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Between 1916 and 1918, a group of Chinese intellectuals opened a school in Paris for Chinese workers who came to Europe in aid of the Allied cause. One of them, Cai Yuanpei, created a textbook based on lectures he gave at the school, which included chapters on moral and intellectual topics. This article focuses on two of these chapters – History and Geography – and situates them within the context of Chinese modern history, curricular and pedagogical debates in mainland China, and the history of textbook publication at the time. In doing so, I argue that Cai Yuanpei utilised these chapters to instil critical thinking skills among workers in a pedagogical move that, while consistent with contemporary discussions on the goals of education, was nevertheless unique in the context of other contemporary approaches to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on semi-structured interviews with Tibetan teachers in Qinghai Province in Northwest China, this article explores how the teachers, who hold subject positions as pedagogical professionals and local intellectual elites, understand the value and implications of education for Tibetan people, and how they navigate their profession in the local education system. Findings show that the teachers demonstrate strong professional commitments towards the development of Tibetan society, which embodies an entanglement of knowledge and skills acquisition, Tibetan cultural and language preservation, and selective transformation of value and behaviourial orientations among students as well as parents. Firstly, the teachers are committed to students' acquisition of school knowledge and skills which they believe would lead to better socio-economic outcomes for individuals and their families. Secondly, the teachers, especially the Tibetan language teachers, elaborated on the importance of education and their professional roles in transmitting Tibetan culture and language. Finally, the teachers attempt to make students motivated and competent to cope with rising educational and social competition, and make parents more supportive of and involved in school education. These findings show that the Tibetan teachers play crucial roles in the socio-economic and cultural transformations and development of Tibetan society in China, and shed light on their active engagement with modernisation discourses and projects. The paper also contributes to domestic and international scholarly discussions on teachers' work and professional roles, education for ethnic minorities, education in developing contexts, and ethnic minorities' engagement with modernisation (or similar processes such as globalisation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass persuasion is crucial to politics, and sophisticated leaders utilize political persuasion to influence citizens' attitudes and emotions, alter their behaviors, and solicit regime support. In recent decades, a variety of actors have engaged in mass persuasion on China's internet. Using online ethnography and archival research, this study examines a newly emerged but less studied group—pro-regime intellectuals and their online mass persuasion strategies. First, we find that pro-regime intellectuals act as outspoken critics of the West to promote China-centric theories by utilizing their academic knowledge and reasoning. Meanwhile, given their close government connections, they stand as intermediaries between the state and society to channel public discontent and articulate public policy. Furthermore, they proactively adapt to cyberculture by interacting and cultivating close bonds with netizens, as well as by collaborating with platforms to attract public attention. By deciphering this set of mass persuasion strategies, this article contributes to our understanding of how pro-regime intellectuals' digital mass persuasion helps maintain the state's discursive hegemony, which facilitates regime resilience in the era of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores pre-modern Chinese intellectuals' identity construction through the choice of self-referring forms in their letters home. Based on a case study of Hu Shih's letters home, it categorizes the self-referring forms he used and self-identities he constructed, and further investigates the underlying sociocultural factors. It shows that Hu Shih employed four categories of self-referring forms, namely first-person pronouns, kinship terms, names, nicknames, and pen names, and appositive expressions. With these forms of self-reference, he constructed himself as a kin member, an independent person, and a scholar. Hu's construction of the first self-identity might have been influenced by the traditional family ethics and ideology prevalent within Chinese social structure, whereas that of the other two could be ascribed to the emerging social changes at the historical turning point, and scholarly principles. The study provides a new perspective for understanding traditional Chinese intellectuals' letters home in the pre-modern society of China. • Traditional Chinese intellectuals constructed varied self-identities in their letters home. • They employed various self-referring forms for self identity construction. • Their identity construction had communicative and sociocultural underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines literary and cinematic representations of ethnic frontiers in China in the 1980s to illustrate how they serve to express intellectuals' different views of China's sociopolitical condition, especially ultra-leftist history and the burgeoning market economy. Works under examination include Zhang Nuanxin's Sacrificed Youth, Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women, Tashi Dawa's "A Soul in Bondage," Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief, and Zhang Chengzhi's The Black Steed. These different discourses of ethnic frontiers contest with each other, reflecting intellectuals' disagreement over how to understand China's past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Rise and Fall of the EAST" by Yasheng Huang explores the longevity of China's autocratic political system and its potential decline. Huang argues that the keju, an examination system used to select administrators, is the central pillar of Chinese autocracy. The keju homogenized thinking and produced standardized human capital that helped entrench autocratic rule. However, Huang also suggests that the keju's monopoly on intellectual elites stifled innovation and made China a "state without a society." The book also examines how the Communist Party of China continues to prioritize control over dynamism, potentially hindering technological advancement. Overall, "The Rise and Fall of the EAST" offers a unique and insightful perspective on Chinese history and governance. [Extracted from the article]

