Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

About the Series

About the Series The Formation and Development of Academic Disciplines in Twentieth-Century China John Makeham, Series Editor The series is the principal outcome of three annual workshops held in Canberra, Beijing and Hong Kong between 2007 and 2009 on the topic of “the Formation and Development of Academic Disciplines in TwentiethCentury China.” Our aim in these workshops was to construct a historically informed multidisciplinary framework to examine the complex processes by which traditional Chinese knowledge systems and indigenous grammars of knowledge construction interacted with Western paradigms to shape the formation and development of modern academic disciplines in China. The modern disciplines were formed as intellectuals sought new roles for themselves in the context of dramatic political change. New institutions—above all academic (schools, universities) and media (newspapers, book publishing)—provided the social basis for much work on specialized disciplines from the late Qing through the Republican period. The mutual interaction of traditional Chinese and modern Western knowledge paradigms and institutional practices shaped the formation and development of modern academic disciplines in China. Modern scholarship remains largely silent about how different domains of traditional knowledge practice responded to common challenges and the consequences of this for subsequent disciplinary developments . To what extent were new knowledge systems viewed as tools in the recovery of tradition rather than its abandonment? What were the thematics, conversations, controversies, and dominant modes of argument across these domains as they responded to the new challenges? To what extent and under what conditions did practitioners of traditional forms of learning concede authority to Western knowledge paradigms? viii · About the Series Specifically, we have sought to understand and analyze how traditional forms of Chinese scholarship were adapted to new knowledge paradigms; to identify the role played by indigenous “grammars” (inherited problematics and standards of rational justification) in shaping the formation of academic disciplines, and the concrete forms in which these grammars interacted with Western paradigms and concepts; to demonstrate how indigenous grammars of knowledge construction, and their ongoing complex interaction with Western paradigms, decisively influenced the formation and development of individual academic disciplines; and to examine the significance of the growing trend toward the indigenization (bentuhua) of knowledge systems and how it relates to broader contemporary concerns about the indigenization of knowledge in many social science and humanities disciplines. ...