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USES AND MISUSES OF A CHINESE RENAISSANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2013

MARK GAMSA
MARK GAMSA*
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University E-mail: gamsa@post.tau.ac.il
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Extract

To adopt the least contentious of several definitions, the currents of thought and motifs in the arts that we associate with the Renaissance had their beginnings in fourteenth-century Florence. By the end of the fifteenth century they had spread out to other Italian cities while, during the sixteenth century, the Renaissance became a cross-European phenomenon. But was there also a “Renaissance beyond Europe”?

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Essays
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 635 - 654
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

To adopt the least contentious of several definitions, the currents of thought and motifs in the arts that we associate with the Renaissance had their beginnings in fourteenth-century Florence. By the end of the fifteenth century they had spread out to other Italian cities while, during the sixteenth century, the Renaissance became a cross-European phenomenon.Footnote 1 But was there also a “Renaissance beyond Europe”?

A recent book by the veteran social anthropologist Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many?, argues for the existence of multiple renaissances in history, including the Islamic world and China.Footnote 2 The plea Goody makes for seeing the Italian Renaissance “in a comparative light”Footnote 3 may only be endorsed: although Renaissance research since the 1980s has steadily expanded beyond the traditional geographical boundaries of the discipline to include the “peripheries” within Europe and to discover Renaissance contacts with non-Europeans,Footnote 4 not many comparisons with the non-European world have been attempted in Western scholarship. In arguing the case for extending the application of the term beyond Europe to the Islamic civilization, India and China, Goody acknowledges the influence of Arnold Toynbee's The Study of History (1934–61), among the first histories to conceive of “other Renaissances”. This essay, beginning with a critique of Goody's approach, then briefly surveys other ways in which “Renaissance” has been applied to China by Western scholars. It proceeds to trace in greater detail the meanings attached to the idea of “Renaissance” by participants in Chinese intellectual and political debates from the early twentieth century to the present. As the Renaissance, formerly identified with Europe alone, is now going “global”, this article concludes by suggesting how the coupling of “Renaissance” with “China” may be better conceptualized.

“RENAISSANCE IN CHINA”: VIEWS FROM THE WEST

“Renaissance in China” is the heading under which Jack Goody treats his Chinese example.Footnote 5 Relying on English-language syntheses of Chinese history, Goody cites evidence of renaissance-like developments in the annals of Chinese dynasties as these have been detected by Western sinologists. He uses a similar method in a lengthy chapter on “Rebirth in Islam”, a field where the application of the Renaissance label has acquired greater respectability due to a two-volume study by Joel L. Kraemer, published in 1986, on the rule of the Buyid dynasty (945–1055) over what are now Iran and Iraq.Footnote 6 Goody draws on this work even as he points to many more Islamic renascences than only the Buyid age. In the Indian case, Goody believes that “cultural continuity” made a Renaissance unnecessary and prefers therefore to speak of “revival”, “efflorescence”, “awakening” and “renewal”. He nonetheless adopts the definition of an Indian Renaissance as having occurred in the Gupta period between 240 and 550 CE.Footnote 7 Writing on China, Goody draws heavily on conceptualizations of a Chinese Renaissance under the Song dynasty (960–1279), as elaborated in books by Jacques Gernet and Mark Elvin in the 1970s.Footnote 8 However, he cannot refer to publications from the last ten to twenty years, when such language has become rare in professional usage.

It is a regrettable lack of critical assessment that Goody displays towards the array of historical metaphors which he culls from earlier writings in English,Footnote 9 filling the pages of his chapter on China with images of “flourishing” and “blooming”, “efflorescence” and “effervescence”, “golden age”, “rebirth”, “revival” and, finally, “renascence”. Together, these terms help to construct a teleology of progress by cultural leaps, which are also described as “bursts forward”. With the dubious support of such abstractions, presented as the characterizations of entire centuries, Goody's summary of Chinese history unsurprisingly ends up by having old clichés repeated and reinforced. Containing little in the way of comparative enquiry into the European and Chinese situations, it offers a bird's-eye view of splendour and achievement in China from remote antiquity to the twenty-first century, with a cautiously quick glance thrown at the twentieth. Exhibiting unbridled admiration for all things Chinese (the adjective “great” is omnipresent), Goody is ever-ready to applaud a Chinese cultural “flowering”.

There is a troubling irony here: a self-perceived rebel against mainstream history, Goody wishes to promote the understanding that “the East” was and is in no way inferior to “the West”. He readily admits that his writing has a “political dimension”; he is out to challenge celebratory teleological perspectives on European history and he is quick to spot the misguided application of Western criteria to Eastern past or present by thinkers whom he suspects of wanting to defend notions of Western superiority.Footnote 10 However, he forfeits his critical sense when coming upon the use of Western terminology by well-meaning scholars of the Orient—including those for whom finding a Renaissance in China was merely to pay the distant “other” the compliment of being almost like oneself. By reiterating old statements in this vein so as to be able to tell readers that “Europe was not alone, nor was it a cultural island”,Footnote 11 Goody brings back from oblivion and bestows new legitimacy upon a construction of a “Chinese Renaissance” that, it will be argued here, would be better abandoned along with such entries of the orientalist lexicon as the Asiatic mode of production, oriental despotism and Chinese or Japanese feudalism.

The outcome of Goody's efforts is counterproductive in a paradoxical way: by insisting on China's entitlement to a Renaissance of its own, he is doing quite the same thing which he laments when perpetrated by others. In The Theft of History (2006), a book highly critical of the approaches of other scholars past and present, Goody had supported his claim that most cultural and social developments in Europe had their matches in other parts of the non-Western world by charging Europeans with monopolizing the normative categories in which universal (and not only European) history was to be imagined and narrated: the necessary passage from the Renaissance through the Industrial Revolution to the Enlightenment. Even as he rejected arguments for European superiority on the basis of temporal precedence, he relied on the logic of “who was there first” to claim that China had preceded Europe in developing cities and urban culture, haute cuisine and so on.Footnote 12 Operating with the very set of categories the global validity of which he rightly questions when they serve a Eurocentric agenda, Goody seems to believe that making them truly universal (a loosely defined Renaissance, or at least a renascence, as the birthright of every literate civilization) would help restore historiographical justice.