The translation of Chinese literature brought Mao Zedong thought and the Chinese revolutionary spirit to France in the 1960s, giving rise to the development of French Maoism. The translation conducted by French left-wing intellectuals focused on Mao's literary works and other left-wing revolutionary literature, which encouraged French avant-garde writers to project an image of idealized "Maoist China" onto the land of France, with an ambition to promote social and political reforms at home. Utopian fantasies about Chinese literature and politics drove the development of French Maoism, but the disintegration of spontaneous Maoist organizations and the trips to China allowed pro-Maoist intellectuals to recognize their idealized misinterpretation of China gradually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an exploratory qualitative study that investigated a group of Chinese school teachers' imaginaries of intellectuals and self-perceived experiences of being an intellectual. The study was informed by the perspectives of critical pedagogy, that is, to transform technician-like teachers to organic, transformative, or society-involved intellectuals with an activist vision and emancipatory commitment. The findings were generated from textual analysis of in-depth interviews. Chinese teachers tended to distance teaching from their imagined intellectual work, which was deemed value-free and prestigious. Additionally, they rarely regarded themselves as critically engaged agents committed to challenging the oppressive structure in education. Their unreflexive acceptance of the intellectual-teacher divide and their depoliticised stance have largely been shaped by the instrumental approach of education, the pleasure-driven cultural industry, and the unique ideological landscape in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of my paper is that higher education in China is going through a process of totalitarianization and democratization at the same time. On the one hand there are organizational controls and ideological indoctrination of students and cooptation of the faculty by the Party-state. On the other hand, there are democratic breakthroughs on the part of both students and professors. Whatever happens in the ivory tower inevitably affects what happens outside of it. Whether the Party-state is going in the direction of totalitarianism or democracy depends on the result of the tug-of-war between the forces of totalitarianization and democratization in both state and society. My analysis is based on an examination of the available data in research from a perspective of the sociology of higher education. I hope that a better understanding of what happens at the university and the role of higher education in China's development will help all the stakeholders of higher education in making wiser policies and practical decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite many studies on Chinese representations of the European Union (EU), limited attention has been given to how this is shaped by the EU's trade policy. This article considers recent developments in EU trade policy, in the context of China's rise as an economic power and the EU's labelling of China as a systemic rival. Using a reversed analytical framework of actorness, this article shows how the EU's trade policies are represented by the Chinese official media and intellectual elites. Our thematic analysis centres on these two types of Chinese social actors' discourses about EU trade from January 2013 to July 2021. The findings reveal that their representations of the EU's trade actorness highlight (i) the EU's importance with regard to China's competition with the US, (ii) the EU's decreasing normative attractiveness for China due to its institutional and ideational incapability, and (iii) China's positive expectations for EU-China relations in the future with China's own active efforts. This research also contributes a nuanced approach in analysing the relevance of Chinese social actors' representations for China's foreign policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of medical experts have become famous overnight in China since the outbreak of COVID-19. This research investigates four representative Chinese scientists by employing search analytics of the Baidu index (from December 2019 to May 2020) and content analysis of answers and commentaries on the Zhihu website (from January 2020 to May 2020). We find that the four scientists present different images and spark unprecedented publicity. In particular, the key to the transformation from scientists into public intellectuals is to demonstrate moral responsibility in public images, or to realize humorous and effective communication with the public. The birth of celebrity scientists has not only reshaped the public's traditional perception of scientists but also played a crucial role in the governance of pandemic risks by guiding the public's behavior and offering scientific ways to cope with risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistics in modern China was transplanted from the West. Driven by a wave of Western learning in the late Qing Dynasty, the statistical works translated into Chinese consisted of two main categories: firstly, the statistical yearbooks