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This chapter re-examines the political and philosophical ideas of Zhang Taiyan and addresses the question concerning the place of the individual in modern Chinese political thinking. It argues that implicit in Zhang's rejection of the collectivity was a much broader rejection of the ontological assumptions and epistemological positions that naturalized the rise of nation-states as a universal historical process for all people. It shows that Zhang's individuated self was freed from the materially determined collectivity only to be subsumed in a broader stream of subjectivity.

This chapter delves into the contents of Liu Zhi's work, focusing on his use of specific Chinese terms and concepts, their origins and meanings in Chinese thought, and their correspondence to Islamic principles. It places Liu Zhi's work within the larger context of the Han Kitāb texts, as readers of his work were expected to have read his other writings, if not the other texts of the Han Kitāb. In addition, any literate Chinese reader of the time would also have been intimately familiar with the texts of the classical Confucian canon that informed and influenced these writings. Thus it is with these contexts in mind that the chapter reads the Tianfang dianli, singling it out from the rest of Liu Zhi's Tianfang trilogy.

This chapter provides a historical overview of Peking. Peking first emerges in Chinese records of the Western Zhou dynasty (1027 to 770 BC). Starting in 403 BC, the Warring States period marked the final collapse of the nominal authority of the Zhou dynasty. This era also inculcated a deeply rooted fear of chaos in Chinese social thinking. Different dynasties of China are specifically described here. Chinese history seemed to slow down once Deng Xiao Ping inherited the Mandate of Heaven. Peking politics in the 1980s did not witness the dizzying volume of change as in prior years. By the 1990s, Peking had begun to experience economic growth that raised people's standard of living but snuffed out the remnants of Old Peking that somehow survived the brutality of the twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes how the Republican economic reformer Wu Juenong, in his attempts to revive the collapsed industry, articulated a criticism of the tea merchants as parasitic. These were the same houses who played a crucial, dynamic role during the nineteenth-century golden years of Chinese tea. What had changed by the 1930s was not the comprador (buyer) and tea warehouse merchants' own behavior but instead the perspectives of Chinese economic thought, now rooted in a division between “productive” labor and “unproductive” finance. The chapter introduces the comprador both as a real, historical institution and as a theoretical category in modern Chinese history. As with free labor in India, the oppositional categories of productive and unproductive labor in China signaled an embrace of the industrial capitalist model by nationalists across Asia, in spite of a dearth of the traditional signs of industrialization in either region.

Securitization does not happen in a vacuum. Key functional actors can play a very important role in helping the securitizing actor to understand the nature of the threat to the referent object. In foreign policy, this is particularly true when the policymakers are not familiar with the issue at hand and, therefore, there is ample room for other actors to influence them. This chapter, however, shows that the Chinese foreign policy bureaucracy and the community of experts was only partially able to do aid this securitization. These findings emerge from an examination of the development of the Chinese diplomatic system in terms of regional expertise, personnel, resources, and political standing. As for the scholars in Chinese universities and think tanks, they lacked either the skills or the influence to warn the government about the risks brewing in North Africa and the Middle East. At most, they were able to shape the government’s response to the crisis in those regions only after it took place.

Focusing on the writings of Confucius and the Confucian tradition, Joel Jay Kassiola argues that looking beyond the Western political thought makes obvious sense in an era of globalization and planetary environmental crisis; moreover, such a move enables us to escape the narrow perspectives that have contributed to our ecological predicament. Confucius and Confucianism provide a particularly valuable understanding of our times: Confucius wrote in response to a society that, like our own, was confused and bewildered by a transformative moment in history and widespread sense of perceived crisis; Confucius valued past teachings and thus offered an intergenerational perspective; and the later Confucian tradition advanced a cosmology attuned to an ecological perspective. While Western religious cosmology envisions a discrete moment of creation by a divine creator, a view that fosters a dualism of humanity and nature, Neo-Confucian thought sees nature as always existing in an endless, ongoing process of creation. Furthermore, the Confucian tradition is non-anthropocentric, as it posits a fundamental continuity and unity among humanity, Heaven, and Earth, a view that, in turn, entails respect and care for nonhuman nature.

Both Chinese thinkers of a century ago and contemporary scholars struggle with the realization that their received modes of viewing the world derive not from universally accessible and transparent foundations but from local, historically situated traditions of thought. These parallels suggest that the Western Learning conversations examined in this book can be read as more than simply the instrumental rhetoric of self-colonization or the mark of the inevitable demise of “Confucian China” in the face of Western modernity. Rather, these conversations offer more general methodological lessons about how individuals and societies might confront their own ethnocentrism by learning from cultural others in radically self-transformative ways, contributing to debates in comparative political theory and postcolonial studies.

This chapter demonstrates that military power and its purpose of legalizing civil rule were topics of particular interest to intellectuals and statesmen from the fourth through first centuries BCE. Contrary to some long-standing characterizations of early Chinese thought as pacifist, there was a sophisticated and broadly based discourse during these centuries on the nature of warfare, its cosmological and moral underpinnings, its role in history, and its importance to the stability of the state. This discourse developed alongside a more technical discourse on such topics as mobilization, weaponry, defensive strategies, and deployment of formations—some of which were recorded in the early military treatises that survive to this day.