What we have called the construction of a “Chinese Renaissance” is an intellectual project with a long pedigree, which can now be briefly sketched out. Within little more than a year of the demonstrations that took place in Peking in May 1919, the American sociologist Sidney D. Gamble (1890–1968) described the then still ongoing “student movement” by a term which, he indicated, had already become the accepted English translation for the Chinese xinchao (literally “new tide”)—the “Renaissance Movement”.Footnote 13 Later in the 1920s, the name of the movement in Chinese became firmly associated with “May Fourth”. Sinologists in the West, however, would continue to make use of “the Renaissance” in relation to China. Rather than pursue the analogy with the May Fourth movement, some scholars applied it to the Song dynasty of imperial China: Jacques Gernet did so in 1972 and Mark Elvin (following the lead of Japanese periodizations of Chinese history) in 1973.Footnote 14 A concept of a Chinese Renaissance in the Song dynasty was also elaborated by the Soviet orientalist Nikolai Konrad (1891–1970), who situated it within the determinist Marxist framework postulating scientific laws in the evolution of societies.Footnote 15 Others in the West argued that China never experienced a Renaissance, and went on to enquire why a phenomenon considered essential to the historical development of Europe did not occur there.Footnote 16 Meanwhile, recent scholarship has cast doubt on the thesis of the Song dynasty as the Chinese Renaissance by arguing that the extent of innovatory achievement in the Song has been overstated.Footnote 17 At the non-respectable end of Western counterreactions to the Eurocentric perspective, a popular history published in 2008 did more than claim that China had a Renaissance, too: in this fairytale in the tradition of “alternative” or “conspiracist” history, it is the Chinese empire, rather than the Italian peninsula, that becomes the movement's birthplace.Footnote 18

“RENAISSANCE IN CHINA”: CHINESE SIGHTINGS

In his long discussion of the Chinese case in Renaissances, Goody ignores Chinese interpretations of “Renaissance in China”; similarly, the chapters of his book concerning the Islamic, the Jewish and the Indian civilizations also display little or no interest in tracing conceptions and appropriations of the Renaissance by historical agents within them. The omission is not accidental and rather goes to the core of what Goody aims to do: the local uses of a European idea are irrelevant for the purposes of demonstrating original contributions of non-Europeans to Renaissance achievements and arguing the case for renaissances outside the European or the Christian worlds.

In China, associations with the Renaissance were made almost as soon as, by the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese scholars became acquainted with the fundamentals of European history. From the outset, their orientation was towards the present, not the past: possible connections between Renaissance Europe and Ming China were of lesser moment than the instrumental (contemporary and local) potential of Renaissance imagery. In the 1900s, the nationalist philosopher Zhang Binglin (also known as Zhang Taiyan, 1869–1936) resorted to such imagery as he held up the banner of philological “restoration”. A cultural conservative and staunch opponent of the rule of the Manchu dynasty, Zhang advocated a “literary renaissance” by means of a return to the purest language of Chinese antiquity.Footnote 19 In the later 1910s and 1920s, these Renaissance-like sentiments, prizing the rediscovery and rereading of ancient texts treated as repositories of moral and cultural authority, became main targets for attack by the self-styled progressives of “May Fourth”.

The organizing principles as well as the terminology of traditional Chinese historiography, with its cyclical succession of dynasties passing on the “Mandate of Heaven”, had been shattered with the introduction of new historical interpretation and methodology from the West.Footnote 20 Along came a new lexicon, of which the Renaissance was only one alluring example. The May Fourth movement perceived the Renaissance as a link in the chain of historical development, representing an idea of progress, which stood in contradiction to the traditional Chinese view. The Confucian tradition had placed China's golden age in the remote past and therefore saw history as a process of inevitable decline from the mythological era of sage rulers. The prolific American-educated academic Hu Shi (1891–1962), one of the leaders of May Fourth in its early stages, made repeated statements on “the Chinese Renaissance” in the 1920s, describing it as culminating in the movement for New Culture and the “literary revolution”, which he had helped to launch.Footnote 21 In 1933, Hu Shi delivered a series of lectures in English at the University of Chicago, which were titled The Chinese Renaissance when they came out in print the following year.Footnote 22

Hu Shi's very idea of the Renaissance had been mediated by fin de siècle discourse in the West and shaped by what he knew of such near-contemporary movements as the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.Footnote 23 The solidarity of the May Fourth camp with other foreign movements that similarly advertised their inspiration in Renaissance terms is well attested. Hu Shi's frequent references to the Renaissance in speeches abroad also had to do with the assumption that a familiar term could both help to bring events in China closer to a Western audience and highlight, in a way which that audience would find flattering, the positive contribution of the West to China's development; his discursive choices therefore reflected the imbalance of power between East and West.Footnote 24 In similar fashion, Hu Shi's older intellectual opponent, the British-educated conservative thinker Gu Hongming (1857–1928), who published mainly in the English-language press in China, described the ideological camp to which he belonged as “the Chinese Oxford movement”, after the Christian movement in Britain that dated back to 1833.Footnote 25 A prominent Chinese Christian and one of the best-known speakers for China in English in the 1930s and 1940s, Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 1897–2003) persistently used the New Testament images of “resurgence” and “rebirth” in her public appearances abroad as in her writings, including her popular book of 1940, which, drawing on the Latin resurgam, “I shall rise again”, was entitled China Shall Rise Again.Footnote 26

In modern Chinese usage since the 1920s, the European Renaissance has been designated by the two-word construction wenyi fuxing (literally, “revival in literature and the arts”). When dealing with statements in Chinese that did not address a foreign audience, we often face the problem of (reverse) translation: in which instances did terms such as xinchao (“new tide”) and, later, fuxing and zaisheng (“rebirth”) refer to the Renaissance? Can such instances be isolated from those when speakers thought they were using figurative (non-historical) language for something they wished to qualify, metaphorically or generically, as a renaissance, a revival or a resurgence (this last: a term more readily associated with the Risorgimento than with the Rinascimento)? While the range of meanings between the general and historically specific senses of the term allows for some nuance, the indisputable frequency of this imagery in republican China is significant, as are the rhetorical practices of the historical actors.Footnote 27

Whether inspired by the Italian Renaissance or “only” borrowing its name, the idea of cultural revival has formed part of the global intellectual and political vocabulary of modernity: chapters in a recent collective volume on this subject have treated the Chinese May Fourth next to the Nahda movement in Egypt and Iraq, the reinvention of Hebrew as a living language by European Jews, the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and the Renaissance of the Maori in New Zealand.Footnote 28 At more places than only in China, the Renaissance idea was inseparable from that of the nation state: what was to be revived was a perceived past glory, yet the purpose of the action was neither mere antiquarianism nor popular education, but strengthening of the nation. “Renaissance”, therefore, had much in common with “awakening”, another trope through which the nation was imagined as a developing biological organism.Footnote 29

