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Objective/Context: This article investigates how seven literati of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, whose works deal with geography and world history, interacted and negotiated with Jesuit narratives in Chinese on the "discovery" and evangelization of America. The main objective is to elucidate the differences and similarities between the two sides' perspectives on these events, highlighting the role that the encounter between the universalisms of Confucianism and Christianity played in these interpretations. Methodology: A textual, comparative and historical-contextual analysis is employed, framed by Nicolas Standaert and Pingyi Chu's theoretical perspectives on the Sino-Jesuit encounter as a case of cultural exchange. In it, knowledge was negotiated through the selection of textual elements and the restructuring of conceptual frameworks. In doing so, narratives about the "discovery" and evangelization of America in Chinese works are contrasted with Jesuit descriptions of these events and the contextual factors that determined both the creation of these narratives by the Jesuit mission in China and the reactions of Chinese scholars to them are investigated. Originality: This pioneering study examines the reception of early Chinese accounts of Euro-American contacts. It seeks to contribute to the field of Chinese and global intellectual history by discussing how a foundational event of the European worldview was re-signified from various perspectives by Chinese scholars interested in incorporating the «discovery» narratives into their works and integrating them into the path of Confucian universalism. Conclusions: The narratives about these events were discursive spaces where disputes and convergences between the civilizing projects of Christianity and Confucianism took place. The way in which Chinese scholars integrated them into their works reflects how the transmission of the Christian worldview was subjected to local frameworks that reinforced ethnocentric ideas. Inevitably, this led to the emergence of alternatives to European interpretations of American history in late imperial China. The latter challenged the European ethnocentric gaze, primarily grounded in the "discovery" and evangelization of America, and shows how Chinese scholars used their narratives to defend their civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores one of the great paradoxes of imperial China: the rise of religions that required qijia (family abandonment) in a society that privileged a patriarchal family system. Grounded in the case of Quanzhen Daoism, the article examines representations of qijia in poetry, hagiographies, inscriptions, and plays to explain the distinctive ways in which this nonscriptural tradition of renunciation configured its relationship with families. It demonstrates that there existed ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward the issue of family, particularly that of parents, in different genres of Quanzhen texts. This ambivalence speaks to irreconcilable family-monastery tensions as the Quanzhen order transformed from a local movement with a few ascetic elites to a nationwide monastic order in the early thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century qijia narratives, Quanzhen apologists deployed flexible renderings of filial piety to validate personal and universal salvation—instead of familial salvation—as the principal goal of a Quanzhen monastic career. Neither the Quanzhen ideology nor its monastic institution truly addressed the interests of natural families. As such, the Quanzhen tradition contrasts sharply with the medieval Buddhism and Daoism, whose apologists conceptualized the family-monastery relations to harness the family interests to the needs of the churches. Despite posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal family system, Quanzhen Daoism developed into one of the two major Daoist schools after the thirteenth century. Its success resulted from the Quanzhen order's salvationist contribution to the crumbling northern Chinese society under Mongol conquest, as well as its initiatives producing texts to promote pro-Quanzhen narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the spread of the Bahá'í religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá'í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Bahá'í connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique 'cosmopolitan moment' in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce 'cosmopolitan moments' at specific historical junctures and locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Chronology by the Graz Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein (1676–1732), published in 1729. Since late antiquity, intellectuals have been crafting chronological works with a view to making apparent God's actions in the world. These attempts were primarily based on the Old Testament, which was seen as a historiographical narrative and thus counted as a record of factual truth. New chronographical insights from China, which had been reaching Europe since the beginning of the seventeenth century, contradicted this exegetical tradition, however. Whoever attempted to relate the new findings arriving from China to the Bible had no choice but to give up certain truths in order to save others. Seen in this light, the tight framework of biblical truth led directly to creative hypotheses such as Stöcklein's Chronology, which demonstrated two main shifts in the conceptualizing of universal history: first, Stöcklein emphasized the significance of the Old Reich and therefore decentred his universal history from western Europe to (mainly) Augsburg and Nuremberg; secondly, he envisaged the Far East rather than the Middle East and Europe as the geographical centre of Christian universalism and of the beginning of universal history. One crucial step was his relocation of Paradise to the immediate vicinity of China. Discussing the manifold Buddhist, Muslim and Christian sources with which Stöcklein was playing, I argue that Stöcklein's turned the biblical story of salvation into a Chinese story of salvation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of ideas associated to historical universalism in Roman and Chinese empires. It explores the sociopolitical context and growth of historiography and historical awareness in the countries. It states that an experiment was conducted to examine how the relationship between the world and polity are considered in different written texts. It says that the development of universalistic views during China's Han dynasty and Rome's imperial period were compared.

