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 socalled "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.