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This chapter explores the significant role that Chinese religious traditions have played in the context of family planning and related issues. It argues that the idea of family planning or population management does not necessarily conflict with the long traditions of the Chinese religions. On the contrary, the compatibility between the modern idea of family planning and how it was conceived according to Chinese traditions is in fact an inherent cultural and spiritual resource that has enabled Chinese people to tolerate, accept, and even support the modern idea of family planning. “Chinese religious traditions” designates the two major indigenous religions: Confucianism and Taoism, which have shaped the Chinese cultural tradition since the Chou Dynasty (1066–256 b.c.e.), during which the classics or scriptures of both religions were composed by their initiators. This chapter focuses on the ideas and beliefs shared by both religions that have been absorbed into the larger contexts of Chinese culture.

As China's economy continues to modernize, observers have begun to wonder what sort of a power on the world stage China will actually become. Many analysts, particularly in the US, see China not simply as an emerging world power but a highly problematic and dangerous one. With thousands of years of history continuing to be an extraordinary presence in contemporary Chinese life and thought, China's current ideals of law present a mosaic of traditional legal conceptions, Western influences, and attempts to comply with the legal requirements of a fast-changing global economy. One factor that has greatly enhanced the perceived salience of the past throughout the long course of China's history has been the relative uniformity and stability of its written language. This powerful written tradition, and the comparative cultural uniformity that it has encouraged, has helped foster the intense and inwardly focused classicism that is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese intellectual life. This does not mean, however, that China's traditional culture mandates an intellectual ossification and sterile scholasticism that makes it not simply resistant but, in fact, positively immune to new ideas. Although it has not prevented innovation, the overpowering historicism of the Chinese tradition has nevertheless constrained the country by giving special advantages to those who can denounce and resist what they do not like by appealing to the authority of precedent. Hence, Chinese thinkers tend to present their own views as “simply a reaffirmation, an appeal to an ancient, legitimate but neglected tradition,” even when they are not.

This chapter examines the conceptions of statecraft and international order in the ancient Chinese traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Legalism, and bingjia, and how these impact the social and political philosophy of modern China as it relates to the rest of the world. It is shown that the Chinese intellectual tradition is suffused with a monist political ideology that conceives of international order in fundamentally hierarchical terms and idealizes interstate order as tending toward universal hegemony or actual empire. Hence, it lacks a meaningful concept of coequal, legitimate sovereignties pursuant to which states may coexist over the long term in nonhierarchical relationships. With the exception of Buddhism, such conceptions of international order may be seen in all the major philosophical currents that are examined. In a country as obsessed as China is with canonical texts and the present-day legitimacy that literary-historical precedent is felt to convey, this legacy of hierarchical assumptions about international order may also provide cause for concern to students of modern-day international relations.

This chapter traces the methodology of this study and attempts to place Liu Zhi in his historical context. In particular, the chapter uses the method of progressively narrowing the foci on both space and time in order to understand the positions of the Muslims in China as participants in what appears to be two cultures. That said, the chapter pointedly narrows down the focus from the emergence of Islam in China to an examination of Liu Zhi's background, shedding light on some motivations for undertaking his work and revealing sources of conceptual formulations and intellectual choices in his writings. In the interest of identifying where Liu Zhi differed and/or accorded with other intellectuals from the Islamic, Chinese, and Chinese-Islamic traditions, this chapter pinpoints the setting and epoch in which he lived as a first step to analyzing his work.

This chapter examines the recent revisionist literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are crucial for understanding the economic divergence in the modern era. It focuses on the comparative status of legal professionals or communities as a historical outcome of important differences in underlying political structures between China and England. It notes that the contrasts in legal regimes as revealed through the differential patterns of legal professions and jurisprudence in China and Western Europe directly impact the nature of these societies' property rights, contract enforcement, and ultimately their long-term growth trajectories.

This book aims to explain the Chinese conception of world order to Western readers, to outline the ways in which this worldview has helped shape China's relations with the rest of the world, not least with Western Europe and the US, and to suggest some potential implications that these dynamics might have for the future. Chinese conceptions of international order are mainly grounded in lessons drawn from its history, and its tradition has as its primary model for interstate relations a system in which the focus of national policy is, in effect, a struggle for primacy, and legitimate, stable order is possible only when one power reigns supreme. Its central assumptions are reflected in many aspects of China's classical cannon: in Confucian literature, Taoist works, and the manuals of war and statecraft known as the bingjia. Sinic monism, therefore, enjoys powerful roots in China's intellectual tradition that amplify its centrality as a prism through which all subsequent Chinese leaders have viewed their world and China's place in it. The implications of this cultural baggage have been profound in the past as they have influenced how China has lived out its encounters with others for many centuries and, most dramatically, have helped shape the contours of China's awkward, painful, and sometimes disastrous encounters with the modern industrialized West. Nevertheless, China's modern approach to international relations suggests an understanding that ideals of sovereign equality and international law are currently in China's interest. As its strength grows, however, China may well become much more assertive in insisting on the sort of Sinocentric hierarchy its history teaches it to expect and its traditional notions of power and legitimacy encourage it to demand.

