Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives (Asia in the New Millennium) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813136423 ISBN 13: 9780813136424

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky, 2012

Synopsis

Westerners seem united in the belief that China has emerged as a major economic power and that this success will most likely continue indefinitely. But they are less certain about the future of China's political system. China's steps toward free market capitalism have led many outsiders to expect increased democratization and a more Western political system. The Chinese, however, have developed their own version of capitalism. Westerners view Chinese politics through the lens of their own ideologies, preventing them from understanding Chinese goals and policies.

In Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang bring together leading Chinese intellectuals to debate the main political ideas shaping the rapidly changing nation. Investigating such topics as the popular "China Model", the resurgence of Chinese Confucianism and its applications to the modern world, and liberal socialism, the contributors move beyond usual analytical frameworks toward what Dallmayr and Zhao call "a dismantling of ideological straitjackets." Comprising a broad range of opinions and perspectives, Contemporary Chinese Political Thought is the most up-to-date examination in English of modern Chinese political attitudes and discourse.

Features contributions from Ji Wenshun, Zhou Lian, Zhao Tingyang, Zhang Feng, Liu Shuxian, Chen Ming, He Baogang, Ni Peimin, Ci Jiwei, Cui Zhiyuan, Frank Fang, Wang Shaoguang, and Cheng Guangyun.

About this title

About the Author:

Fred Dallmayr, Emeritus Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Return to Nature? An Ecological Counterhistory.

Zhao Tingyang, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and professor at Capital Normal University, is the author of Studies of a Bad World: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy.

Review:

"There is a sore need for a work which introduces the diverse strands of contemporary Chinese political thinking to an anglophone audience, and this book is the best I've seen so far. Contemporary Chinese Political Thought shows that there are lively and intellectually rigorous debates in Chinese political theory."―Daniel A. Bell, Jiaotong University and Tsinghua University

"A splendid example of the need now to go beyond merely learning about the Chinese to appreciating that we may well have much to learn from them. As we all struggle to re-think political ideas of liberty, democracy, international relations and social justice, the intellectually sophisticated essays gathered here offer a multiplicity of differing interpretations of these ideas―often against a Confucian background―that are not found in most contemporary Western writings on them, thus providing us with a far richer perspective from which to analyze and evaluate differing solutions proposed for the manifold political problems facing our increasingly fragile economic, political and social worlds in the age of globalization. All of the essays are accessible to the non-initiate, aided by an excellent introduction by Dallmayr."―Henry Rosemont Jr., Brown University

"This intelligent anthology is a most welcome intervention at a time when Chinese power and influence has increased exponentially to reconfigure the economic, political, and indeed, cultural order of the world. The editors―political philosophers Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang―have drawn upon the most timely work of a distinguished assembly of scholars from different corners of the globe to engage one of the defining questions of our time: Whither China? And the answer is a complex and heterogonous set of arguments that the Chinese future, true to its own enduring tradition, will be a confluence of some kind―and there is a rich difference of opinion here on what kind―between the currents flowing from its past as they encounter the strong eddies of a Western modernity that continue to play along the Chinese shore."―Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai'i

"This book provides one of the first platforms for a more balanced view on China and serious academic communication between Chinese and US scholars. ― Stella Xu, Roanoke College"―Pacific Affairs

"Dallmayr and Zhao are to be congratulated for having assembled such a thought-provoking set of essays...By collecting in one place the work of scholars located in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States, and by presenting their scholarship in English, the editors help to enable a still-more-inclusive and global debate about what is distinctive about Chinese poltical thinking today―and about what we can all learn from these efforts to "rethink China."―Stephen C. Angle, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy

"Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, presents a vital new source that promises to help untie some of these knots complicating China's ties with its immediate neighbors and other major powers."―Swaran Singh, The Hindu

"This anthology, edited by Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang, contains deep analyses by academics in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States."―Walter C. Clements, author of North Korea and the World: Human Rights, Arms Control, and Strategies for Negotiation

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0813136423
• ISBN 13: 9780813136424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 306
• Editor: Dallmayr Fred, Tingyang Zhao