We, the residents of modernity, live in an unquiet house.This essay examines the relationship between human subjects and their built environment, but it does so less by focusing on architecture than on what one might call ‘architecture once removed'. It is less concerned with the built environment itself than with a prevalent image of that environment in ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, in literature, in film and painting. It is my contention that a particular unsettling image of buildings has gained increasing (...) currency in the modern epoch. I will attempt to show that such an image — and a concomitant anxiety — exists, and to offer an explanation for its provenance. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern (...) China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

This essay highlights the influential role played by epistemological nativism in the disciplining of tradition in modern China. Chinese epistemological nativism is the view that the articulation and development of China’s intellectual heritage must draw exclusively on the paradigms and norms of so-called indigenous/local or China-based perspectives. Two case studies are presented to reveal some of the conundrums that confront the disciplining of tradition in modern China: Chinese philosophy and guoxue or National Studies. These (...) case studies also provide an opportunity to reflect on the implications this has for tradition’s place in Chinese modernity.In the case of the discipline of Chinese philosophy the role of epistemological nativism is evident in widespread calls to return Chinese philosophy to some pristine form, predating its encounter with “Western” philosophy; and in the continued refusal to acknowledge and engage the intellectual diversity of the traditions that contribute to Chinese philosophy’s composite identity. To illustrate this latter claim, I focus on the prominent example of Buddhist philosophy and its Indian roots.As for the second case study, National Studies has been revived as a discipline, marked as distinct from all other disciplines, because of claims that it represents a holistic body of learning. National Studies’ connection with various traditions of premodern learning is premised on the romantic conceit that these traditions of premodern learning somehow constituted a holistic, even organic, body of learning. The conundrum for contemporary guoxue protagonists, who present guoxue as a holistic body of learning, is that the stronger the claim made that guoxue warrants disciplinary status—and hence to be subjected to disciplinary subdivision—the weaker the case that guoxue is a holistic body of learning. This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that guoxue is an invented tradition. (shrink)

Argues that during the late Imperial period, all three main religious strains in China embraced an ethic that everyone should engage in labor as a crucial component to their personal enlightenment and their duty to society. This is what brings together new Chan (Zen in Japanese) Buddhism; new religious Daoism; and new Confucianism. All three new religions had to overcome traditional elitist biases and moral concerns about working for individual material results. To overcome traditional assumptions and practices, as well (...) as to embrace the priority of working for one's livelihood, required the religious practitioners to resolve tensions within their own minds and often with precepts of earlier forms of their religious traditions. The final section of the book focuses on the changing social status of merchants, their enhanced self-confidence in their identity and profession, and their manifestation of the new work ethics in their mercantile activities, especially from 1500 to 1820. (shrink)

Ethical Politics and Modern Society introduces and critically examines British idealist philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, his practical philosophy and its reception in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. As a response to the modernity issue in Great Britain, Green's philosophy, in particular his ethical politics, anticipated a practical solution to the individual alienation issue in modern society. Witnessing the resemblance between Green's ethical politics and classical Chinese ethical and political thought, some Chinese (...) scholars became inclined to take Green's thought as an intellectual approach to assimilate Western modernity. While Green and the Chinese scholars both intended to articulate an ethical conception of modern politics in response to the issue of modernity, their results were very different. In this book, James Jia-Hau Liu analyses why modern Chinese scholars introduced Green's philosophy to China and why the studies of Green's philosophy in China have since faded away. Modern Chinese scholars, such as Gao Yi-Han, Chin Yueh-Lin, Tang Jun-Yi, Chang Fo-Chuan and Yin Hai-Guang, are explored in greater detail. The contradictory standings towards modernity between Green and Chinese scholars illustrate how to understand the difference forms of modernity that can be embodied therein. Ethical Politics and Modern Society is a valuable resource to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, history of social and political thought, British Idealism and the work of Thomas Hill Green. (shrink)

Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities (...) alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China. Using fresh archival and primary sources, along with extensive ethnographic research, this volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China's twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating new narratives of Buddhism's involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, the book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history. (shrink)

One INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF THE VOICES OF NURSES IN CHINA Two motives launched this study to search for the voices of nurses in China. ...

