Examining "The end of revolution": a foretaste of Wang Hui’s thought

Wang Hui is a significant contemporary Chinese thinker and a key representative of Chinese New Left thought. This article provides a critical review of some of the themes that emerge from Wang’s The End of Revolution as a means of situating his position in China’s intellectual landscape, with a particular mind to exploring the historicity of Wang’s thought as it informs his views. The essay engages some of the key discursive threads in The End of Revolution and provides a critical overview of Wang’s positions on neoliberalism, the tension between Western articulations of modernity and China’s own self-image

Genetic correlation between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and schizophrenia

A. Palotie on työryhmän Schizophrenia Working Grp Psychiat jäsen.We have previously shown higher-than-expected rates of schizophrenia in relatives of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), suggesting an aetiological relationship between the diseases. Here, we investigate the genetic relationship between ALS and schizophrenia using genome-wide association study data from over 100,000 unique individuals. Using linkage disequilibrium score regression, we estimate the genetic correlation between ALS and schizophrenia to be 14.3% (7.05-21.6; P = 1 x 10(-4)) with schizophrenia polygenic risk scores explaining up to 0.12% of the variance in ALS (P = 8.4 x 10(-7)). A modest increase in comorbidity of ALS and schizophrenia is expected given these findings (odds ratio 1.08-1.26) but this would require very large studies to observe epidemiologically. We identify five potential novel ALS-associated loci using conditional false discovery rate analysis. It is likely that shared neurobiological mechanisms between these two disorders will engender novel hypotheses in future preclinical and clinical studies.Peer reviewe

THE UNRAVELLING OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM: THE LOWER YANGTZE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

Before the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the most compelling ideal that motivated the greatest Chinese scholars was the cultivation of moral perfection. By 1750, however, the heirs of these fervent coteries of Neo-Confucian masters and disciples had become members of a secular academic community, which encouraged, and rewarded with livelihoods, orginal and rigorous critical scholarship. Ch\u27ing dynasty (1644-1911) scholarship represented a new and irreversible transition in traditional Chinese intellectual history. The tradition of evidential research (k\u27ao-cheng ), which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century textual scholars(\u27 )(, ) created, initiated an intellectual crisis from which the imperial Neo-Confucian orthodoxy entrenched in official life never recovered. In my dissertation, I describe the intellectual community in which the Ch\u27ing evidential research movement took hold. One of my principal conclusions is that a unified academic community existed in the Lower Yangtze Region of China before its dissolution during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). Members of this community of scholars were bound together by associations and institutions for the propagation of knowledge. A consensus of ideas about how to find and verify knowledge was the result. My contention is that evidential scholarship was a sum of linguistic practices that revealed rules for the formation of concepts and their modes of connection and coexistence, what Michel Foucault describes as a discourse. Beginning with chapter 2, I evaluate a wide variety of scholarly writings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, outline the nature of the intellectual order within those materials, and finally discuss the social and institutional setting within which those materials were produced. In chapters 3 and 4, in particular, I describe the social and institutional patterns of organization that made a k\u27ao-cheng community of scholars possible. The institutional and intellectual context for the emergence of specialized scholarship in Lower Yangtze urban centers such as Soochow and Yangchow marked what I call the professionalization of academics in late imperial China. In these chapters, the roles of scholarly patronage, academies, libraries, and the publishing industry in the eighteenth century are given special attention. The individual evidential research scholar by the eighteenth century was part of a dynamic and evolving scholarly environment, which I analyze in chapter 5. Through the concentrated efforts of trained specialists, who were bound to the past by building on accumulated knowledge and who systematically employed precise procedures of inquiry, an almost autonomous subsystem of Ch\u27ing society, with its own rubrics of status evolved in the Lower Yangtze Region. Although the academic community upon which the k\u27ao-cheng movement in the Lower Yangtze depended perished during the Taiping Rebellion (described in chapter 6), its intellectual legacy did not. The appeal to empirical methods of exact scholarship initiated the gradual unravelling of the Neo-Confucian tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

THE UNRAVELLING OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM: THE LOWER YANGTZE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

Before the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the most compelling ideal that motivated the greatest Chinese scholars was the cultivation of moral perfection. By 1750, however, the heirs of these fervent coteries of Neo-Confucian masters and disciples had become members of a secular academic community, which encouraged, and rewarded with livelihoods, orginal and rigorous critical scholarship. Ch\u27ing dynasty (1644-1911) scholarship represented a new and irreversible transition in traditional Chinese intellectual history. The tradition of evidential research (k\u27ao-cheng ), which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century textual scholars(\u27 )(, ) created, initiated an intellectual crisis from which the imperial Neo-Confucian orthodoxy entrenched in official life never recovered. In my dissertation, I describe the intellectual community in which the Ch\u27ing evidential research movement took hold. One of my principal conclusions is that a unified academic community existed in the Lower Yangtze Region of China before its dissolution during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). Members of this community of scholars were bound together by associations and institutions for the propagation of knowledge. A consensus of ideas about how to find and verify knowledge was the result. My contention is that evidential scholarship was a sum of linguistic practices that revealed rules for the formation of concepts and their modes of connection and coexistence, what Michel Foucault describes as a discourse. Beginning with chapter 2, I evaluate a wide variety of scholarly writings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, outline the nature of the intellectual order within those materials, and finally discuss the social and institutional setting within which those materials were produced. In chapters 3 and 4, in particular, I describe the social and institutional patterns of organization that made a k\u27ao-cheng community of scholars possible. The institutional and intellectual context for the emergence of specialized scholarship in Lower Yangtze urban centers such as Soochow and Yangchow marked what I call the professionalization of academics in late imperial China. In these chapters, the roles of scholarly patronage, academies, libraries, and the publishing industry in the eighteenth century are given special attention. The individual evidential research scholar by the eighteenth century was part of a dynamic and evolving scholarly environment, which I analyze in chapter 5. Through the concentrated efforts of trained specialists, who were bound to the past by building on accumulated knowledge and who systematically employed precise procedures of inquiry, an almost autonomous subsystem of Ch\u27ing society, with its own rubrics of status evolved in the Lower Yangtze Region. Although the academic community upon which the k\u27ao-cheng movement in the Lower Yangtze depended perished during the Taiping Rebellion (described in chapter 6), its intellectual legacy did not. The appeal to empirical methods of exact scholarship initiated the gradual unravelling of the Neo-Confucian tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries