A Singular Entity
Peter C. Perdue: Classical China, 20 May 2021
What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael GibbsHill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019,978 0 674 73714 3 Show More
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael GibbsHill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019,
“... In the 1950s, Western scholars and Chinese émigrés were writing extensively on the classical tradition in China, but historians in the People’s Republic were constrained by a Marxist framework that sorted the major thinkers of the past into ‘materialists’ (good) and ‘idealists’ (bad). This impasse lasted until Mao’s death in 1976, but classical scholarship continued to be neglected into the 1980s, as a flood of translations entered China and with them a vast body of Western thought ... ”