Thinking China
Thinking China is an attempt over time to document Chinese thinkers and thinking, scholarship and intellectual enquiry. Our aim is to feature Chinese voices, arguments and accounts that allow English-language readers better understanding the many (often conflicting) strands that make up The China Story.
Key Articles contains summaries, explanations and links to texts of interest. It introduces readers to some of the significant writers and thinkers in the Sinophone world today. Dealing with topics that crystallize the thought of these writers – many of whom will be in the People’s Republic of China, although some will be writing in Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan and internationally – this section is aimed at providing insights into how the Chinese world’s voices of concern are responding to Chinese predicaments within the global context.
Many Chinese intellectuals have written about what they regard as the indiscriminate embrace of ‘imported ideas’ characteristic of twentieth-century Chinese thought, but few have articulated ways in which the productive assimilation of such ideas can over time contribute to ways in which Chinese ideas can circulate more widely in the global context – and how the international currency of Chinese thought may well contribute to the ways we all think about and inhabit a world culture of which China is a constituent and central part.
We believe that, whereas, many Western-trained Chinese academics have found a voice (or a niche) in global English-language discourse, in that context writings tend to reflect academic concerns, in particular American-centric academic concerns. We hope that, by casting the net wide and working with leading younger and established writers and thinkers throughout the Sinophone world the section Key Intellectuals will become a database of Chinese thinkers that can, in some small way, help redress these distorting imbalances.
Key Intellectuals
Sima Nan (司马南)
Steven NS Cheung 张五常
Wu Jiaxiang 吴稼祥
Li Yining 厉以宁
Currents of Thought
Jiang Shigong on 'Philosophy and History: Interpreting the "Xi Jinping Era" through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP’
Ai Weiwei on Art, Activism and Human Rights
Rong Jian 荣剑 on Thought and Scholarship in China