Modem neo-Confucianism is studied at two levels, one is at the historical level and the other at the academic level. Modern neo-Confucianism at the historical level was developed in the modern context, but its basic content belongs to the traditional Confucianism or the study of Confucian classics. Modem neo-Confucianism at the academic level recognizes both the deficiencies of the traditional Confucianism and rationality of western learning, and dedicates itself to the modernization of Confucianism. Though Ma Yifu's moral philosophy (...) is developed in the context of modem Chinese culture, it fails to deal with the problem of modern transformation of Confucian ethical values and its content still belongs to the traditional Confucianism. So it should be labeled as the modern neo-Confucianism in the historical sense. In this paper, the author makes a systematic exploration and an evaluation of Ma Yifu's ethical thought. (shrink)

This article mainly discusses the standardization of the translation of personal and place names. In the first section, common problems in the translations of foreign names and Chinese names are summarized. The basic principles of the translation of personal names are discussed and several systems used in the transliteration history of Chinese names are presented in detail. The author also makes a brief review and comments on bilingual dictionaries of personal names published in modern China. In the second (...) section, based on the practices and lessons of translation of place names from and into Chinese, the author refines the basic principles of the standardization of translated place names, summarizes the methods and strategies for place names translation, and sums up the unified translations of certain disputed place names based on the summary of common problems in place names translation in official publications. In the third section, it is believed that the standardization of place names translation depends on the compilation of authoritative dictionaries of place names. In this section, several representative translated dictionaries of place names in late Qing dynasty, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China are reviewed. The author analyses the characteristics of these dictionaries and their contributions to the unification of translated place names and sums up the overall translation history of the standardization of place names in modern China. (shrink)

This book is a grand review of the centurial development of rule of law in China. It covers the most important issues in this area and presents "political constitution," a new interpretative framework that allows the Chinese experience of rule of law to be more fully and correctly expressed. It is especially useful to scholars involved in the study of modern China. The main chapters of this book include: The Constituent Movement in the Late Qing Dynasty; The (...) Xinhai (1911) Revolution; Constitution-making at the Beginning of the Republic of China; The Great Revolution in the 1920s; The Rise of the Party State and its Transition; The Founding of 1949 New China and its Early Constitutional Development; and The Dualist System of Rule of Law in the Reforming Times. (shrink)

The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” Joseph (...) W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies. (shrink)

Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China. By Nadine Amsler. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 258. $95 ; $30.

Inspired by Max Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic, this volume sets out to understand the role and influence of Christianity on overseas Chinese entrepreneurs working in China during its transition from a centrally-planned economy ...

'Transforming Consciousness' develops a wide-ranging and deeply sourced argument that Yogācāra Buddhism played a much more important role in the development of modern Chinese thought than has previously been recognized. It shows how key Chinese thinkers used Yogācāra Buddhism to make sense of and to change the modern world.

In early modern China, natural history and medicine were shifting along with the boundaries of the empire. Naturalists struggled to cope with a pharmacy's worth of new and unfamiliar substances, texts, and terms, as plants, animals, and the drugs made from them travelled into China across land and sea. One crucial aspect of this phenomenon was the early modern exchange between Islamic and Chinese medicine. The history of theriac illustrates the importance of the recipe for the (...) naturalization of foreign objects in early modern Chinese medicine. Theriac was a widely sought-after and hotly debated product in early modern European pharmacology, and arrived into the Chinese medical canon via Arabic and Persian texts. The dialogue between language and material objects was critical to the Silk Road drug trade, and transliteration was ultimately a crucial technology used to translate drugs and texts about them in the early modern world. (shrink)

