Description

The challenge for understanding modern Chinese intellectual history is to get beyond our assumptions and the big stories. For many, Chinese intellectuals are dissidents and democrats, people trying to be like us. The big stories are tied to what China is today. Recasting modern Chinese intellectual history requires us to find ways to break out of these set story lines. Looking at China’s thinkers and writers in terms of ideological moments and intellectual worlds can help us understand what intellectuals in different decades thought they were doing, what the problems were that they were addressing, and thus how to assess their contributions to enduring ideas in Chinese thought from the nature of “the people” to “Chinese” to “democracy.”

His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. His books include Critical Introduction to Mao (2010) Living with Reform: China Since 1989 (2006), Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions (2002) and Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China (1997), as well as New Perspectives on State Socialism in China (1997), with Tony Saich, and The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (1989) with Roderick MacFarquhar and Eugene Wu, and China’s Establishment Intellectuals (1986), with Carol Lee Hamrin. His new book, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History will be available on Cambridge University Press in 2015.