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.

This book has explored how the meanings of folk cultural revivals in contemporary Yan'an are woven together by multiple actors and various political, economic, and social forces and initiatives. It has used the term “hyper-folk” to refer to the production and consumption of folk revival discourses and cultural practices in post-2000 Yan'an in order to highlight the distance between what is celebrated today as “Chinese folk tradition” and what was understood as exclusively peasant culture in the past. It has demonstrated how the cultural logic of late socialism converges political, social, economic, and communal forces and relations and, at the same time, makes their meanings and practices flexible and malleable to fit in various purposes and occasions. Finally, it has used “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.

This chapter examines perspectives on self, other, and the world in the Chinese tradition. It argues that the tendency to view China as a monolithic threat forecloses a potential contribution of Chinese culture to building a less confrontational world. Add to this that Confucianism proposes less dichotomised understandings of self and other than are on offer through realist international relations perspectives. In Confucianism the self can come into existence only through and with others, and it is in this stance that the chapter finds a compelling approach for conflict resolution. By focusing the discussion through a particular Confucian concept — shu — the chapter finds a philosophy for harmony and conflict resolution through mutual responsiveness among differences.

This chapter discusses the importance of reading the ‘Asian classics.’ The reading and understanding of a text should work, as much as possible, from the inside out rather than from the outside in. This means making the effort to put ourselves in the position or situation of the author and his audience. No reading of an Eastern text should be undertaken that is so removed from its original context as to be discussable only in direct juxtaposition to something Western. Such a reading leads almost inevitably to one-sided comparisons and does not serve genuine dialogue. Party to this new dialogue must be enough of the original discourse so that the issues can be defined in their own terms and not simply in opposition to, or agreement with, the West. The chapter then presents a list of classics that could be argued to be essential to a basic reading program. These texts can serve as an introduction the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions. They include works that have withstood the tests of time not only in their own traditions but in at least sixty years of reading and discussion with American students of all ages.

This chapter discusses the emergence of women artists and the female body in the Chinese art tradition in the twentieth century. It shows that throughout the course of China's search for modernity, Chinese women artists have constantly negotiated their positions in art history and contributed to the art canons. In reclaiming the female body once again since the 1990s, artists intend not simply to recover but to re-create women's art adrift in art history. Due not only to the quantity and quality of artists and works but also to a clearly inscribed gender consciousness and female aesthetics, for the first time in Chinese art history women's emerged art as a disciplinary category attracting visual analysis.

This introductory chapter emphasizes the importance of studying cross-media adaptations in Chinese literature and cinema. It posits two reasons for the scarcity of such comparative studies, noting the inherent difficulty of studying cross-media adaptation of any kind, as well as the peril of the inherently transtextual nature of Chinese cultural traditions. Given the latter issue in particular, this chapter presents a different approach for the study of Chinese adaptation: instead of imposing default frameworks such as region or genre on the empirical messiness of adaptation, the chapter posits a careful study of seven films that are ranked among the best, most influential, and most interesting examples in the modern history of Chinese adaptation. Blending historical contexts with close readings, this method will be used to identify and examine some of the richest and most revealing hermeneutic points of contact and divergence between source texts and films.

This chapter focuses on the pregnant nude in Chinese art. First, it examines how Yu Hong's Witness to Growth and Xing Danwen's Born with the Revolution use the pregnant body as a witness to social-political history. By locating the pregnant body side-by-side with official media images, Yu Hong's autobiographical unfolding generates an intertextual frame wherein the pregnant nude becomes an embodiment of political history. Xing Danwen's photographic representation frames the pregnant nude and portraits of Mao in a private space to connect the revolutionary past t contemporary interpretation. The chapter then investigates how Feng Jiali's Pregnancy Is Art turns the pregnant body (as well as pregnancy itself) into a gendered subject and art form. With the “monstrous body” inviting and challenging the gaze of the spectator, the pregnant subject subverts the notion of the nude body as “impossible” in art history. Seen together, these works advance the argument that the personal is political as the pregnant nude seizes a legitimate position in the rewriting of historiography and the creation of women's art.

This chapter traces a cultural genealogy of gossip in Shanghai as an everyday social practice, a recurring literary trope, and a form of counterhistory. In the Chinese cultural tradition, gossip has occupied a curious place between history and fiction. With the rise of modern journalism in Shanghai, the newspaper became a new medium for both fiction and gossip. Gossip columns often appeared in close juxtaposition with installments of fictional narratives, and the two genres likely shared some of the same subject matters and pool of readers. In the Shanghai of the 1930s, however, gossip—both in print and as a social practice—came under vehement attacks by progressive intellectuals condemning its cannibalistic powers, in which the entire society was complicit. After the Communist takeover of Shanghai, gossip ceased to occupy the printed page as virtually all tabloid newspapers and popular literary magazines closed down in the early years of the People's Republic.