Many in China considered the “rebirth” of Germany after its humiliation at Versailles another impressive example of the regeneration of an oppressed nation, which like China had been offended by the terms of the peace treaty of 1919.Footnote 30 The speeches of Mussolini, describing the history of Italy's oppression by foreigners as a succession of slurs to the national pride that needed redeeming through the re-creation (or rebirth) of a new Roman Empire also found a sympathetic Chinese audience. The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) shared the fascists’ attribution of visionary wisdom to the leader and distaste for both communism and democracy; in the 1930s, the party also used the rhetoric of a Confucian “restoration” to identify itself with the nation's cultural patrimony. Meeting Chiang Kai-shek in July 1937, Mussolini's special envoy, the pro-Chinese fascist economist De’ Stefani (1879–1969) used the English word “reconstruction”, which he repeated three times in one sentence, to describe China's most pressing task; he lectured on “national reconstruction” throughout his extensive tour of China.Footnote 31 The Chinese State Socialist Party (Zhongguo guojia shehuidang), founded in 1932 under the leadership of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang, 1887–1969), expressed its own aspirations for a blend of “national democracy” with dictatorship in its journal Zaisheng, which translated its title into English as the National Renaissance.Footnote 32 A critic of the Kuomintang regime, Zhang published in 1935 a book he called The Academic Basis of National Renaissance. This he presented as a Chinese parallel to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's early nineteenth-century Addresses to the German Nation (translated by Zhang himself into Chinese in 1932): in it, he set forth a political programme that emphasized the attainment of national consciousness through education.Footnote 33

The Chinese Communist Party made sporadic attempts during the 1930s to identify the memory of May Fourth with the Enlightenment, casting itself as the legitimate successor to the former, native movement, which supposedly incorporated the spirit of the eighteenth-century European one.Footnote 34 In 1944, a literary giant of modern China, the essayist Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), still called the achievement of a comprehensive Chinese Renaissance, after the model set by Europe between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, “a dream” that his generation was bequeathing to the next.Footnote 35 Between the end of the Sino-Japanese War and the Communist seizure of power, Renaissance imagery was deployed once again in the liberal literary monthly Wenyi fuxing, published in Shanghai from January 1946 to November 1947.Footnote 36 However, from the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and through the period of Mao Zedong's rule, “renaissance” imagery was notable by its absence. The Communist state remained critical of the intellectual autonomy which the Renaissance stood for, while emphasis on patriotism and a xenophobic outlook also put it at odds with Enlightenment ideas of cosmopolitanism. No longer interested in the comparisons once favoured by May Fourth, the Communist Party discouraged historical research on the Renaissance.

In 1966, in response to the proclamation of a “Cultural Revolution” on the Communist mainland, a “Cultural Renaissance” movement was declared on Taiwan and the concept thereby relocated to the island, whose national government in exile regarded itself as the rightful heir to the riches of Chinese culture.Footnote 37 Since the 1980s, commentators in China, as in the West, have again resorted to “renaissance” terms in connection with China's economic recovery under the new policies of “opening up”. But it was in 2001 that President Jiang Zemin first declared that the Chinese Communist Party was leading the nation towards a great renaissance, or revival (fuxing). He strengthened this message in a report to the sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002, in which he repeated the word fuxing no less than nine times. In the writings of some authors of ultranationalist persuasion, usually with close ties to the ruling Party, this “renaissance” has since been presented in terms of an imminent change of power in the international arena and a looming confrontation between China and the United States.Footnote 38 It is telling, however, that as in the days of Zhang Binglin and Hu Shi, the same historical trope is being used by critics at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The liberal academic Liu Junning, who has been periodically censured by the PRC government, published an essay entitled “China, You Need a Renaissance!” in the much-read Guangzhou weekly Southern Weekend in December 2006. By reiterating his call in subsequent publications, Liu has brought the European Renaissance and the prospects of its application in China back into Chinese cultural polemics.Footnote 39

Whether interpreting “Renaissance” as national restoration or, in a dissenting view such as Liu Junning's, seeing in it the reaffirmation of humanist values, speakers in China have had the state, not the individual person, in mind. In the Chinese perspective, the Renaissance appears less as a current of thought and a period in the history of the arts (the common definition with which this article began) than as a fact of political history. Couched in the terms that should allow China the right of entry into modernity after the Western model, it is being used today for the rebirth of the nation rather than for that of art and culture or the development of a creative self. Much Party-approved talk of a Chinese Renaissance was heard in PRC media in advance of the staging of the Beijing Olympics, modern China's most forceful bid for international recognition, in summer 2008. One of the keywords of the time was “the road to revival”, fuxing zhi lu. The use of a near-identical formulation in a pro-fascist publication in 1937, Yidali fuxing zhi dao (Italy's Way to Revival) by the Kuomintang official Xue Guangqian (alias Paul K. T. Sih, 1910–78), could have been the source of some embarrassment, but the precedent went unnoticed.Footnote 40 In 2007 the television series Fuxing zhi lu expressed the Communist Party's interpretation of Chinese history since the Opium War, while the new National Theatre in Beijing, inaugurated in 2008, staged a lavish music-and-dance performance under the same title in 2009.Footnote 41

The new National Museum of China, which opened in spring 2011, uses “Fuxing zhi lu” (translated into English as “The Road of Rejuvenation”) as the title for its permanent exhibition, beginning with national humiliation in the Opium War and ending with confident achievement in the Chinese space programme.Footnote 42 Notably, the museum devoted its first international exhibition to the European Enlightenment. The ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in July 2011 was celebrated with the release to both domestic and international audiences of a propaganda film on the decade between 1911 and 1921, which, marketed as “Beginning of the Great Revival” in English, interprets the Nationalist Revolution and the May Fourth movement as junctures in the path to power of today's Communist government.Footnote 43 As President Hu Jintao addressed the nation on the hundredth anniversary of the 1911 revolution, he drove home his point on China's revival with the help of twenty-three repetitions of the word fuxing.Footnote 44 However, when the most popular and outspoken blogger in China, Han Han, intended to give the title Renaissance (Wenyi fuxing) to a magazine he was launching in 2010, the censors did not allow it; not because, as the New York Times commented, the word “Renaissance” is taboo,Footnote 45 but because it is a term over which the Communist Party wants to maintain a monopoly. The latest addition to the stream of historical analogies mobilized to lend lustre to the Party's achievements has been the notion of a “prosperous age”. In contradistinction to the foreign “renaissance”, this has the advantage of evoking the glory of imperial China, with such “ages” in mind as the high Ming and the early to mid-dynasty Qing.Footnote 46 It appeals to the alternative vision of a Chinese modernity that preceded the country's traumatic confrontation with the West in the nineteenth century.Footnote 47

