Description
Book SynopsisThis translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s
Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day.
Trade ReviewIt is continually rewarding, offering up new avenues of inquiry and revisiting links between Chinese modernity and the country’s imperial history. Three centuries on from Kangxi, there are still plenty of blanks in the map of modern China. For anglophone readers, this very overdue translation helps us see the lie of the land. -- Alex Monro * Times Literary Supplement *
The present book is an erudite, stimulating, thought provoking, nuanced, but highly condensed overture to Wang’s ambitious macro history of the formation of Chinese intellectual modernity. Sensitive to both continuities and disruptions, Wang engages traditional thought as well as Western and Japanese scholarly discourse… It illuminates 21st-century Chinese discourse and provides ample food for thought for scholars grappling with interpreting modern and premodern Chinese intellectual history. -- C. Schirokauer * Choice *
China from Empire to Nation-State, a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China—and of the non-West in general—than this consistently illuminating and bracing book. -- Pankaj Mishra, author of
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
