New publication: Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949

2. Juli 2020, von AAI Webmaster

Foto: Brill

We are delighted to announce a new publication edited by Thomas Fröhlich from our department and Axel Schneider from the University of Göttingen: "Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949". 

The book, published in the Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography (Brill), offers a panoramic view of reflections on progress in modern China. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses on progress shape Chinese understandings of modernity and its pitfalls. As this in-depth study shows, these discourses play a pivotal role in the fields of politics, society, culture, as well as philosophy, history, and literature. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Chinese ideas of progress, their often highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism of modernity they offered, opened the gateway for reflections on China’s past, its position in the present world, and its future course. 

This is the full list of contents: 

Introduction: Progress, History, and Time in Chinese Discourses after the 1890s (Thomas Fröhlich)

Part 1: Initial Conceptual Encounters

1 The Chinese Concept of “Progress” (Kai Vogelsang)

2 The Progress of Civilization and Confucianism in Modern East Asia: Fukuzawa Yukichi and Different Forms of Enlightenment (Takahiro Nakajima)

Part 2: Tides of Optimism

3 The Idea of Progress in Modern China: the Case of Yan Fu (Li Qiang)

4 Prospect Optimism in Modern China: the Formation of a Political Paradigm (Thomas Fröhlich)

5 An Anatomy of the Utopian Impulse in Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1890–1940 (Peter Zarrow)

6 The Optimism of Cultural Construction in the 1930s: Wholesale Westernization, Cultural Unit Theory, and Cultural Construction on a Chinese Base (Leigh Jenco)

7 Fantasizing Science: the Idea of Progress in Early Chinese Science Fiction (1905–1920) (Rui Kunze)

Part 3: Margins of Skepticism

8 Critiques of Progress: Reflections on Chinese Conservatism (Axel Schneider)

9 Playing the Same Old Tricks: Lu Xun’s Reflections on Modernity in His Essay “Modern History” (Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik)