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This chapter looks at the enactment of political agendas under the guise of humanitarian outreach through the operations of the CIA-funded Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, Inc. (ARCI). This ostensibly nongovernmental agency targeted intellectual Chinese for assistance and migration, first to aid the Nationalists on Taiwan and then to the United States in fulfillment of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Despite the limits of U.S. assistance, the Department of State, through the Office of Refugee and Migration Affairs (ORM) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), sought to maximize the impact of such symbolic relief programs. Cold War propaganda proclaimed American friendship and concern for Chinese overseas while reassuring Americans domestically that applicants vetted not only for political views but also for prearranged employment.

This chapter examines the contemporary debate in China over whether Confucianism should be classified as a religion. It begins by introducing the formation of the official religious classification, the Five Major Religions, in the 1950s in socialist China. The chapter then turns to the contemporary Confucianism as a religion controversy in 2000–2004, an important debate among Chinese intellectuals with significant academic, social, and political implications. It argues that ideas are shaped by their social situations, and that the ideas about Confucianism, like many other bodies of knowledge, were shaped by and yet succeeded in transcending their specific environments of origin. The chapter draws on interviews with officials from the State Administration of Religious Affairs, with members of the Department of Confucianism, and with the current head of the Institute of World Religions.

This chapter focuses on the intellectuals' voluntary attachment to the ruler's service as their single most significant choice. It elucidates both the advantages of this choice and its price. Having opted for a political career, leading intellectuals had to accept their position as the emperor's servitors, which was at odds with their self-proclaimed moral superiority over the throne; and the resultant tension between their roles as the leaders and the led generated persistent frustration and manifold tragedies. Yet bitterness aside, the voluntary attachment of the intellectuals to the throne had also greatly empowered the educated elite as a whole. For two-odd millennia, members of this stratum navigated the empire through many storms and challenges, contributing decisively toward the preservation of the imperial political structure, and of its cultural foundations, against all odds.

This book argues that the works of Lin Shu and his collaborators offer a unique perspective on the transformation of mental labor and intellectual work in modern China. Lin Shu's career epitomized how positions for educated people in urban cultural and educational institutions quickly appeared and vanished during the early twentieth century. This chapter places the history of his career in the context of a number of scholarly discussions, including the cultural history of modern China, translation studies, and comparative literature.

This chapter takes a look at the scope of mathematics in Ancient and Medieval China. Although the Chinese engaged in numerical calculation as early as the middle of the second millennium BCE, the earliest detailed written evidence of the solution of mathematical problems in China is the Suan shu shu (or Book of Numbers and Computation), a book discovered in a tomb dated to approximately 200 BCE. The Suan shu shu was part of the Chinese intellectual culture shaped in part by China's tempestuous political history. Within this history, Chinese mathematicians—who seemingly worked in isolation and in widely disparate parts of the country—gradually developed new methods for treating various problems that their works needed to contain. Here, the chapter discusses various mathematical explorations set out by Chinese scholars, such as the Chinese remainder problem.

Erik Hammerstrom’s chapter examines the participation of Buddhist intellectuals in the early 1920s “Science and Philosophy of Life” debates; he shows how Buddhist intellectuals adopted and promoted modern scientific taxonomies of knowledge and scientific empiricism in ways informed by their Buddhist thinking that subsequently tempered, complicated, expanded, and deepened the modern Chinese discourse on science even as they advanced it.

The period following China's defeat and humiliation at the hands of Western powers saw a good deal of rumination about how the country should move on from these challenges. After making very little progress in adopting Western technology and methods and combining these with the underlying virtue and strength of the Celestial Empire, some Chinese reformers suggested reforms based on the belief that Confucianism had become corrupted and that certain aspects of the Chinese culture had kept it backward and weak compared to the West. When these reform efforts also failed, a radical group of reformers emerged in the early twentieth century, proposing the outright rejection of Confucianism. This movement coalesced into what became known as the May Fourth Movement, which viewed much of China's cultural tradition as an obstacle to modernization. The movement marked a watershed for Chinese nationalist thinking, which thereafter focused heavily on anti-traditionalist modernization and had a fiercely anti-imperialist outlook, approaches that would strongly influence the Chinese Communist Party.

This chapter continues to discuss the issues surrounding opinion and perception research in the People’s Republic of China. It stresses the difficulty of ascertaining “true” opinions in a propaganda-saturated sociopolitical environment, but argues that there is nonetheless real value in studying expressed Chinese views and the regime’s “official narrative” of the United States for what it can reveal about China itself. China’s America experts are intellectuals who work for think tanks or research institutions and analyze U.S. actions for the consumption of the general public. Most of these organizations are directly or indirectly funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and as such, public opinion surveys and data analysis of the results often do not accurately represent the feelings of the general public.

This chapter closes the study with a brief survey of Lin Shu’s reputation in the years following his death, from the slightly moderated criticism of New Culture and May Fourth scholars to his students’ revisionist canonization of his “pure and chaste writing” (zhenwen) and concludes with a discussion of the significance of his career in the formation of intellectual work in modern China.

This chapter focuses on Yan Fu, one of the most influential translators in modern China in order to illustrate how Chinese authors and translators developed a workable and sustainable banquan system to cope with their changing economic life at the turn of the twentieth century. Yan Fu is often considered by contemporary legal scholars and intellectual historians to be one of the earliest Chinese intellectuals to promote banquan/copyright. Like Fukuzawa Yukichi, Yan Fu has been known for introducing and articulating Western knowledge to his countrymen as the secret of Western wealth and power. It takes a close look at how Yan Fu changed his work pattern, negotiated with publishers for remuneration and royalties, developed various mechanisms to remotely monitor his publishers and calculate his royalties, and eventually achieved his goal. The chapter also explains how banquan/copyright was owned and transferred by booksellers and authors as a kind of incorporeal property.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book reconstructed the political vision offered in the three Classical Confucian texts: the Analects, Mencius, and Xinzu. For a long time, the Chinese intellectual tradition did not receive academic interest in its own right similar to that received by the Western tradition. While the urgency of the renewed interest in it is both timely and welcome, it has meant that the Confucian texts are now mined with a view to contemporary concerns. Many of the political discussions in the early texts have thus been ignored for being irrelevant today. As a result, the book's interpretation of early Confucianism meshes with the recent trend in the discipline of political theory, which critiques the post-Kantian approach that takes ethics as a basis.

Although the Great Unity Herald was the Manchukuo State Council's official newspaper, hundreds of works of resistance literature were published in four supplements, where intellectuals wrote their history and expressed a spirit of resistance via literary channels. Supplements to the Great Unity Herald demonstrate strong deviations from political and cultural identities fostered by the Manchukuo state. This study excavates and analyses supplements and works of resistance literature, finding that Manchukuo authorities oppressed at least 49 editors, journalists, and authors, resulting in arrest, execution, or forced exile for the majority. With support of resistance organizations, and despite official oppression, a prevalent phenomenon of divergence from state narratives developed in supplements within Manchukuo's Chinese newspapers.