The subordination of cultural agendas to the political should not be considered unique to China, but the Chinese case which we are analysing here does show this form of thinking with particular clarity. This process did not begin in the Communist period; neither did the appropriation of the historical Renaissance. The Renaissance, as well as the Enlightenment, were already put to use to lend legitimacy and respectability in both Western and Chinese eyes to a twentieth-century Chinese movement, May Fourth, which soon upon its unfolding in the 1920s had left behind an initial commitment to the cultivation of critical minds for the more practical purposes of effecting political change. Central to May Fourth and fundamental to communism in China, as to the Marxist doctrine in general, was belief in the metanarrative of progress and it was within this conceptual scheme that the Renaissance had a main role to play. In an academic and intellectual environment little influenced by postmodern scepticism about the “coherences of ages”, which in the West has led to repudiation of the logical chain connecting the “ages” to one another and to the present time, the Renaissance is still conceived as a historical stage, through which, as not only Marx and Engels, but Burckhardt and Hegel have all argued, the West had passed on its trajectory to modernity.Footnote 48 The equivalent of this stage needed to be located in China just as, in the Mao period, historians had searched and found the requisite Chinese counterparts of such other abstractions of European social thought as “feudalism” or “capitalism”. What distinguished the Renaissance from these, negatively coloured, junctures of a borrowed historical teleology was only that, being distinctively positive, it was placed in the present or anticipated in the future rather than consigned to the past.

Another kind of subordination, that of world history to Chinese concerns, has shaped the writings of historians no less than the speeches of political actors. Cultural critics and politicians alike have scoured history for lessons and warnings for China; Mao Zedong's dictum on “using the past to serve the present” (gu wei jin yong)Footnote 49 validated ingrained assumptions about the duty of the historian as a Confucian scholar as much as it reflected Communist interest in controlling historical interpretation. The long history of “the Renaissance” in China is, in the last analysis, a mirror of Chinese thought about history from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first. This is political history with a moral message, a story with a didactic end and with succeeding visions of a Chinese Renaissance as its unfulfilled promise.

BEYOND “RENAISSANCE” AND “CHINA”: THE PROBLEMS OF PERIODIZATION

The first to popularize the term “Renaissance” in modern usage, Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), considered it only appropriate for Italy, for it was there that classical heritage could be rediscovered and revived. In relation to Northern Europe, which could draw on no such heritage, he accordingly spoke of a “Pseudo-Renaissance” or “so-called Renaissance”.Footnote 50 While Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) disagreed with Burckhardt on this narrow definition, he condemned the “stretching” of the Renaissance both “backward into the Middle Ages and forward into the modern period”, since “by transferring the term to another terrain in this way one takes away from it something of the full richness that accrued to it as long as it was restricted to the specific and unique cultural process for which it first came into use”.Footnote 51

The main challenge to “the Renaissance” today is posed by the rejection of narratives of sequential progress in Western history writing. By accepting the provocative verdict of a literary historian, that “periodization is now widely perceived as nonsense”,Footnote 52 we do not only part ways with the simplistic positivism underlying Hu Shi's claims on China's succeeding “Renaissances”.Footnote 53 To the extent that doubts now prevail about periodization as an analytical tool, we have gone much further than Huizinga, committed as he was to a study of the “morphology of epochs”. While an idea such as “the axial age” of humanity, which the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) expounded in The Origin and Goal of History (1949), is still used by sociologists, most historians would prefer to view it as part of twentieth-century intellectual history and philosophy rather than as a valid contribution to “history” as such.Footnote 54 The role assigned to the Renaissance within “the old dramatic pattern, with its concept of linear history moving the human race ineluctably to its goal in the modern world” has been subjected, in the West, to a particularly close scrutiny as an intellectual and historiographical construct.Footnote 55 Historical reality during the period subsumed under this broad heading is increasingly seen to require approaches more alive to pluralities and local (including non-European) variations. While the all-embracing word “Renaissance” is still in no danger of disappearing from the titles of books and articles, when cross-cultural inclusiveness is sought it is now often shunned in favour of “early modern”—although the teleological presuppositions behind that label do not make it a perfect solution.Footnote 56 The notion of periods or “ages” having their internal sets of coherences survives in “transition studies”, which are interested in the transition, or passage (metaphors in their own right),Footnote 57 of states and societies between forms of government regarded as fundamentally different from one another. The new form is here expected to be better than the old and the “transition”, therefore, to be followed if not by a rebirth, then at least by a recovery. Much of this research, concerned with current events or the recent past, leans towards the social sciences.

A consideration of Chinese statements on the various modern “Renaissances”, within and outside Chinese borders, will show that it is more productive to treat these utterances not as historical comparisons, but rather as political pronouncements grounded in their time and place, part of a rhetorical idiom committed to “projecting the present onto the past”.Footnote 58 Reading them in this spirit, we should remember that in making such claims to historical analogy, the Chinese were obviously not alone: calls for Renaissance-like revivals, supported by some general comparison with the emergence of Europe from the darkness of the Middle Ages, have been issued widely in the twentieth century and are still heard from commentators on world affairs and from politicians today.Footnote 59 They are now more frequent in Asia than in the West, where the Renaissance has become less common a rallying cry than even the Enlightenment and both are felt to be too highbrow to be enlisted as effective tools in political debate. Modern China, for its part, has also produced serious historical research on the Renaissance, which did not attempt to shift it to home ground.Footnote 60

CONCLUSION

Politicized and instrumental Chinese uses of “the Chinese Renaissance” find their match in Western attempts to locate a Renaissance in China: an ambition one might have written off as the unreflective, methodologically naive extension of European terminology to world history that could not be expected to reappear today, and hence a position no longer worth criticizing, had it not made a comeback in Jack Goody's Renaissances: The One or the Many?. Considering the political convictions behind this and other recent publications by the same author, the “comeback” is less than surprising, but in his pursuit of evidently biased targets Goody does not serve well even the cause most dear to him: showing that the East deserves the recognition of the West.

