"Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity" () is an influential article of around 35,000

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

in length by

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

intellectual historian Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual histor ...

and literary scholar Wang Hui, written in 1994 and published in left-wing literature journal ''Tianya'' (天涯) in 1997. An English translation by Rebecca E. Karl appeared in a volume of ''

Social Text ''Social Text'' is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, ''Social Text'' has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gende ...

'' titled "Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China" (1998). The article became the subject of intense debate and attention both for its

methodology In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bri ...

—an unusually socio-historical approach to intellectual history—and its expressed

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

, which are critical of

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...

modernity. According to academic Yue Gang, it is "a cornerstone in the transformation of contemporary Chinese thought" and "has become a benchmark for the

New Left The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, g ...

."Yue Gang. "Wang Hui." ''Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture''. Ed. Edward L. Davis. London: Routledge, 2005.

References

External links

* Wang Hui. "''Dangdai Zhongguo de Sixiang Zhuangkuang yu Xiandaixing Wenti''" ''Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity''" ''Tianya'' 5 (1997). * Wang Hui, tr. Rebecca E. Karl. "Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity." ''Social Text'
55
Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China (1998): pp. 9–44. Chinese New Left Magazine articles 1994 documents Works originally published in Chinese magazines Modernity {{PRChina-stub

See also

References

External links