Why read China from Empire to Nation-State?

Book cover of China from Empire to Nation-State

Book description

This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui's Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the…

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Asian history

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Why read it?

1 author picked China from Empire to Nation-State as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Viren Murthy

Author

Wang Hui changed the way I look at Chinese intellectual history and the above book is a translation of the introduction to his magnum opus, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. The book argues for an indigenous proto or early modernity emerging during the Song Dynasty or the tenth century in China. He shows how Chinese thinkers expressed ideas of equality and had fairly sophisticated bureaucracies by the tenth century. Moreover, through his analysis, he challenges the distinction between the nation-state and empire. Normally, we think of modernity as connected to premodernity and the nation connected to the…

From Viren's list on The best books to profoundly understand modern East Asian thought.