This paper reflects mainly on three ideas of “political Ruism” in modern China. We first review Mou Zongsan’s idea of “selfnegation of innate moral consciousness良知坎陷,” which embraces universal values and tries to bridge them with Chinese culture. We then re-examine Jiang Qing’s “political Confucianism,” which, while criticizing universal values, attempts to establish a political system based on the Kingly Way. Finally, we discuss the “Kang Youwei-ism康有为主义”, which calls on us to return to Kang Youwei’s idea of state construction (...) and national construction. The three ideas offer some new perspectives into Confucianism, but all turn out unrealistic and unpragmatic. We believe that Confucianism in modern China can still work in both the private sphere and the public sphere, and examine politics from a human, cultural or moral perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Anglophone works on Chinese democracy have tended to build their analyses on assumptions that tradition is either a premodern phenomenon unrelated to China’s democratization process, a hindrance that should be gotten rid of if China is to democratize, a static phenomenon that cannot but appear antiquated with regard to a dynamic, fast-paced modern China, or an object from which modern agents can freely draw. In order to challenge these assumptions, this article (...) suggests that modernity and democracy were translated into a Chinese milieu already ripe with Gadamerian prejudices: prejudices that not only modified the meaning of modernity and democracy, but also provided the very conditions without which modernity and democracy would not have been meaningful or understood at all. Max Ko-wu Huang’s work can contribute to our understanding of the role played by various traditions in the process of translating democracy during the transitional period of modern Chin... (shrink)

본 논문에서는 중국의 근대화 속에서 지식인들이 ‘근대’라는 자기정체성을 찾아가는 시대정신을 모색해보고자 한다. 그들의 세계관에서 근대화는 중국이 서양의 존재를 타자로 받아들이면서 자신을 주체로 새롭게 인식하는 과정이다. 그들은 기존의 전통적 사상과 서구의 사상 사이에 공존하는 괴리감을 어떻게 해소할 것인가 하는 현실적 문제를 고민하였다. 그들은 서구의 사회진화론을 수용하면서 부국강병과 민족생존과 같은 시대적 절박감과 역사적 사명감에 직면하였던 한편, 자유와 평등의 이념 하에서 반봉건주의적 진보성, 교화주의적 계몽성, 반제국주의적 애국심 등을 기치로 내걸으며 變法自强운동, 戊戌政變등을 추진하였다. 특히 강유위는 道義만을 명분으로 하는 봉건제도의 불합리성과 전통적 사고의 질곡을 비판하며 (...) 이른바 大同의 세계 혹은 太平의 경지를 지향하였다. 그의 大同三世論은 升平世의 단계에 있던 중국의 상황에서 사회진화론과 같은 필연적인 역사적 과정에서 이해될 수 있다. 여기에는 전통의 重建과 근대의 轉換의 이중적인 과제가 있다. 전통의 重建이 민족주의의 함양과 관련된다면 근대의 轉換은 국가주의의 고양과 관련된다. 지식인들은 天下의 大同사회의 공동체적 차원에서 민족생존의 민족주의와 국민의식의 국가주의를 추구하였다. 그들은 문명화된 세계에 중국을 끊임없이 새롭게 투사하면서 구국적 애국심과 주체적 민권의식을 발판으로 하여 근대적 국가의 조감도를 그려내고자 하였다. 이러한 근대적 사고는 經世致用의 기조 속에 大同의 민족주의와 文明의 보편주의에 관한 담론을 낳았으며 더 나아가 구미의 열강들과 어깨를 나란히 하려는 中華主義의 극단적 민족주의로 치닫게 하였다. (shrink)