of various countries translated directly from English; secondly, the statistical works translated by Japanese scholars from Japanese, who translated the English word statistic as tokei, or as political table, notation, tabulation or comprehensive calculation, which was later transferred from Japan to China. The translation and publication of the Japanese-translated statistics works marked the beginning of modern statistics in China. On the basis of the translation of Western statistics, Chinese scholars began to explore the compilation of a variety of statistical handouts for the use of teaching in the new style of schools . The early intellectual elites' perception and acceptance of modern Western statistical knowledge was not simply the infiltration and transplantation of the other, but a complex process of localization and reproduction involving both Western cultural transmitters and local recipients With the widespread establishment of new style of schools and the gradual formation of the seven disciplines, statistics took its place in the new school system and gradually grew into an independent modern discipline in China [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using recently published personal correspondence and a diary (supplemented by camp gazetteers, recollections, etc.), this article attempts to examine the experiences and inner world of Liu Yuxuan, an intellectual persecuted in 1950s China, during his internment in a reeducation-through-labor (laojiao) camp—his activism in ideological remolding, his perspectives on himself and his campmates, his wife's role in his redemption, and some practices of and conditions in the Shandong First Laojiao Institution. While recent scholarship has noted the presence of relatively benevolent laojiao camps in the Mao Zedong era, this article shows what reeducation was like for a single individual. It also shows that, for certain types of victims of the Chinese Communist Party's political campaigns, reeducation involved both genuine efforts for transformation and pragmatic concerns regarding surviving laojiao. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "Pan-Asianism" has its roots in the ideas of the Japanese scholar Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), who argued that Asia (defined as China, India, and Japan) were long bound by common civilizational ties sundered by colonialism and would rise together once more in anti-West, anti-colonial regeneration, as "Asia Is One." Here too, the earlier facade of amity faded with a reversal in China to Sino-centric perspectives that envisioned post-colonial Asia as a China-dominated political order. Some of the Indian activists nurtured the possibilities of Japan-China-India Asian unity and continued to see Japan as a friend and liberator from British rule after the start of World War II. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores narratives on the People's Republic of China created by intellectuals of the New Left in Uruguay during the 1950s and 1960s. The Chinese Revolution inspired new interest and began a period of exchange of ideas, publications, and people between Latin America and China, especially among leftists. However, historiography mostly focused on the impacts of the Cuban Revolution in the formation of the New Left in Latin America and has so far downplayed the role of Asian and African experiences in this process. The article includes China in the Uruguayan debates and argues that the crisis faced by the country during the period allowed leftists to perceive it as a possible inspiration for the transformation they sought. Furthermore, the crisis in international communism caused by the Sino-Soviet split opened the possibility of China being perceived as an experience distinct from the Soviet Union. This left had an ambiguous relationship with China marked by international and internal factors, and the operation to approximate the two countries was complex. It was viable because leftists interpreted the Chinese Revolution according to categories that were disseminated, such as antiimperialism, development and Third Position/Third World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the 21st century, China has leveraged the international environment in its favour to achieve a spectacularly rapid rise, a success that Chinese strategic policymakers attribute in part to 'seizing the strategic window of opportunity'. How has China perceived the international environment and shaped the narrative of its macro-strategy? What impact has it had on China and the world? The article explores the evolution of the strategic narrative of the 'window of opportunity' in three stages since the 21st century and explores its impact in terms of quantity and keyword mapping by analysing the narrative texts of China's 'discourse coalition' (government, official media and intellectual elites). The study found that China's macro-strategic narrative is primarily driven by the official political and semi-official intellectual elites and places a premium on domestic political persuasion rather than external displays of strategic intent. It combines classical and modern philosophical thinking and methodology with the two core objectives of 'maintaining peace' and an 'economic priority'. Over 20 years, the trend of narrative production of the 'strategic opportunity period' has shown a concentrated emergence and fluctuating decline, and its narrative elements have been enriched, interlinked and aligned with the narrative of the CPC's core policies. The narrative of the 'strategic opportunity period' has been a powerful force in building domestic legitimacy, guaranteeing partial fulfilment of strategic objectives and offering lessons for other countries to learn from. Inevitably, the narrative faces a number of dilemmas and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joan Robinson's infatuation with Mao's China remains the most controversial episode of the Cambridge economist's life. Drawing on the literatures on observation in science and economics, and economists' travels, we