A comparison of the European Renaissance, or indeed the Enlightenment, with developments outside Europe is both welcome and possible.Footnote 61 Applied to China, such analysis may be undertaken in the spirit of a comparative intellectual history, to include both differences and similarities between the Renaissance in Europe and elements of Chinese thought in the late Ming and the Qing dynasties, on the one hand, and movements in the twentieth century, on the other. While there would be few insights to be gained from measuring cultures widely apart in time and space by the yardstick of the “original” Italian model, as long as we do not do that there should be no reason to abstain from the comparison itself.Footnote 62 In the main part of this article, looking into the vocabulary of speakers in China from the 1900s to the present has shown uses of the Renaissance as a contested image and point of reference in modern Chinese historical, scholarly and political discourse. While attention to such Asian reformulations of a European concept has recently been called for with regard to the term “Enlightenment”, we have argued here for maintaining a distinction between what a historical event or discourse were and the forms (unexpected, interesting and hence undoubtedly important) in which they were used in other temporal and cultural contexts.Footnote 63

Next to the comparative method and analysis of usages of the Renaissance by latecoming movements, another promising avenue for scholarship opens up in studying the contacts that Europeans, among them artists and merchants in the age of the Renaissance, established with their counterparts beyond Europe and the images they possessed of Asian, Middle Eastern and (in the case of Egypt) African cultures. Research has also begun on the travel routes of objects as part of the border-crossing networks of trade and communications which it is the current trend to call “global”.Footnote 64 The possibility of the European Renaissance reaching China through Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has occasionally come up in studies on the Jesuit enterprise in the Ming and Qing periods, although reception at the Chinese end is known to have been limited,Footnote 65 and it also remains an open question to what extent the Jesuits may be considered agents of late Renaissance ideas and values. Peter Burke has proposed two more methods of “globalizing the Renaissance”: studying “contributions to the Renaissance that originated beyond Western Europe, notably the contributions of Byzantines and Muslims” and “what might be called for convenience the ‘export’ of the Renaissance and the varied reception of the movement from China to Peru”. Writing in 2005, Burke also made the point that, considering the prevailing climate in academia, “we may expect to see more references to the contribution of Islam for reasons of political correctness as well as from intellectual conviction. The danger today is not the neglect of non-western contributions but the exaggeration of their importance”.Footnote 66 Burke's own subsequent research has highlighted similarities and analogies between elements of the European Renaissance and cultural developments in Islam, China and Japan, without diminishing the historical uniqueness of the Italian case.Footnote 67

While there are now favourable prospects for arriving at a better understanding of intersections and parallels in European and Asian history, and as we may be on the cusp of real discoveries in this field of research, we need to beware of historians twisting their findings for a fashionable argument. The methods outlined above should also provide viable alternatives to insisting—as we have seen both Chinese and Western scholars do—on the universality of the European path, the deeply flawed logic of “we/they had (or are having) a Renaissance too”. Stemming from a late twentieth-century entitlement discourse, this framing of the problem represents no advance on Eurocentrism in its earlier, justly discarded guises. As writings on the “Chinese Renaissance” both in China and in the West have demonstrated, once the name of a historical movement is reified and enlisted in the service of political agendas, the urge to prove a thesis vitiates the claims of comparison while leaving unexplored the potential of studying forms of appropriation and cross-continental contact.

References

1 For this trajectory, see the articles in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikuláš, eds., The Renaissance in National Context (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Goody, Jack, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar. Review articles so far have been sympathetic: Alazard, Florence, “Une ou des Renaissances?”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2011/4, no. 58–4, 125–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, acknowledged a critical reception of the book by other French historians (at 131); but Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, “Many Renaissances, Many Modernities?”, Theory, Culture & Society 28/3 (May 2011), 149–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, applauded Renaissances together with Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge, 2010).

3 Goody, Renaissances, 24.

4 See Burke, Peter, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Brotton, Jerry, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford, 2002Google Scholar; republished as The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, 2005); and, for still more radical claims and a list of publications exemplifying the “trend toward an increasingly cross-cultural, global perspective on Renaissance Europe”, the editor's introduction in Jyotsna G. Singh, ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Chichester, 2009), 25 n. 8.

5 Goody, Renaissances, 198–240. This chapter in the book, like the chapters on Islam and India, was co-authored with the Cambridge University Germanist Stephen Fennell.

6 Joel L. Kraemer presented his concept of “The Renaissance of Islam” in the introduction to his Humanism in The Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden, 1986), a volume followed by Kraemer, , Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam: Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani and His Circle (Leiden, 1986Google Scholar; 2nd revised edn 1992).

7 Goody, Renaissances, 196, on “the Indian Renaissance”. On the first mention of the term, at 185, it may be seen to derive from Rowland, Benjamin, The Art and Architecture of India: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain (Harmondsworth, 1953)Google Scholar.

8 “The Song period has been called a Renaissance and it certainly appears as such”. Goody, Renaissances, 248, gives the reference to this statement as “Elvin 1973”. On Gernet's and Elvin's work, see more below.

9 The “spiritual Renaissance” mentioned in a book by Etienne Balazs (1905–63); the parallel to the European Renaissance that Arthur R. V. Cooper, translator of the volume Li Po and Tu Fu for Penguin Classics in 1973, discerned in the two Tang dynasty poets; and the several “golden ages” and “dark ages” identified in Chinese history by a number of other anglophone writers. Goody, Renaissances, 213–14, 216.

10 Ibid., 38, 234, 255.

11 In the concluding lines of the book: ibid., 274. Note that, while he quotes Mark Elvin on “a renaissance of learning” in the Song, Goody disapproves of his attempts to answer the question why imperial China did not develop a “modern economy”. Ibid., 222, 229.

12 Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

13 Gamble, Sidney D., Peking: A Social Survey (London, 1921), 158–62Google Scholar. One of the organs of the movement, the Xinchao magazine published in Peking from January 1919 to March 1922, carried the English title The Renaissance below the Chinese title on its front cover.

14 See Part 5, “The Chinese Renaissance”, in Gernet, Jacques, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster, J.R. and Hartman, Charles (Le monde chinois, 1972), 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973)Google Scholar. Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance, 45, presented the Song only as one of the four (unsuccessful) Renaissance movements that had preceded the movement for New Culture in the twentieth century.

