Culture & History of Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity

The essays in this volume grew from a series of talks delivered in late 2010 as the Liang Qichao Memorial Lectures at the Academy of National Learning (Guoxue yuan) of Tsinghua University, Beijing. Offering critical perspectives on a number of ideological issues that have figured prominently in Chinese intellectual discourse since the beginning of the so-called “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) in the late 1970s, these essays range widely in subject matter, from Marxist historiography to sociology and anthropology in China to guoxue/national studies. Together they are conceived as different windows into a basic problem: the deployment of culture and history in postrevolutionary Chinese thought. Dirlik touches on a number of themes, including the repudiation of the revolutionary past after 1978, which has led to a rise of cultural nationalism. He further places these developments within a global context, ultimately making a case methodologically for “worlding” China: bringing China into the world, and the world into China.