The book titled The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought by Professor Wang Hui’s team from Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences for the first time presents the insightful venation of the development of thoughts from Song Dynasty to modern China in complete form and reveals the choices in the transformation and their global significance. It criticizes the west-centered perspective systematically and combines the traditional and the modern innovatively, providing a new framework for understanding the various methods of Chinese modernity.

At present, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought has already had several versions. The key chapters are available in Japanese and Italian. In 2023, Harvard University Press published the English version, and it was selected as the 2023 Best Book from Academic Presses by a famous British political and cultural magazine The New Statesman. In 2024 the Korean version was published, which offers a proper opportunity for exchange of thought between China and South Korea. Korean scholars comment that this book “urges its readers to readjust the fixed perspective and perception of modernity and Chinese thought through subtle analysis of Chinese intellectual, philosophical and political discourse in over a thousand years,” and it “evokes the the tension between ideas and the transformation in perception, opening a broader vision of thoughts for Korean readers.”

The Korean intelligentsia comments that “the reaction to The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought from the global intelligentsia shows that the topics for discussion in Chinese intellectual history not only needs changes, but is changing.” The 2024 Korean version facilitates the comprehensive collation and effective discussions of the intellectual history between the two countries and is a milestone in the academic exchanges between China and South Korea.

Source:  School of Humanities 

Editor: Guo Lili