15 In Konrad, N. I., West–East: Inseparable Twain, trans. Kasanina, H.et al. (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar, see especially the chapters “The Philosophy of the Chinese Renaissance (The Sung School)” and “The Renaissance Epoch”.

16 Shaffer, Lynda, “China, Technology and Change”, World History Bulletin 4/1 (Fall/Winter 1986–87)Google Scholar, 1, 4–6, attributed such reasoning to the pioneering historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham (1900–94), to accuse him of posing an “unfair” question. Jack Goody, too, critiqued Needham in The Theft of History for asking why China was overtaken by the West in science and technology in the sixteenth century. For yet another geographical perspective cf. Mirkovic, Alexander, “Did the Balkans Have a Renaissance?”, World History Bulletin 26/2 (Fall 2010), 24–8.Google Scholar

17 Pomeranz, Kenneth, “Putting Modernity in Its Place(s): Reflections on Jack Goody's The Theft of History”, Theory, Culture & Society 26/7–8 (Dec. 2009), 32–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 47 n. 3. Responding to this remark in a forum on his book in Theory, Culture & Society, Goody, “Supremacy or Alternation?”, ibid., 148–55, was ready to leave the question to sinologists, while restating his position that the Song “has frequently been compared to the Italian Renaissance” (151).

18 Menzies, Gavin, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; and cf. Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (London, 2002). For an analysis of the problem see Prazniak, Roxann, “Menzies and the New Chinoiserie: Is Sinocentrism the Answer to Eurocentrism in Studies of Modernity?”, Medieval History Journal 13/1 (April 2010), 115–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Hideo, Kiyama, “The ‘Literary Renaissance’ and the ‘Literary Revolution’”, Acta Asiatica 72 (March 1997), 27–60Google Scholar. Kiyama points out, however, that Zhang did not make regular use of his term wenxue fugu and, when doing so, in 1906, could apply it to both “the Italian renaissance and . . . the current movement in China to revive ancient learning” (ibid., 30). On uses of the European Renaissance by Zhang and other writers in the Scholarly Journal on National Essence (Guocui xuebao) see Weizheng, Zhu, “China's Lost Renaissance”, in Zhu, , Coming Out of the Middle Ages: Comparative Reflections on China and the West, trans. and ed. Hayhoe, Ruth (Armonk, NY, 1990), 188–97, 190–92Google Scholar; and more in Hon, Tze-ki, Revolution as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China's Path to Modernity, 1905–1911 (Leiden, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Kaske, Elisabeth, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden, 2008)Google Scholar, chap. 5, on the inspiration drawn from “the European Renaissance” by conservative Chinese philologists in the 1900s.

20 See Wright, Arthur F., “On the Uses of Generalization in the Study of Chinese History”, in Gottschalk, Louis, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago and London, 1963), 36–58, 46–7Google Scholar. On calls for a new “post-Confucian” historiography during the 1920s and early 1930s see Moloughney, Brian, “From Biographical History to Historical Biography: A Transformation in Chinese Historical Writing”, East Asian History 4 (Dec. 1992), 1–30, 20–21Google Scholar.

21 “This literary revolution marks the first stage in the Chinese Renaissance, for here will be found a spirit essentially different from the earlier stages of modernisation”. Shih, Hu, “The Renaissance in China”, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 5/6 (Nov. 1926), 265–83 (record of speech in Chatham House, London, followed by discussion), at 270–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Shih, Hu, The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures 1933, 2nd edn (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. The Chicago lectures are at the centre of Zhou, Gang, “The Chinese Renaissance: A Transcultural Reading”, PMLA 120/3 (May 2005), 783–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also available as a chapter in Schildgen, Brenda Deenet al., eds., Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (New York, 2006), 113–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Eber, Irene, “Thoughts on Renaissance in Modern China: Problems of Definition”, in Thompson, L. G., ed., Studia Asiatica (San Francisco, 1975), 189–218Google Scholar, which follows Hu Shi's generalizations on the Chinese Renaissance through to another series of invited lectures, delivered at Berkeley in 1956. See also Grieder, Jerome B., Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Sun, Lung-kee, “The Other May Fourth: Twilight of the Old Order”, in Chow, Kai-Winget al., eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham, MD, 2008), 271–92, 281Google Scholar.

24 “Without the benefit of an intimate contact with the civilization of the West, there could not be the Chinese Renaissance”. Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance, 47.

25 Gu followed the same strategy in his book in English, The Spirit of the Chinese People (1916). Müller, Gotelind, “Gu Hongming (1857–1928) und Chinas Verteidigung gegen das Abendland” (Gu Hongming and China's Defence against the West), Orientierungen, 1 (2006), 1–23, 12–14Google Scholar.

26 Cf. Mackerras, Colin, Western Images of China, 2nd revised edn (Oxford, 1999), 65–6Google Scholar.

27 Cf. Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London, 1971)Google Scholar, 38: “The paradigms which order ‘reality’ are part of the reality they order . . . language is part of the social structure and not epiphenomenal to it, and . . . we are studying an aspect of reality when we study the ways in which it appeared real to the persons to whom it was more real than to anyone else”.

28 Schildgen et al., Other Renaissances.

29 See Fitzgerald, John, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, 1996)Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, “The Unfinished History of China's Future”, Thesis Eleven 57 (May 1999), 17–31.

30 The German example was discussed in the first issue of the Kuomintang-edited Fuxing yuekan (Renaissance Monthly) in 1932. See Kirby, William C., Germany and Republican China (Stanford, 1984), 151, 165Google Scholar. Admiration of Germany's recovery after the Great War (as expressed by Sun Fo, the son of President Sun Yat-sen, who saw it as a model for China) was once again in evidence in Chinese interpretations of Germany's “revival” (fuxing) under Hitler. Chiang Kai-shek's fascist organization, the Blue Shirts (1932–38), styled itself the Zhonghua fuxingshe (Chinese Renaissance Society). Cf. ibid., 64, 160–61; and, on Fuxingshe, esp. Wakeman, Frederic Jr, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar.

31 Samarani, Guido, “Alberto De’ Stefani and Sino-Italian Relations Just before the Second World War”, East and West 43/1–4 (Dec. 1993), 301–10, at 307Google Scholar.

32 Jeans, Roger B. Jr, Democracy and Socialism in Republican China: The Politics of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), 1906–1941 (Lanham, MD, 1997), 203Google Scholar.

