What\u2019s wrong with the Chinese Nation? In The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity, Edmund S.K. Fung examines how Chinese thinkers confronted this question as they encountered and sought to resolve the question of modernity.<\/p>\n
In broad philosophy, modernity has been formulated as a Western worldview, centered on Enlightenment, the guiding principle of reason and progress, and the idea of improving both man and the natural world. As Fung notes, this results in ideas of modernity that are not consistently compatible with each other, particularly the opposition drawn between modernity and tradition, which often maps onto a parallel opposition between West and East.1<\/a><\/sup> This has raised the question of how the East experienced and conceptualised modernity, if they did so at all.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Fung\u2019s overview of the variations of modernity provides a helpful synthesis of both Western and non-Western conceptualisations.3<\/a><\/sup> Foucault\u2019s idea is especially useful here, as it encapsulates this synthesis and relates directly to the themes of nationalism and modernity. Foucault, drawing on Kant, describes modernity as an \u2018attitude.\u2019 For him, modernity involves philosophical questioning that interrogates how humans relate to their own time, how they exist historically, and how they constitute themselves as autonomous subjects.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Within this context, Zhang Junmai (1887-1969), one of the leading thinkers of the NeoConfucianism movement, found that nationalism was crucial in China’s \u2018attitude of modernity.\u2019 Writing in a time of crisis where China faced existential threat from foreign aggression, Zhang believed that the freedom of the nation was what offered \u201cthe best protection of individual liberty\u201d and that the nation was characterised by a distinctive \u2018national spirit\u2019 that sought political and cultural expression.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n To this end, Zhang developed a nationalism rooted in self-defence and grounded in a \u2018usable past.\u2019 As Zhang explains, \u201cin the midst of renewal the old is conserved. That is, creative renewal inherits the past and develops the future.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> Anderson argues that this creative renewal is needed to create a unified national identity and requires a perpetuation of beliefs and myths about a group’s common past and future.7<\/a><\/sup> However, this act of reinterpreting the past to underline themes of commonality \u201cnecessitate collective forgetting or amnesia.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> Crucially, Zhang built this national consciousness in opposition to the \u201cother\u201d most immediately Japanese aggression, but also in comparison to the West. Thus, in answering the question \u201cWhat is wrong with the Chinese nation?\u201d Zhang contrasted China with other nations to diagnose its weaknesses: its lack of unity, the absence of a constitutional and legal-rational state, and the widespread absence of education among its people. Zhang then, participation in the attitude of modernity could not exist without the nation state.<\/p>\n What\u2019s wrong with the Chinese Nation? In The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity, Edmund S.K. Fung examines how Chinese thinkers confronted this question as they encountered and sought to resolve the question of modernity. In broad philosophy, modernity has been formulated as a Western worldview, centered on Enlightenment, the guiding principle of reason and progress, … Continue reading “How to Formulate Chinese Modernity and Nationhood”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1793,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions\/1793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}