aim to overcome the dichotomy between Robinson as a political pilgrim and Robinson as a development economist. Instead, we take a closer look at her observation practices, her literary choices, and her position within different political and intellectual communities. The structure of the article is quasi chronological: each trip to China is both described in its own right and treated as an entry point to shed light on a particular aspect of Robinson's engagement with the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in the writing of village minsuzhi, reflecting a growing awareness of the importance of traditional culture in the development of Chinese rural society. Contemporary scholars should carry on the traditions represented by the ancient intellectual elite, such as “fighting for the people” and “transforming customs with rituals.” They should also promote writing minsuzhi based on an accurate knowledge and expression of tradition by combining scholars’ perspectives and the local villagers’ perspectives. Doing so will help promote contemporary village revitalization strategies and contribute to the development of local societies. Practical village minsuzhi writing should also be part of a theoretical discourse about the folk expressions and inheritance mechanisms of Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper points out, as the conditions of knowledge in the post-Cold War era evolve, the "de-Cold Warization" of the understanding of China has become an intellectual topic of regional significance, so as the concern, brought by such historical juncture, of the Debate on Chinese Social History and within which the reflection and commentary of (the work of) Hu Qiuyuan, who is viewed as an intellectual in the middle of the political spectrum. Hu Qiuyuan's intellectual reflection was different from the official historical narrative of the Chinese Communist Party that succeeded it, as the 1930s was actually a time of great intellectual altercation. Back then, the Kuomintang, the Communist Party, the Trotskyist, and the others co-existed and interacted with each other, even pushing the CCP to alter its course of the revolutions. Specifically, because the centrists were not contained by the logic of exclusivity of other political positions, they were able to criticize the theoretical practice of other forms of dogmatism and represented the whole-of-society and the subjectivity of national interests. Moreover, Hu Qiuyuan, following the tradition of the centrists in the Debate of Social History, unfolded a theory of anti-imperialist, Third Worldist and "transcendent advancedism" (chaoyue qianjinlun). As such, Hu Qiuyuan's intellectual history might implicate the direction for the "de-Cold War" of the understanding of China and have a positive meaning in the inter-referential system of knowledge in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the court was going through a serious crisis caused by Taiping Rebellion, different forces mentioned above made conscious moves to interpret the court gazette to their advantage. Eighteenth-century readers digested edicts and memorials thoroughly and regarded the court gazettes as textbooks sharing statecraft knowledge, while readers in the nineteenth century cared more about personnel change. However, Mokros discovers the significance of gazettes as a unique channel through which political and intellectual elites experienced the Qing dynasty and its government. [Extracted from the article]

From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati's scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China's scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati's scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most distinctive features of Chinese Communist Party governance is the frequent deployment of work teams to conduct campaigns, implement policies and troubleshoot crises. An underappreciated aspect of work-team operations from Land Reform to the present has been the active participation of educated intellectuals as key intermediaries between central leaders and grassroots society. Serving in effect as "missionaries" of the Party, intellectual work-team members function as trained "ritual specialists" in carrying out their appointed mission. Although work teams are often not the most efficient or effective means of governance, the impact of work-team experience on team members themselves is consequential. Employing quasi-religious practices designed to promote the ideological incorporation of intellectuals, work teams have helped to forestall the emergence in China of an alienated class of dissidents like those whose criticisms eroded the legitimacy of Communist regimes elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western missionaries working for the proselytization of Christianity during the early twentieth century were predominantly representatives of a new worldview that put scientific objectives on a par with the aim of converting the Chinese to their faith. Conventional wisdom stipulates that the 1920s brought about a sea change in public attitudes, transforming the missionaries' perceived role in China, as well as in the colonized world, into "agents of imperialism." This article posits that this may well have been the case within the ranks of a radicalizing and ideologically reorienting intellectual elite. However, the majority of the population within the Republic of China held a variety of views, from deep-rooted suspicion ("Western clerics as alien magicians") to high esteem ("clerics as medical experts"). The May Fourth Movement's axiom of a monolithic, "patriotic," and "scientific" opposition to the Western missionaries thus needs to be replaced by a more nuanced interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic 'main melody' plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play's focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luther was first recognized in China in the first half of the nineteenth century. Missionaries and Chinese intellectuals formed the two routes publicizing his work