Xiaowei Zheng's review of Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950

-
My friend Xiaowei Zheng's review of Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950 is published on Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Volume 13, issue 1 (January 2019): 157–164.

We appreciate her insightful critique that our theoretical use of cosmopolitanism remains incoherent and somewhat shallow. To clarify our editorial principle, I would like to borrow some lines from R. Bin Wong's review of our book: "The volume shows the meanings of cosmopolitanism for different kinds of people in Qing China, including Manchus, Muslims, Koreans (in relation to the Qing, if not in the Qing). It further explicates the multiple framings within which different modalities of cosmopolitanism were achieved, including Buddhist and Confucian. It also shows cosmopolitanism not merely as a feature of thought, but suggests implications of such approaches in matters of governance." Please see Cambria Press' link to our book.

It has been three years since the volume was published in 2016. In retrospect, I think we were trying to show that cosmopolitanism could be deployed by historical protagonists in Qing China as their own "framing" as well as how these protagonists acted accordingly or differently given the various modalities of cosmopolitanism they used to frame their thinking. At least for myself, I never attempted to  use cosmopolitanism as an analytical category, such as public sphere or civil society, in our examination of early modern and modern China.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UCSC seminar on early modern China–Part 1

-
I am reading some recent scholarship with six graduate students in the fall quarter. The first set of readings includes Frederic Wakeman's  “ China and the Seventeenth-century World Crisis ," the first two chapters of Wai-yee Li's Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature , and James Frankel's chapter “Making Manchus and Muslims” in the edited volume Cosmopolitanism in China. The Chinese collaboration For the previous millennium (1000–2000), China was twice conquered by an alien minority. The first time was Mongol conquest and the second the Manchu. The Mongol Yuan dynasty was short-lived because, among other reasons, the Mongol rulers displaced the Chinese elites institutionally and deprived them of political power. The Manchu, on the other hand, shared power with the Chinese elites, kept their land and privilege , and promised them more. Wakeman provides the following statements regarding how the ethnic Chinese elites who worked for the new...
Read more

The Scholar's Robe

-
Image
My essay " The Scholar's Robe " is published on Frontiers of History in China . Check it out! The Scholar's Robe will be published again in the conference volume of International Research Center for Japanese Studies ( Nichibunken ). I am quite impressed by its format. Click here to check it out! A photo of all participants in Nichibunken conference, Kyoto, 2/19–2/21, 2016.
Read more

UCSC seminar–Part 2

-
The second set of readings includes the first chapter of Rosenthal and Wong's  Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe , John Elliott's "A Europe of Composite Monarchies," and the second part of R. Kent Guy's Qing Governors and Their Provinces: The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644-1796 . The Language of Union: Conquest, territorial management (such river work and transportation), ecological characteristics, and provincial governance (such as tax collection and disaster relief) all featured in Guy's  Qing Governors and Their Provinces . We only read the second half of the book. The first half is about the extraordinarily active appointment and dismissal of Qing governors, assessment of their competence, and central coordination of territorial control, tactical and logistical concerns of border defence, revenue collection for the imperial coffer, etc. Elite activism on behalf of the Qing stat...
Read more