Histories of thought and comparative political theory: the curious thesis of "Chinese origins for Western knowledge," 1860-1895

How is cultural otherness any different from the historical otherness already found in our existing canons of thought? This essay examines an influential Chinese conversation that raised a similar question in struggling with its own parochialism. Claiming that all “Western” knowledge originated in China, these Chinese reformers see the differences presented by foreign knowledge as identical to those already authorizing innovation within their existing activity of knowledge-production. Noting that current academic theory-production treats the otherness of past authors in a similar way, I argue that we must broach something like a China-origins claim if we are to see typically marginalized (“non-Western”) thought as part of what disciplines our thought, rather than serves simply as its target of inclusion. Doing so, we blur self/foreign binaries and enable future innovation of thought on radically new terms

What can a science fiction blockbuster teach us about China's worldview?

Professor Leigh Jenco shares her insights about the recent film screening and panel discussion of The Wandering Earth 2 at the British Film Institute

Overlapping histories, co-produced concepts: imperialism in Chinese eyes

Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term "empire"should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states

Can the Chinese nation be one? Gu Jiegang, Chinese Muslims, and the reworking of culturalism

This article examines how the classicist and folklorist Gu Jiegang, in conversation with his Hui (Chinese Muslim) colleagues at the Yugong study society and journal (published 1934– 1937), theorized the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu) as an internally plural and openended political project, to resist homogenizing claims by both Japanese imperialists and the ruling Chinese Nationalist party under Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s. Echoing the struggles of his Hui colleagues to articulate their place in the nation as both Muslim and Chinese, Gu reworked traditional “culturalist” assumptions about the non-racial character of identity formation to pose minority experience as constitutive of a constantly expanding and transforming political community. When Gu asserted in his notorious 1939 essay that the “Zhonghua minzu Is One,” he posed a unity built not on cultural assimilation or ethnic identity, but on a shared political commitment to an expansive and culturally hybrid concept of the “Chinese nation.

Chen Di’s Record of Formosa (1603) and an alternative Chinese imaginary of otherness

This article examines Chen Di's 1603 text Record of Formosa ( Dongfan ji ), the earliest first-hand account in any language of the indigenous people of Formosa (now called Taiwan). Recent commentators have viewed Chen's text as a key elaboration of Chinese imperial discourse and its various tropes of hierarchical difference. In contrast, I argue that Chen reads the perceived cultural differences between his society and Taiwan's indigenous peoples as evidence of the contingency, rather than inevitable superiority, of a historical story that produces the outcome of ‘civilization’. Building on a broader understanding of Chen's intellectual biography and his extant works, I show that Chen Di places the indigenes along a different timeline in which they forge their own contingent history parallel to, rather than behind, that of a civilizational centre. By doing so, Chen's historical narrative resists aligning their society with Han Chinese forms of development and offers a glimpse of how late Ming syncretic thought could produce an account of legitimate otherness

Introduction: history from between and the global circulations of the past in Asia and Europe, 1600-1950

This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narratives that continue to shape constructions of identity throughout Eurasia

Making the political: founding and action in the political theory of Zhang Shizhao

Democratic political theory often sees collective action as the basis for noncoercive social change, assuming that its terms and practices are always self-evident and accessible. But what if we find ourselves in situations where collective action is not immediately available, or even widely intelligible? This book examines one of the most intellectually substantive and influential Chinese thinkers of the early twentieth century, Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973), who insisted that it is individuals who must “make the political” before social movements or self-aware political communities have materialized. Zhang draws from British liberalism, democratic theory, and late Imperial Confucianism to formulate new roles for effective individual action on personal, social, and institutional registers. In the process, he offers a vision of community that turns not on spontaneous consent or convergence on a shared goal, but on ongoing acts of exemplariness that inaugurate new, unpredictable contexts for effective personal action