Voices from China's Century
Voices from the Chinese Century
The essays translated in this volume, published by Columbia University Press in 2019, are from some of the best minds in China today. The focus of their concerns is China itself: Where has it come from? What is it today? What should it be in the future? The collection is edited by Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua Fogel and the translations include those of the editors, as well as others produced by Western and Chinese graduate students and junior scholars who received training in the larger Reading the China Dream project.
For reviews of the volume, click here, here, and here (this last one is more blurb than review).
The Chinese scholars and public intellectuals translated in this volume rest heavily on history, framed by Gan Yang’s well-known challenge to “integrate the three traditions” of China’s modern history: Confucianism, liberalism, and socialism. They give three clearly different narratives of the same China over the past century to justify their competing visions for the China Dream. In the process they offer a powerful critique not only of Maoism but also of liberal democracy in the 21st century. For the New Confucians the failures of socialism and the depredations of Western “hollowing out of Chinese culture” in the 20th century cry out for a traditional Chinese solution—Confucianism. The same world according to Chinese liberals is one of socialist failure and market success now challenged by the lack of political reform. These challenges cry out for the best political solutions human civilizations have produced, and liberalism has the best track record in modern history. For New Left intellectuals only the Chinese state, as a reformed socialist entity, has the wherewithal to withstand the depredations of neo-Liberal globalization.
It is the disagreements, as well as underlying shared assumptions, of these thoughtful and fractious intellectuals that provides a richer and more complex understanding of China today and its role in our future. We have selected writings that we, the editors, in conjunction with our Chinese colleagues in the PRC, feel capture the diversity of intelligent opinion about just what is, or should be, the “Chinese Dream.”
The volume was published in December 2019 by Columbia University Press and is available for purchase here. Consequently, the texts made available in full on this site have, with some exceptions, been reduced to teasers to help the press reach its commercial objectives. The authors' introduction, one text by Guo Yuhua, and the text by Wang Shaoguang remain available as "advertisements."
Table of Contents
Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua Fogel, "Introduction: Thinking China in the Age of Xi Jinping"
Gan Yang ,“Integrating the Three Traditions”
Rong Jian, “A China Bereft of Thought”
Liu Qing, “Liberalism in Contemporary China: Potential and Perils”
Xu Jilin, “’I am a Child of the Nineteenth Century:’ The Last Twenty years of Wang Yuanhua’s Life”
Guo Yuhua, "The Shadow of Communist Civilization"
Guo Yuhua, "Original Intentions Start with the People"
Cai Xia, "Advancing Constitutional Democracy Should be the Mission of the Chinese Communist Party"
Qian Liqun ,“Mao Zedong and His Era”
Xiao Gongqin, “From Authoritarian Government to Constitutional Democracy: Perspectives on Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms”
Gan Yang, “Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?"
Wang Shaoguang, “Representative Democracy and Representational Democracy”
Sun Ge, “The Significance of Borders”
Chen Lai, “A Century of Confucianism: Looking Back and Looking Forward”
Gan Yang, et.al., “Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism”
Jiang Qing, “Only Confucians Can Make a Place for Modern Women”