It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.

"Rarely does a reviewer or publisher encounter a milestone: this is it. It is the first major study of the development of Chinese feminism in what is arguably the most formative period in the history of modern China. In its women-centered approach, the book challenges the official women's history authored by the Chinese Communist Party and long accepted by Euro-American scholars. This book will set the agenda for future scholars researching the relationship between feminism and nationalism in China."—Dorothy Ko, author of Teachers of the Inner Chambers

China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought examines the ideas of China in the works of three major thinkers in the early European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries: Pierre Bayle, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the Baron de Montesquieu. Unlike surveys which provide only cursory overviews of Enlightenment views of China, or individual studies of each thinker which tend to address their conceptions of China in individual chapters, this is the first book to provide in-depth comparative analyses of these seminal Enlightenment thinkers that specifically link their views on China to their political concerns. Against the backdrop especially of the Jesuit accounts of China which these philosophers read, Bayle, Leibniz, and Montesquieu interpreted imperial China in three radically divergent ways: as a tolerant, atheistic monarchy; as an exemplar of human and divine justice; and as an exceptional but nonetheless corrupt despotic state. The book thus shows how the development of political thought in the early Enlightenment was closely linked to the question of China as a positive or negative model for Europe, and argues that revisiting Bayle’s approach to China is a salutary corrective to the errors and presumptions in the thought of Leibniz and Montesquieu. The book also discusses how Chinese reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on Enlightenment writers’ different views of China as they sought to envisage how China should be remodeled.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power. China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

This volume examines the historical basis of the debate over sudden versus gradual approaches to enlightenment in Chinese Buddhism seeing it as part of a recurrent polarity in Chinese history and thought. Sudden and Gradual includes essays by Luis O. Gomez on the philosophical implications of the debate in China and Tibet, Whalen Lai on Taodheng`s theory of sudden enlightenment, Neal Donner on Chih-i`s system of T`ien-t`ai, John R. McRae on Shen-Hui`s sudden enlgihtenment` and its precedents in Northern Ch`an, Peter N. Gregory on Tsung-.i`s theory of sudden enlightenment .

"Previous scholarship held that the image of China did not penetrate North America until after trade was established between Canton and the East Coast in 1784. In The Dragon and the Eagle, A. Owen Aldridge reveals that a lively curiosity about oriental culture existed before the middle of the eighteenth century, and that a good deal of information about it was available even during the War for Independence." "Aldridge surveys attitudes and opinions about all aspects of Chinese life and culture expressed in American fiction, history, travel accounts, sermons, poetry, essays, correspondence, memoirs, and references in periodicals. He indicates that between 1760 and 1825 several entire books about China were published in America, together with a host of short pieces in newspapers and magazines. By the end of the eighteenth century, practically every idea or element of concrete information about China in print in London or Paris had reappeared in some form or another in the United States." "The history of these initial dealings shows in many ways a clash of contrasting cultures. This book uncovers some extraordinary instances of the relationship: Benjamin Franklin at the age of thirty-two publishing in his Philadelphia newspaper an analysis of the thought of Confucius; Thomas Jefferson including a Chinese novel on a reading list of 200 books for his brother-in-law; Thomas Paine comparing Confucius and Christ as great moral teachers; Philip Freneau composing a poem hailing the first voyage of an American vessel to the Far East; the American Philosophical Society enquiring into the contents of a Chinese book unearthed in the midst of a camp of American Indians in Pennsylvania; and a shocked American sea captain viewing the corpses of Eurasian babies floating down the river in Canton." "Aldridge confines his remarks to literary and intellectual texts before the eighteenth century and emphasizes authors in English who have been previously neglected. A bibliography of American imprints referring to China, 1760 to 1826, appears in the appendix."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Enlightenment in Dispute is the first comprehensive study of the revival of Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China. Focusing on the evolution of a series of controversies about Chan enlightenment, Jiang Wu describes the process by which Chan reemerged as the most prominent Buddhist establishment of the time. He investigates the development of Chan Buddhism in the seventeenth century, focusing on controversies involving issues such as correct practice and lines of lineage. In this way, he shows how the Chan revival reshaped Chinese Buddhism in late imperial China. Situating these controversies alongside major events of the fateful Ming-Qing transition, Wu shows how the rise and fall of Chan Buddhism was conditioned by social changes in the seventeenth century.