33 Fung, Edmund S. K., Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge, 2010), 108–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See Schwarcz, Vera, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar. Interpretations of the Enlightenment by PRC scholars today are available in English in Feger, Hans, ed., The Fate of Reason: Contemporary Understanding of Enlightenment (Würzburg, 2013)Google Scholar.

35 Zuoren, Zhou, “Wenyi fuxing zhi meng” (The Dream of a Renaissance), reprinted in Hu, Yang, ed., Lishi jiyi yu lishi jieshi: Minguo shiqi mingren tan Wusi (Historical Memory and Historical Analysis: Famous Persons of the Republican Period Discuss May Fourth) (Fuzhou, 2010), 422–4Google Scholar.

36 See on this journal Katalin Till, “A Brief Flowering: A Study of the Modern Chinese Magazine ‘Literary Renaissance’”, MPhil thesis submitted to University of London, SOAS, 1995.

37 Chun, Allen, “From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan”, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 31 (Jan. 1994), 49–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 A main proponent of these views has been the conservative cultural critic He Xin (born 1949). His essays are collected in two volumes under the title The Renaissance of the Chinese Nation and Future of the World (Zhonghua fuxing yu shijie weilai) (Chengdu, 1996). On this author (ironically, an exact namesake of the translator of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; see below), cf. a trenchant entry by Barmé, Geremie R. in Davis, Edward L., ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York, 2005), 344Google Scholar.

39 Liu Junning, “Zhongguo, ni xuyao yi chang wenyi fuxing!”, Nanfang zhoumo, 7 Dec. 2006. Cf. the discussion forum in the Beijing monthly Yishu pinglun (Arts Criticism) 5 (2007), 14–22.

40 Xue's book had a foreword by General Jiang Baili (aka Jiang Fangzhen, 1882–1938), a main figure in Kuomintang contacts with Mussolini, who urged readers to learn from the success of Italian fascists in realizing their theory of cultural revival. Godley, Michael R., “Lessons from an Italian Connection”, in Pong, David and Fung, Edmund S.K., eds., Ideal and Reality: Social and Political Change in Modern China, 1860–1949 (Lanham, MD, 1985), 93–123, 110–11Google Scholar.

41 See Mark Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age (shengshi)”, China Heritage Quarterly 29 (March 2012). The television series was also marketed as a three-volume book under the same title (Beijing, 2008); cf. Xianghua, Hong, ed., Fuxing zhi lu: Zhongguo jueqi de 30 ge lishi guanjian (The Way to Revival: Thirty Historical Keys to China's Rise) (Qingdao, 2007)Google Scholar, reissued in 2009 and advertised as a best seller. Even as the Renaissance trope has been extensively employed in state propaganda, it is also being claimed by an anti-government Internet blog, operating from abroad and associated with the banned Falun Gong movement (atruechineserenaissance.blogspot.com).

42 To quote the museum's website, this exhibition “demonstrates the glorious but long course of achieving national happiness and prosperity and fully reveals how the people chose Marxism, the Communist Party of China, socialism, and the reform and opening-up policy”.

43 The film's original Chinese title is “The Great Exploit of Party-Building” (Jiandang weiye). This, in turn, alludes to the title of a previous self-congratulatory production, Jianguo daye (literally “The Great Enterprise of State-Building”; English title: The Founding of a Republic), a film covering the years from 1945 to 1949, which was released for the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC in 2009.

44 Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age”.

45 Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “In Search of a Modern Humanism in China”, New York Times, 13 May 2010.

46 See Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age”; and Barmé, Geremie R., “Shengshi Zhongguo: China's New Prosperous Age”, China Heritage Quarterly 26 (June 2011)Google Scholar. Barmé notes the connection to images of the Renaissance and their uses since Hu Shi, observing that “In China's modern history. . . enlightenments, rebirths and revivals have often been hastily announced and hailed in a mood of anxious exuberance”.

47 Szonyi, Michael, “Ming Fever: The Present's Past as the People's Republic Turns Sixty”, China Heritage Quarterly 21 (March 2010)Google Scholar, comments on the current vogue for a “concept of an indigenous Chinese modernity with its roots in the Ming [that] allows Chinese people today to challenge the hegemony of Western-style modernity without challenging the hegemony of modernity in general”. Cf. Horner, Charles, Rising China and Its Post-modern Fate: Memoires of Empire in a New Global Context (Athens, OH and London, 2009), 37, 42Google Scholar.

48 “All three nineteenth-century historiographies—Hegel's theodicity, Burckhardt's cultural history, and Marx's economic prehistory—conferred upon the Renaissance the status of inaugural epoch of the modern”. de Grazia, Margreta, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/3 (Fall 2007), 453–67, 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Engels's poetic description of the Renaissance in the preface to Dialektik oder Natur (1873), “Es war die größte progressive Umwälzung, die die Menschheit bis darin erlebt hatte, eine Zeit, die Riesen brauchte und Riesen zeugte” (in the English translation of Dialectics of Nature: “It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants”), has often been quoted in Chinese. Ruru, Li, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Hong Kong, 2003), 6–7, 44–5, 71, 166Google Scholar, notes this in the context of Chinese theatre criticism.

49 Cf. Unger, Jonathan, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (Armonk, NY, 1993)Google Scholar; and Spakowski, Nicola, “National Aspirations on a Global Stage: Concepts of World/Global History in Contemporary China”, Journal of Global History 4/3 (Nov. 2009), 475–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Gilbert, Felix, “Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years: The Road to Cultural History”, Journal of the History of Ideas 47/2 (April–June 1986), 249–74, 272–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Huizinga, Johan, “The Task of Cultural History” (1929), in Huizinga, , Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans. Holmes, James S. and van Marle, Hans (London, 1960), 17–76, 63Google Scholar. Cf. 69: “We cannot do without the names of periods, because they have become filled with meaning that is valuable to us, even though every attempt to motivate their validity only demonstrates the contrary”, and note also Huizinga's suspicion of “every name for a period which is taken too literally, or behind which too much is sought” (75).

52 Hume, Robert D., “Construction and Legitimation in Literary History”, Review of English Studies, new series 56/226 (2005), 632–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 637 (cf. 646: “the idea of uniformity across a period of decades is convenient but too silly even to be worth attacking”). A defence of periodization as a valuable intellectual enterprise is in Rabb, Theodore K., The Last Days of the Renaissance & The March to Modernity (New York, 2006), xx–xxiGoogle Scholar. See also the forum on “Periodization, Then and Now”, History Workshop Journal 63 (Spring 2007), and the special issue “Medieval/Renaissance after Periodization”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/3 (Fall 2007).

