China Dream-Chasers
China Dream Chasers is a collection of very recent texts penned by Chinese intellectuals from across the ideological spectrum, chosen and translated by David Ownby. The context is framed by China's spectacular rise to great power status, the West's seeming decline, particularly since 2008, and the remarkable presidency of Xi Jinping. These events came together to suggest to Chinese intellectuals that China's "century of humiliation" was finally truly over, and that China would shortly return to its rightful place at the center of the world. This would be the achievement of Xi Jinping's "China Dream."
Yet what kind of state, culture, or civilization China would be remained an open question; the "China Dream" was at best aspirational, at worst sloganistic. Each text in this collection attempts, in its own way, to provide content for Xi's "China Dream," or criticizes the projects advanced by others. To my mind, these texts are marked by a particular audacity and a particular energy. Many of the ideas expressed will be uncongenial to many readers, but these are the ideas that have captured the attention of China's most prominent establishment intellectuals in the 2010s.
I originally intended to publish these texts as a book, but my publisher would have required that I remove them from my site. For the moment, I choose to leave them here, so what you have before you is a sort of virtual book, a bit harder to use that the published variety, but a lot cheaper, and available on your smartphone...I have yet to write a formal introduction to the volume, but a talk I gave at Chung-Shan University in Kau-hsiung in March of 2019 on "China’s Rise and China’s Thought World: Gan Yang and the Tongsantong Trope," hits most of the high points of what an eventual introduction will say, and serves as a preliminary guide to the translated texts, each of which has its own introduction and contextualization.
Introduction
David Ownby, "China’s Rise and China’s Thought World: Gan Yang and the Tongsantong Trope"
New Confucians
Gan Yang, “Unifying the Three Traditions” (Preface)
Jiang Qing, “Only Confucians Can Make a Place for Modern Women”
New Left
Wang Shaoguang, “Traditional Moral Politics and Contemporary Concepts of Governance”
Wang Hui, “The Economy of Rising China and its Contradictions”
Jiang Shigong, “Philosophy and History: Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping’ Era through Xi’s Report to the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party”
Liberals
Gao Quanxi, “The Political Maturity of Chinese Liberalism”
Xu Jilin, “Modern Politics is Live and Let Live”
Ge Zhaoguang, “If Horses Had Wings : The Political Demands of Mainland New Confucians in Recent Years”