Over the course of a thousand pages, Wang Hui leads his readers across a thousand years of Chinese thought from Song–Ming neo-Confucianism to Qing neo-Confucian-ish evidential studies and New Text learning to Kang Youwei (1858–1927). He does so not by offering simple storylines but by offering close readings of major texts presented in nuanced and often dense prose (the English seems about equally dense as the original Chinese). Readers encounter a familiar cast of characters: the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi, Lu Jiuyuan, Wang Yangming, Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, Dai Zhen, Zhang Xuecheng, Zhuang Cunyu, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, and finally Kang Youwei, along with mentions of seemingly dozens of others. If these men and their ideas are basically familiar, nonetheless Wang sets them speaking to one another in new ways that explicitly look back at times to pre-Qin developments and implicitly forward to today's China.
The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought is a translation of the first half of Wang's magnum opus published in Chinese in 2004. Editor Michael Gibbs Hill has brought together eleven translators to turn Wang's sometimes tricky Chinese plus extensive quotations from original texts into lucid English. Hill suggests Rise is best seen as part of an ongoing process as Wang Hui continues to develop his ideas, partly even in dialogue with various translations of his works. Readers interested in contemporary Chinese thought will find this approach useful, but this review will discuss the work as a stand-alone volume. (The second half of Rise focuses more on the early decades of the 20th century, and related writings have been translated in various forums.)
Normally, academic reviews ferret out the author's thesis and offer a critique, friendly or not, of it. In this case, the reader (at least this reader) emerges after immersion in Wang's “subtle words and profound meanings,” to coin a phrase, exhausted and bleary-eyed, and not quite certain there is a thesis. There are certainly many thought-provoking observations – trust me here, for there are too many to cite in a short review – along with judgments that will seem unexceptional, even banal, to many readers. And there is something of a thesis insofar as Wang stresses certain continuities as we move from one thinker to the next; in the final chapter, he highlights the degree to which Kang Youwei was working in (or through?) a system of classical learning that he synthesized with Western science and social theory, Buddhism and Daoism. Kang brings Wang to the widely accepted “from empire to nation-state” framework, though here a unique empire and a unique nation-state.
In his preface to the English edition, Wang makes clear his distrust of any linear approach to the questions of what is “modern,” “China,” “thought” and “a rise.” Rather, “we should think less about absolute origins than about the repeated appearance across history of certain key elements and the changing meanings in different discursive contexts” (ix). Nonetheless, the narrative form imposes linearity, if not teleology. And when do changing meanings count as full-blown innovation?
Wang also develops the concept of plurality, warning us not to confuse becoming Han with becoming Chinese, which the English term “Sinification” blurs into a general notion of assimilation. Wang cites a long scholarly lineage dealing with the questions of Chinese–foreign relations and the importance of culture rather than bloodlines in defining inner and outer. He suggests that Confucianism was key to the creation of a political culture that provided continuity insofar as each new dynasty conceived of itself as successor to the former dynasty; the Manchu-Qing, too, recognized itself as a Chinese dynasty and all its territories as China. In later chapters, Wang points to how the New Text school, beginning in the 18th century, functioned to legitimate the Qing dynasty by denying the significance of racial or ethnic difference, a point Kang picked up and extended globally in his datong utopia.
Wang further argues – a corollary to a continuity thesis – that empire and nation-state should not be seen as entirely oppositional, and indeed that today's “centralized authority and its corresponding administration systems were not innovations initiated by reformers or revolutionaries but the remnants of the old institutions” (p. 857). This strikes me as a step too far, but it is certainly worth discussing further. Other – not theses but – recurring motifs are the long centrality of discussions of centralized administration versus enfeoffment, ancient rites and music versus (or as) institutions, and the perfection of the Three Dynasties versus “expediency” or “the propensity of the times.”
It seems churlish to complain about what is missing from a long volume that achieves so much. But in terms of Wang's own deconstruction of his title, while we learn a lot about different ways of thinking about China or Chinese, “thought” is largely circumscribed to Confucianism, leaving Buddhism and coming-into-the-19th century Western concepts barely mentioned. Wang also places a great deal of trust in his readers to determine for themselves what rising to modernity means.
In the end, my way of making sense of out Rise – which is not the only way – was to read it as Wang's extensive reading notes. Other readers may find Rise a more original or revisionist account of ancient thought, or at least a series of examinations of certain topics in intellectual history, or even in some ways a political polemic (whether searching for an alternative modernity to global capitalism or a justification of Chinese hegemony or both – this is clearer in some of Wang's other writings, but Wang-watchers will find politically relevant material in Rise as well). The benefit of having this massive work translated into English is that it can now stand with the works of Joseph Levenson and Joseph Needham as a comprehensive history of Confucian thought that asks us to consider big questions. What constitutes Chinese identity? Chinese modernity? What were sources of change in China? How did the Chinese work out the relationship between morality and governance? And what intellectual resources from the past should we be paying more attention to?