53 A powerful rebuttal is McRae, John R., “Religion as Revolution in Chinese Historiography: Hu Shih (1891–1962) on Shen-hui (684–758)”, Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 12 (2001), 59–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Showing the superficiality of Hu Shi's writing on Chan Buddhism, McRae remarks, “Ultimately, all the problems of Hu Shih's work derive from a single point: his dedication to the pragmatic use of history” (98). Comparing Hu's scheme of periodization with that of William T. De Bary, he wonders “how history can be compartmentalized so easily. What factors differentiate the ages from each other, and what are the mechanisms and dynamics of change?” (100 n. 100).

54 See Arnason, Johann P., Eisenstadt, S. N. and Wittrock, Björn, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden and Boston, 2005)Google Scholar; and Bellah, Robert N. and Joas, Hans, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Boy, John D. and Torpey, John, “Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept”, Theory and Society 42/3 (May 2013), 241–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 See the American Historical Association presidential address by Bouwsma, William J., “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History”, American Historical Review 84/1 (Feb. 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1–15, reprinted with commentary in Martin, John J., ed., The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (London and New York, 2003), 27–42, 39Google Scholar. Cf. the forum on the Renaissance, marking twenty years since Bouwsma's lecture, in American Historical Review 103/1 (Feb. 1998), 51–121; and Arlette Jouanna, “La notion de Renaissance: Réflexions sur un paradoxe historiographique”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2002/5, no. 49–4bis, 5–16. Most recently, see e.g. chap. 2, “Breve storia di una metafora” (The Short History of a Metaphor), in Nicola Gardini, Rinascimento (Turin, 2010).

56 One such critique of “early modern” is Caferro, William, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2011), 18Google Scholar.

57 See Platt, Kevin M. F., “The Post-Soviet Is Over: On Reading the Ruins”, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1/1 (May 2009)Google Scholar, for a shrewd questioning of such “metaphorical pathways”.

58 Quoting McRae, “Religion as Revolution in Chinese Historiography”, 89, on Hu Shi.

59 See e.g. Khanna, Parag, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. An example from a Malaysian politician is Ibrahim, Anwar, The Asian Renaissance (Singapore, 1996)Google Scholar; in Singapore, the Singaporean diplomat Mahbubani, Kishore celebrated the growth of Asian power in “renaissance” terms in his Can Asians Think? (Singapore, 1998)Google Scholar.

60 Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was retranslated into Chinese from the 15th edn of the English translation by S. G. C. Middlemore in 1979 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan); this translation by He Xin was reprinted in 2009. The thematically arranged Ouzhou wenyi fuxing shi (supplied English title: A History of the Renaissance), in 12 vols. (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2008–10), under the general editorship of Liu Minghan, represents the state of current scholarship.

61 Conrad, Sebastian, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique”, American Historical Review 117/4 (Oct. 2012), 999–1027CrossRefGoogle Scholar, calls for viewing the Enlightenment through the lens of the “global entanglements” that arose from “the production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century” (1010). As the same would not hold true for the fifteenth or the sixteenth centuries, Conrad is wrong to condemn Goody's work (both The Theft of History and Renaissances) for preferring the comparative approach (ibid., 1008). Comparison and the search for connections, moreover, are not mutually exclusive: cf. Wong, R. Bin, “Did China's Late Empire Have an Early Modern Era?” in David Porter, ed., Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800 (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, 195–216; and Kenneth Pomeranz, “Areas, Networks, and the Search for ‘Early Modern’ East Asia”, in ibid., 245–70. Wong works with “similarities and differences” across the “early modern” and “modern” divide; Pomeranz is “inclined to tack back and forth . . . between comparison and connection” (257).

62 An example of the comparative method, which also looks at Florentine merchants in India in the sixteenth century, is Jones, Dalu, ed., Lo specchio del Principe. Mecenatismi paralleli: Medici e Moghul (The Prince's Mirror. Parallel Patronages: The Medici and the Moghul) (Rome, 1991)Google Scholar. The assumption that a comparative analysis of “Renaissance” movements in Europe and Asia would mean the subjugation of the modern Asian movements to Western standards, as presented in Zhou, Gang, “Other Asias, Other Renaissances”, Concentric 34/2 (Sept. 2008), 87–100Google Scholar, does not need to be accepted.

63 Again, contrary to the argument of Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History”, esp. 1026.

64 See Elman, Benjamin, “Global Science and Comparative History: Jesuits, Science, and Philology in China and Europe, 1550–1850”, introduction to special issue of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 26 (2007), 9–16Google Scholar; and Lee, Christina H., ed., Western Visions of the Far East in the Transpacific Age, 1522–1657 (Farnham, 2012)Google Scholar, for the former approach. For the latter see Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta and Molà, Luca, “The Global Renaissance: Cross-cultural Objects in the Early Modern Period”, in Adamson, Glennet al., eds., Global Design History (London and New York, 2011), 11–20Google Scholar; and on the city in China that shipped porcelain to Europe, Gerritsen, Anne, “Global Design in Jingdezhen: Local Production and Global Connections”, in ibid., 25–33. For more on porcelain see Journal of World History 23/1 (March 2012)Google Scholar, issue on “Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History”. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance”, keynote lecture given on 24 June 2011 at the conference The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450–1700, Birkbeck, University of London; and Fernández-Armesto, “Eurasian Renaissance: Intellect, Art and Exchange”, lecture on 29 June 2012 at the British Library conference Renaissance Old Worlds: English Encounters from the Levant to the Far East, raised the suggestion that Chinese artefacts may have reached European courts in the late fifteenth century through diplomatic gifts from Qa'it Bey, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt.

65 See the conclusion of Standaert, Nicolas, “The Transmission of Renaissance Culture in Seventeenth-century China”, Renaissance Studies 17/3 (Sept. 2003), 367–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also collected in Carey, Daniel, ed., Asian Travel and the Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2004), 42–66Google Scholar.

66 Burke, , “Renaissance Europe and the World”, in Woolfson, Jonathan, ed., Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (New York, 2005), 52–70, 53, 66Google Scholar.

67 See Burke, Peter, “Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances”, Theory, Culture & Society 26/7–8 (Dec. 2009), 16–31, 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests that “in the case of China, connections with European humanism are unlikely . . . On the other hand, similarities are important”.