The Utopian Impulse and Chinese Political Modernity
Peter Zarrow
Department of History, University of Connecticut, Hartford, USA

Time:  Dec 17, 2021 04:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
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This paper discusses the role played by utopian “moves” that were made by political thinkers in the late Qing and Republican periods to build a new more or less democratic and socialist nation. An analysis of four case studies—Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi—reveals distinct but overlapping visions of political modernity. On one level, these were blurry visions of political modernity directly and indirectly derived from Western discourses, particularly those of the Enlightenment. But on another level, Chinese thinkers can be read as making dialogic contributions to evolving notions of political modernity in cosmopolitan spaces across the twentieth century and beyond.

Prof. Dr. Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen
Prof. Dr. Thomas Fröhlich, University of Hamburg

Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

Sponsor:

Academic Confucius Institute, University of Göttingen

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Image: sung ming whang: Early saturday morning in color, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), https://flic.kr/p/6E5PXd