and his ideas in China. However, Luther's reception in China was not a holistic copy from the West, but a reshaping process which was greatly influenced by the context of Chinese history and culture. This article explores how Luther was accepted and how his image developed within this historical context from 1840 to the present day, namely how he was perceived as a negative 'divider,' Catholic 'evil destroyer' and Protestant 'great reformer,' a positive 'great reform model,' and an 'enemy of the working and peasant classes.' Today a multiple, tri-dimensional, and more comprehensive perspective on Luther exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the growing role of think tank experts in Chinese media coverage on international issues and determines the degree to which voices in this spectrum diverge from each other as well as the official line espoused by China's central media organs. It combines a large-sample sentiment analysis of commentaries published by three major institutes that have developed significant public profiles with an in-depth discussion of selected pieces written by especially prolific experts. Based on the results, I argue that Chinese expert commenters sometimes enrich media coverage and show a substantial variety in opinions among them, but prevailing political constraints, skewed incentives, and a slanted media environment keep them from realizing their full potential as public intellectuals. This limits their usefulness both for improving policy outcomes and for managing public expectations about China's rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A work of digital scholarship, this essay presents the discovery of archival data obtained from unpublished correspondence written by American novelist Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973). Using digital tools, our project rendered and analyzed a keyword database in order to identify and measure the keyword "China" in relation to other value‐laden collocations—such as country, friend, and people—which Buck promulgated widely in her role as public intellectual and China expert for her time. Buck was never able to return to China in person. Even so, the globalized values attributed to "China" in her letters remained meaningful touchstones for her philanthropy, activism, and social commentary in the United States in her lifetime, personally and professionally, as she urged greater American recognition of China's emergence prior to and during the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When China was facing the dire consequence of being sliced up by foreign powers, the US proposed the "Open Door Policy" that asked its peers to preserve China's territorial integrity while sharing their interest in China equally among them. It examines the impact of the postwar settlement on China in the early twentieth century, centering on the dubious role of US President Woodrow Wilson in his dealings of US-China relations. Incidentally, when World War II broke out, Hu Shi was appointed by Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), the leader of China who was then strongly backed by the US, to be China's ambassador to the US. US-China relations: Returning to the past or forging the future?. [Extracted from the article]

Recent scholarship on transnational left-feminist activism during the Cold War often focuses on north-south or east-west connections, more rarely exploring transpacific, south-south forms of engagement. This article unearths a revealing episode in internationalism and south-south solidarity by studying the Cuban left's Hands Off Korea campaign (1950–1951), a protest movement against the Korean War in which women played crucial roles as both intellectual authors and foot soldiers. In particular, the article explores the important role played by two members of the Cuban affiliate of the pro-Soviet Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Edith García Buchaca and Candelaria Rodríguez. Their experiences traveling to China and North Korea (respectively) and their insertion into global left-feminist networks, facilitated by the WIDF, helped them cast war, revolution, and decolonization as "women's issues." These conceptual links inspired the Hands Off Korea campaign and help to explain its surprising success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early twentieth-century China, as with other post-imperial states, faced the challenge of creating a nation encompassing different social groups and cultures. How to identify ethnic groups living in the borderlands and generate nationwide social cohesion became a fundamental question that concerned multiple intellectual communities. This article traces the formation of two approaches to ethnicity—ethnology and sociology—at that time. These two approaches, configuring "ethnic differences" in dissimilar ways, were received differently by the public. In the end, the ethnological approach prevailed and the sociological approach was marginalized. This outcome exemplifies a possible hierarchy of knowledge, but also involves the politics of knowledge. This article shows that the disparate visions of "ethnic others" were produced by intellectuals differently positioned within the social context of post-imperial China. The positionalities of these disciplines explain much of their intellectual alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These models could serve as tentative starting points for scholars wishing to extend Lei's analysis into subsequent periods of China's modern history. The second introductory chapter, "Violence and Its Antidotes: Theorizing Modern Chinese Masculinities", casts a wide net in gathering the materials from which Lei will construct her own theoretical apparatus. [Extracted from the article]

This paper aims to highlight the increasing value of Joseph Nye's concept of soft power in East Asia by observing the actions of China and Japan in Thailand. The two major powers are trying to gather sociocultural and political resources towards improved economic relations and collaborations, while mostly detaching from ideological promotion. This article gathers opinions from "intellectual elites" to assess how the two countries understand soft power in action while outlining their main objectives, strategies, and impact. Although China's reputation is gradually improving, the country seems to be playing a risky game where admiration for its economic prowess and skepticism towards its opaque methods are equally present, resulting in a precarious position. Japan's image is still positive and stable, but its safe‐playing stance seems to reflect the geopolitical status‐quo and could be a missed opportunity to emerge as the third option beyond China and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roles played by intellectuals in Chinese society were transformed over the course of the twentieth century and continue to evolve rapidly today. Professionalization has been twinned with marginalization, yet the voices of intellectuals reverberate in China in a way that they do not, for example, in the United States. This essay discusses the following works. Ge Zhaoguang, What is China? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History. Trans. Michael Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. 201 pp. $41.00 (cloth). | Els van Dongen, Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 276 pp. $99.99 (cloth). | Sebastian Veg, Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals. Global Chinese Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 352 pp. $65.00 (cloth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the food discourse elaborated by Chinese intellectuals in the Song period (960–1279) and puts forward a hypothesis concerning its social function. Starting from the Bourdieusian idea that different consumption styles support different visions of the social order, I first define luxurious eating and describe its social diffusion in Song. I then document and analyze the food ideology of frugality, characterized by an emphasis on simple cooking and naturalness as well as by a form of controlled hedonism which I call "Epicurean." Finally, I offer a sociological interpretation of this food ideology, which I understand as an expression of Song intellectuals' cultural capital: the scholars euphemistically took position against luxurious eating and the "temporal" (i.e. economic capital dominated) vision of the social order it signified; through the ideology of frugality, they supported an alternative, "spiritual" vision of society in which status is based on culture rather than wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jun Lei's monograph seeks to address this with a focus on male intellectual discourse on masculinity from the 1890s to the 1930s, a period when stereotypes of the effeminate Chinese man developed into a source of consternation for many. Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s-1930s ISBN 9789888528745 That the nation-building project of the late Qing and early Republican era was distinctly male-centred is a fact often acknowledged, but the implications of this fact in terms of concepts of masculinity are rarely explored. [Extracted from the article]

As a presumed bastion of the Enlightenment values that support a critical intelligentsia, the university is often regarded as both the bedrock and beneficiary of liberal democracy. By contrast, authoritarian regimes are said to discourage higher education out of fear that the growth of a critical intelligentsia could imperil their survival. The case of China, past and present, challenges this conventional wisdom. Imperial China, the most enduring authoritarian political system in world history, thrived in large part precisely because of its sponsorship of a form of higher education closely tied to state interests. Although twentieth-century revolutions brought fundamental change to Chinese politics and pedagogy, the contemporary party-state also actively promotes higher education, cultivating a mutually advantageous state-scholar nexus and thereby reducing the likelihood of intellectual-led opposition. As in the imperial past, authoritarian rule in China today is buttressed by a pattern of educated acquiescence, with academia acceding to political compliance in exchange for the many benefits conferred upon it by the state. The role of educated acquiescence in enabling Chinese authoritarianism highlights the contributions of a cooperative academy to authoritarian durability and raises questions with prevailing assumptions that associate the flourishing of higher education with liberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, a considerable number of Chinese intellectuals were reluctant to live under Communist rule. They began their self-exile and the search for a new home outside China. Many travelled to places on China's periphery such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. Others continued their journey and finally settled down in Southeast Asia and North America. Sojourning abroad, most of these self-exiled intellectuals still kept a close eye on Chinese politics and society. They were eager to promote their political ideal for a liberal-democratic China in the overseas Chinese communities. However, they were at the same time facing the challenge of assimilation into local society. This article traces the journey of the self-exiles in the 1950s and 1960s from Hong Kong to Southeast Asia and North America. It examines several representative figures and studies their activities in their new place of settlement. It argues that, although the self-exiles largely maintained a strong commitment to the future of their homeland, they varied in their degree of assimilation into their new homes. Age was not a key factor in their decision to adapt to the local community. Instead, the existence of a politically and economically influential Chinese population played a more important role in such a decision. Intellectuals who lived in Hong Kong or Southeast Asia were more willing to adjust their life to the locality, while those who went to North America were less attached to the local