Ebook: The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

The definitive history of China's philosophical confrontation with modernity, available for the first time in English.

What does it mean for China to be modern, or for modernity to be Chinese? How is the notion of historical rupture—a fundamental distinction between tradition and modernity—compatible or not with the history of Chinese thought?

These questions animate The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, a sprawling intellectual history considered one of the most significant achievements of modern Chinese scholarship, available here in English for the first time. Wang Hui traces the seventh-century origins of three key ideas—"principle" (li), "things" (wu), and "propensity" (shi)—and analyzes their continual evolution up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Confucian scholars grappled with the problem of linking transcendental law to the material world, thought to action—a goal that Wang argues became...