — which is made possible by re-conceptualizing local intellectual development in hermeneutical terms — put into relief the plight and possibilities of local intellectual development in non-Western localities.

Chair of Chinese Intellectual History

Extracts from the inaugural lecture: “The historical evolution of China over the past century forces us into a kind of increasingly participative observation (to borrow an expression from anthropology). Our perception of China can no longer afford to remain at a distance and to construct a fanciful object that can be apprehended as a quintessential whole. In many respects, we still entertain conceptions which were elaborated three centuries ago in the Enlightenment period but are no longer en...

Authentication Studies (辨偽學) Methodology and the Polymorphous Text Paradigm

The foundation of Chinese intellectual history is a group of texts known as “masters texts” (子書). Many masters texts were authored in the Han dynasty or earlier and many of these have as their title the name of a master who was generally regarded as the author. The inclination to treat a given book as the product of a single writer is apparently a strong one. Nevertheless, from the very beginning there were Chinese scholars who doubted the veracity of the putative authorship of some of these works and suggested that they may in fact have been the product of several authors. Over time, such scholars developed criteria by which to judge the authenticity of ancient masters texts. But as such textual criticism grew more penetrating, the object of its scrutiny began to come apart at the seams. In the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that most early Chinese masters texts were originally quite permeable and that only later were their received forms settled upon.The branch of textual criticism that deals with authenticating early Chinese texts is called “Authentication studies.” This paper is a survey of the methodological advances made in the field of Authentication studies over the last two millennia. It is not a history of the field, as such a history would be a much longer project. The survey concludes with the idea of the “polymorphous text paradigm,” a paradigm that paradoxically obviates much of the preceding scholarship in its own field. Simply put, if authentication relies largely on anachronism, and anachronism relies largely on the dates of the putative author, then a multi-author work with no known “last author” will be impossible to authenticate. Furthermore, the polymorphous text paradigm does not posit these texts as necessarily having earlier and later “layers,” but rather as having had no set structure over the course of their early redactional evolution.This survey examines the contributions of seventeen scholars to Authentication studies methodology, and concludes with how the changes in this field have influenced the work of three modern, Western scholars.

Three Political Confucianisms and Half a Century

Modern Chinese intellectual history was dominated by rejection and criticism of much of Chinese traditional culture and thought in general and of Confucianism in particular (Lin 1979). “Down with the Confucian school” (dadao kongjiadian) was one of the slogans of the all-powerful May Fourth Movement in which Chinese intellectuals embraced Western science and democracy and saw China’s Confucian heritage as an obstacle to its modernization and quest for power and wealth in competition with the nations of the world. Chinese communism, which was subsequently triumphant in giving rise to the People’s Republic of China, was one of the products of the May Fourth tradition of radical anti-traditionalist thought. So was Chinese liberalism, which however failed to exert significant influence on Chinese politics and society in the mainland, or on the island of Taiwan during the authoritarian era of one-party rule by the Nationalist Party.

A return to intellectual history: A new approach to pre-Qin discourse on name

Discussions of name (ming, 名) during the pre-Qin and Qin-Han period of Chinese history were very active. The concept ming at that time can be divided into two categories, one is the ethical-political meaning of the term and the other is the linguistic-logical understanding. The former far exceeds the latter in terms of overall influence on the development of Chinese intellectual history. But it is the latter that has received the most attention in the 20th century, due to the influence of Western logic. This has led to the result of a bias in the contemporary studies of ming. Changing course by returning to the correct path of intellectual history can providing an objective and thorough ordering of the pre-Qin discourse on ming.

From Margin to Cutting Edge: The Search for a Paradigm in Chinese Historical Studies

The Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) has gone through three stages of development. The first stage (1987-1992) began with the founding of the organization in 1987. Most of its members at that time were Chinese students who had just embarked on the graduate programs in American universities. As sojourners destining to return to home eventually, these graduate students chose to take the courses most relevant and applicable to China, attempting to learn western methodologies and approaches so as to apply them to the future teaching and research in China. This kind of selected learning strategy resembled the traditional Ti-Yong formula—“Chinese learning for essence and Western leaning for practical application.” The early CHUS annual meetings reflected the initial pursuits and efforts of its members. The papers presented at the meetings covered wide fields—American, African, European, Chinese, art and diplomatic intellectual history as well as history of philosophy—but many of them were closely related to the topics that were most popular in China. However, American graduate programs pointed to new possibilities in their pursuit of graduate training in history. When these Chinese students worked with their professors, attended in graduate seminars, wrote term papers, prepared conference presentations, conducted dissertation researches, and applied for scholarships, they learned about the Western scholarly discourse and paradigms, which, often than not, compelled them to face the unexpected issue of convergence or clash between the Chinese and American academic cultures.