Chinese animation of the beginning of the XXI century shows significant progress. A number of cartoons and animated series have been released. The hypothesis of the study is that their imagery, plots, and artistic features differ from foreign cartoons and gradually acquire a national identity. This process began in the 2000s, and its pace is only increasing, while it arouses interest from foreign studies, including Russian ones. The typological analysis of the images of the characters of famous Chinese cartoons created (...) at the beginning of the XXI century, as well as the analysis of stylistic and artistic features used by the authors to convey the uniqueness of the character, as well as to emphasize its belonging to Chinese culture, is the main problem of the article. The purpose of this research is to study the specifics of modern Chinese cartoon characters, to identify the features of the development process and the formation of their individual traits in accordance with national characteristics. Chinese animators tend to use the language of traditional art, attributes and symbols characteristic of the national culture. An appeal to the analysis of modern cartoon pictures allows us to highlight the main features of animated characters "with Chinese specifics". In addition, it is of interest to compare the features of the formation of images associated with China in foreign animated films and the characteristic features of characters appearing in the works of modern Chinese animators. (shrink)

The object of the study is clothing as a sociocultural phenomenon, a product of material and spiritual cultures. The evolution of clothing is closely related to sociocultural changes in society. The subject of the study is the transformation of clothing in China under the influence of political, economic, social, and aesthetic factors after the beginning of Chinese economic reform and opening up policy. The significant changes have taken place in Chinese clothing, the main of which was the transition from (...) a uniform style of clothing for the whole country to a variety of fashion and styles, as well as the revival of traditional clothing. The transformation in the style and production cycle of clothing in China is based on objective (technology development, market laws, global fashion trends) and subjective reasons (psychology, personal preferences and aesthetic tastes of consumers). There is always a concept behind the behavior in clothes, and the desire for beauty is the main driving force behind the development of clothing. The social psychology of imitation and difference contributes to the spread of fashion trends in clothing. The author's special contribution to the topic is a detailed examination of the impact on the transformation of clothing of political, economic, sociocultural, aesthetic factors, as well as cultural exchanges and folk traditions. The author traces the sequence of fashion trends in China in recent decades. Сontemporary changes in Chinese clothing culture are not limited to simply borrowing Western trends, but are accompanied by the emergence of postmodern ideas and the promotion of the globalization process, which leads not only to the technological and design enrichment of clothing characteristics in China, but also to the growth of cultural awareness and the revivalization of traditional and local cultures. (shrink)

In the broadest sense, this intellectual biography is designed to give insight into the reasons why Western values and institutions failed to take root in the Chinese environment. Three interrelated themes are treated by Professor Duiker: the evolution of the Chinese educational system from the beginning of the 20th century to World War II; the process by which a Chinese intellectual absorbed Western values and attitudes while retaining significant elements of his traditional Confucian world view; the goals of the humanist (...) movement in early republican China and the reasons for its failure. Ts'ai, as first Minister of Education under the 1912 republic, helped to formulate educational policies during an important stage of transition in modern China. Later, as chancellor of Peking University, he was a central figure in the tumultuous events of the May Fourth period. Having been educated traditionally to the doctoral level before studying at a European university, Ts'ai attempted to synthesize the humanist side of the Confucian tradition with the libertarian elements in Western culture. Ts'ai's synthesis was unique but ultimately unsuccessful. Penn State Study No. 41. (shrink)

In the broadest sense, this intellectual biography is designed to give insight into the reasons why Western values and institutions failed to take root in the Chinese environment. Three interrelated themes are treated by Professor Duiker: the evolution of the Chinese educational system from the beginning of the 20th century to World War II; the process by which a Chinese intellectual absorbed Western values and attitudes while retaining significant elements of his traditional Confucian world view; the goals of the humanist (...) movement in early republican China and the reasons for its failure. Ts'ai, as first Minister of Education under the 1912 republic, helped to formulate educational policies during an important stage of transition in modern China. Later, as chancellor of Peking University, he was a central figure in the tumultuous events of the May Fourth period. Having been educated traditionally to the doctoral level before studying at a European university, Ts'ai attempted to synthesize the humanist side of the Confucian tradition with the libertarian elements in Western culture. Ts'ai's synthesis was unique but ultimately unsuccessful. Penn State Study No. 41. (shrink)