Table Of ContentChinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949
Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider - 978-90-04-42652-8
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Leiden Series in
Comparative Historiography
Editors
Axel Schneider
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
VOLUME 13
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lsch
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Chinese Visions of Progress,
1895 to 1949
Edited by
Thomas Fröhlich, University of Hamburg
Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider - 978-90-04-42652-8
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fröhlich, Thomas, 1966- editor. | Schneider, Axel, editor.
Title: Chinese visions of progress, 1895 to 1949 / by Thomas Fröhlich,
Hamburg University ; Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen.
Description: Leiden : Brill, [2020] | Series: Leiden series in comparative historiography, 1574-4493 ;
volume 13 | Includes index. | Summary: “Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 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”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020003862 (print) | LCCN 2020003863 (ebook) |
ISBN 9789004426535 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004426528 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: China—Intellectual life—20th century. | Civilization,
Modern—20th century—Philosophy. | Intellectuals—China—History—20th
century. | China—Civilization—Western influences. | Progress.
Classification: LCC DS775.2 .C4558 2020 (print) | LCC DS775.2 (ebook) |
DDC 951.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003862
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003863
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1574-4493
ISBN 978-90-04-42653-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-42652-8 (e-book)
Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors viii
Introduction: Progress, History, and Time in Chinese Discourses after
the 1890s 1
Thomas Fröhlich
Part 1
Initial Conceptual Encounters
1 The Chinese Concept of “Progress” 43
Kai Vogelsang
2 The Progress of Civilization and Confucianism in Modern East Asia:
Fukuzawa Yukichi and Different Forms of Enlightenment 75
Takahiro Nakajima
Part 2
Tides of Optimism
3 The Idea of Progress in Modern China: the Case of Yan Fu 103
Li Qiang
4 Prospect Optimism in Modern China: the Formation of a Political
Paradigm 132
Thomas Fröhlich
5 An Anatomy of the Utopian Impulse in Modern Chinese Political Thought,
1890–1940 165
Peter Zarrow
6 The Optimism of Cultural Construction in the 1930s: Wholesale
Westernization, Cultural Unit Theory, and Cultural Construction on a
Chinese Base 206
Leigh Jenco
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vi Contents
7 Fantasizing Science: the Idea of Progress in Early Chinese Science Fiction
(1905–1920) 230
Rui Kunze
Part 3
Margins of Skepticism
8 Critiques of Progress: Reflections on Chinese Conservatism 263
Axel Schneider
9 Playing the Same Old Tricks: Lu Xun’s Reflections on Modernity in
His Essay “Modern History” 292
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
Index 319
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for
funding the International Consortium for the Research in the Humanities: Fate,
Freedom, and Prognostication. Strategies of Coping with the Future in East Asia
and Europe (at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). Without the manifold
support provided by the International Consortium, this volume would not have
been published. The present book chapters, with the exception of the intro-
duction and the chapter by Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, were presented
twice at conferences held in Erlangen, and thereafter once again thoroughly
revised.
We are indebted to Jon Wilcox for English editing, and Magdalena Szpindler
for editing and formatting the references, and we wish to thank two anony-
mous peer reviewers whose comments have helped us a lot in preparing this
volume for publication.
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Contributors
Thomas Fröhlich
is Professor of Sinology at the University of Hamburg. He was Vice-Director of
the International Consortium for the Research in the Humanities: Fate, Freedom,
and Prognostication. Strategies of Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe
(University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). His research focuses on modern Chinese
philosophy, political thought, and intellectual history. He has recently authored
Tang Junyi. Confucian Philosophy and the Challenge of Modernity (Brill, 2017).
Rui Kunze
is currently a DFG-funded research fellow at the University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg. Her research interests lie in Chinese literature and cultural history
since the late 19th century. She is the author of Struggle and Symbiosis: The
Canonization of the Poet Haizi and Cultural Discourses in Contemporary China
(projektverlag, 2012).
Li Qiang
currently is Professor of Political Science at Peking University, China. His main
areas of teaching and research are political philosophy, modern Western liber-
alism, and political thought in late 19th and earlier 20th century China.
Leigh Jenco
is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and asso-
ciate editor of the American Political Science Review. She is the editor, most
recently, of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford
University Press, forthcoming) and author of Changing Referents: Learning
Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Takahiro Nakajima
is currently Professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He is
now Vice-Director of the East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts (University
of Tokyo) and Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Asian Studies
(Cambridge University Press). His research interests focus on Chinese phi-
losophy, Japanese philosophy and comparative philosophy. He has recently
authored Language qua Thought (Iwanami, 2017).
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Contributors ix
Axel Schneider
currently is Professor of Modern Sinology at the University of Göttingen. He
was founding director of the Centre of Modern East Asian Studies at said uni-
versity. His research interests cover modern Chinese intellectual history, and
the history of historiography and historical thinking in China.
Kai Vogelsang
is Professor of Sinology at the University of Hamburg and co-editor of the jour-
nal Oriens Extremus. He has published widely on Chinese culture and history,
focussing especially on historical semantics of pre-Qin and late Qing China.
His latest monograph is Shangjun shu: Schriften des Fürsten von Shang, 2017.
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
is Professor of Sinology at the University of Vienna since 2002, specialized on
Chinese historiography, PRC history, East Asian History, and memory issues
related to WW II in East Asia, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution.
Researching Lu Xun has accompanied the above-mentioned research from its
very beginning.
Peter Zarrow
is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses
primarily on modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history; his most
recent monograph is Educating China: Knowledge, Society, and Textbooks in a
Modernizing World, 1902–1937 (2015). Zarrow’s current project is a comparative
examination of national heritage in Europe and Asia.
Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider - 978-90-04-42652-8
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Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider - 978-90-04-42652-8
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