In this paper the author discusses: (1) the basic characteristics of the concept of Traditional Chinese Systems views, including the concepts of Universalism and unified systems and the concepts of Fundamentalism and Holism systems; (2) the concepts of Pluralistic and local systems embedded in the Philosophy of Scientific Practice and New Empiricism; (3) the necessity of Local Realism to Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology and the significance of social organization and management embedded in the concepts of pluralistic and local systems. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universalism can be religious or secular; within the category of secular universalism, a distinction can be made (especially in China) between universalism focused on 'universality' or the universal validity of certain ideas and universalism focused on 'generality' or the general extension of certain ideas. Within the category of universality-based universalism, 'value universalism' holds one or some values to be universally valid and 'culture universalism' holds a certain culture or a certain way of ranking various values to be universally valid. Within the category of 'value universalism', a distinction can be made between 'dialogue-oriented universalism', which argues for the priority of the right to communication over other rights and 'monologue-oriented universalism', according to which one subject can unilaterally decide what is of universal validity for all. Not only 'monologue-oriented universalism', but also 'dialogue-oriented universalism' can be understood in a Euro-centrist way; there is thus a distinction between West-centrist and non-West-centrist varieties of universalism. The key to avoiding Westcentrist universalism while upholding universalism is to make a distinction between essentialist universalism and constructivist universalism, and to see what is universally shared by all relevant parties as something to be constructed through the process of 'Verkehr' in Marx's sense that is informed by the process of 'Kommunikation' in Habermas's sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a Confucius, universalism and special principle are not in a binary opposition. As a fundamental character of a Chinese, Confucian ethics proposed a synthesis of both, which is termed as Kontextualisierter Universalismus. Culturally, Confucian ethics is the real synthesis of universalism and special principle, which is the embodiment of the fundamental characteristics of Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the end of the Cold War, the international arena has witnessed two concurrent worldwide trends. One is the gradual prevalence of universalism under the banner of human civilization; the other is the gradual revival of nationalism globally under exactly the same heading. Both trends are evident in China, a country which in the twenty-first century is perceived universally as a rising nation. However, does Chinese nationalism necessarily pose a threat to the world? By examining two debates on the Chinese intellectual response towards Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations in the early twenty-first century, this paper investigates the status of Chinese nationalism. It questions whether it is a fixed set of ideas embraced by a solid entity, or whether it possesses multiple layers with dual elements contributing to both security and insecurity internationally. The paper argues that three separate nationalist processes are occurring concurrently but independently of each other: the construction of civic nationalist values; the development of an international relations strategy assigning responsible power to China; and the detection of alleged anti-Chinese conspiracies. The effect of the first two would be to encourage regional peace, and they could offset fervent nationalist expression. A somewhat counter-intuitive result of Chinese nationalism might be that it also becomes a stabilizing force within and outside China's borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the issue of universalism in an age of globalization, taking as its focus the case of China. The philosophical core of the paper is a discussion of the hermeneutical notion of universality, which, the author maintains, is of a nonessentialist nature and is uniquely suited to fostering a "dialogue of civilizations" and to reconciling universal values (e.g., human rights, democracy) with cultural particularity. A discussion of some of the basic notions in Confucian philosophy (Confucian humanism) serves to illustrate the point. The paper is intended as a critique of all forms of cultural relativism ("Asian values" in particular) and as a defense of a global ethics, hermeneutically conceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]