society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent Chinese scholarship on international politics, in particular those which emphasizes a "relational" approach to understanding the nature and practice of world politics. Espoused by prominent Chinese international relations scholar Qin Yaqing, relational scholarship--I argue--is inclined to view individuals more dimly and the need for institutional arrangements that will safeguard group (and societal) solidarity. Hence relationality scholarship finds a sympathetic audience among Chinese intellectuals who place an emphasis on managing complex relationships in a community as a result of China's diversity. This article will map some of the key ideas of relational scholarship and highlight its strengths and weaknesses as a theoretical framework to understanding international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Lu Xun 魯迅 and Zhou Zuoren 周作人 have repeatedly given public discourses on "opposing the elders," in reality, they are unable to completely break with "oldness" culture. What is more, they are afraid of the "evils of oldness" and fascinated by the "charms of oldness"; that is the difference between them and the "new youths." Chinese culture has a profound tradition of respecting the aged and even aestheticizes and ideologizes "oldness." However, in modern China, facing national crisis, intellectuals are filled with the desire for "rejuvenation." While the Zhou brothers are participating in this trend, they can also transform traditional resources and separately construct ways of thinking about "oldness" to confront the youths. Finally, this paper explores the Zhou brothers' development processes and internal contradictions and, in doing so, illuminates the spiritual world of the May Fourth era literati. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in the New Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting the intellectual landscape in terms of a "New Culturalists vs. the rest" divide. In this stratagem, those who later became "the conservatives" were lumped together for dissenting from the New Culture movement and largely defined by who they were not. Historiographically, the establishment of this polarity scheme sidelined alternative mappings of the intellectual scene. Drawing on the case of the Critical Review (1922–1933)—a journal of "cultural conservatism"—and its polemics against the New Culture, this essay explores one such alternative mapping that grouped "conservative" thinker Liang Shuming (1893–1988) with the New Culturalists. Taking this paradigm as one of many that existed before the mid-1920s, the essay discusses the juxtaposition of multiple schemes of grouping as a strategy for superseding the polarity mode of classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recent decades, historians of modern East Asia generally considered Asianism to be an imperialistic ideology of militant Japan. Although Japanese expansionists certainly used the term and its concept in this way in the 1930s and 1940s, earlier proponents of Asianism looked upon it as a very real strategy of uniting Asian nations to defend against Western imperialism. Showing that Chinese intellectuals considered different forms of Asianism as viable alternatives in the early days of the Republic of China, this article examines a number of discussions of Asianism immediately following the 1911 Revolution. Concentrating on newspaper articles and speeches by intellectuals Ye Chucang and Sun Yat-sen, I show the international aspirations of the Guomindang elite at this crucial point in the construction of the Chinese nation. Despite the dominance of discourse on the nation state, these intellectuals advocated different Asianist programmes for strategic purposes within the first two years of the Republic, dependent on their very different relationships with Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Corrected Interpretations of the Five Classics (Wujing zhengyi) is a surprisingly neglected source for the study of medieval Chinese intellectual history. Often considered more of a political performance than an intellectual one, the series has been charged with heterogeneity in its attempt to put an end to the intellectual disputes of the period of division and to craft an orthodoxy for the nascent Tang dynasty. This paper will show, however, that the Zhengyi subcommentaries do articulate a coherent intellectual position with regard to a set of crucial questions about the cosmos, the ancient sages, and the culture that they inaugurated. Repurposing xuanxue arguments about the inherent obscurity of the dao and the cosmos, the Zhengyi argues that most of us cannot understand the source of normative values, and that therefore our only recourse is to limit our intellectual presumptions and follow the models provided by the ancient Sage Kings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To read Wang Xuedian's Chronology of Twentieth-Century Chinese Historiography is to embark on a voyage through 100 years of China's intellectual history. Every major debate undertaken by Chinese intellectuals since 1900 is represented in the events, protagonists, and key publications described in the work's 1,953 pages. These debates sometimes anticipated political turmoil, often accompanied political change, and in times of crisis reflected fierce political struggle. A close reading of the four volumes tells the reader a lot about continuity and change in the development of an elite culture of modernity in China that, much in continuation of the past, defines itself by its history and historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the emphasis on inner self-cultivation as daoxue, in connection to a study by professor James T. C. Liu used the phrase China turning inward to define the shift from Northern Song to Southern Song intellectual traditions. The author mentions the early usage of daoxue before the Song and the origins of daoxue. The author notes that the term daoxue had already been used by Song intellectuals before the Qingyuan Proscription.