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Author: Dingxin Zhao
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Early Empire
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 473
ISBN-13: 0199351732
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"The Confucian-Legalist State proposes a new theory of social change and, in doing so, analyzes the patterns of Chinese history, such as the rise and persistence of a unified empire, the continuous domination of Confucianism, and China's impossibility to develop industrial capitalism without being compelled by Western imperialism"--
Author: Dingxin Zhao
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-09-22
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13: 0190463619
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In The Confucian-Legalist State, Dingxin Zhao offers a radically new analysis of Chinese imperial history from the eleventh century BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty. This study first uncovers the factors that explain how, and why, China developed into a bureaucratic empire under the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. It then examines the political system that crystallized during the Western Han dynasty, a system that drew on China's philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Legalism. Despite great changes in China's demography, religion, technology, and socioeconomic structures, this Confucian-Legalist political system survived for over two millennia. Yet, it was precisely because of the system's resilience that China, for better or worse, did not develop industrial capitalism as Western Europe did, notwithstanding China's economic prosperity and technological sophistication beginning with the Northern Song dynasty. In examining the nature of this political system, Zhao offers a new way of viewing Chinese history, one that emphasizes the importance of structural forces and social mechanisms in shaping historical dynamics. As a work of historical sociology, The Confucian-Legalist State aims to show how the patterns of Chinese history were not shaped by any single force, but instead by meaningful activities of social actors which were greatly constrained by, and at the same time reproduced and modified, the constellations of political, economic, military, and ideological forces. This book thus offers a startling new understanding of long-term patterns of Chinese history, one that should trigger debates for years to come among historians, political scientists, and sociologists.
Author: Dingxin Zhao
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-10-16
Total Pages: 688
ISBN-13: 0199351740
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In The Confucian-Legalist State, Dingxin Zhao offers a radically new analysis of Chinese imperial history from the eleventh century BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty. This study first uncovers the factors that explain how, and why, China developed into a bureaucratic empire under the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. It then examines the political system that crystallized during the Western Han dynasty, a system that drew on China's philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Legalism. Despite great changes in China's demography, religion, technology, and socioeconomic structures, this Confucian-Legalist political system survived for over two millennia. Yet, it was precisely because of the system's resilience that China, for better or worse, did not develop industrial capitalism as Western Europe did, notwithstanding China's economic prosperity and technological sophistication beginning with the Northern Song dynasty. In examining the nature of this political system, Zhao offers a new way of viewing Chinese history, one that emphasizes the importance of structural forces and social mechanisms in shaping historical dynamics. As a work of historical sociology, The Confucian-Legalist State aims to show how the patterns of Chinese history were not shaped by any single force, but instead by meaningful activities of social actors which were greatly constrained by, and at the same time reproduced and modified, the constellations of political, economic, military, and ideological forces. This book thus offers a startling new understanding of long-term patterns of Chinese history, one that should trigger debates for years to come among historians, political scientists, and sociologists.
Author: Zhengyuan Fu
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16
Total Pages: 151
ISBN-13: 1315285231
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This text discusses the Chinese Legalists, an ancient school of Chinese philosophy which flourished during the Period of the Hundred Contending Schools (6th-3rd century B.C.E.) The school perfected the science of government and art of statecraft to a level that would have greatly impressed Machiavelli. This period and its personalities, as well as a taste of the style and spirit of the Legalists' discourse, are made accessible to the student and general reader, placing into focus the roots of the great Chinese philosophy-as-statecraft tradition. The Legalists - most famously Li Kui, Shang Yang, Shen Buhai, Shen Dao, and Han Fei - had a great impact not only on the institutions and practices of Chinese imperial tradition but also on the Maoist totalitarianism of the People's Republic of China.
Author: Shao-yun Yang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-10-14
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 0295746017
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
Author: Yan Xuetong
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-25
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1400848954
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From China's most influential foreign policy thinker, a vision for a "Beijing Consensus" for international relations The rise of China could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will China look like in the future? What should it look like? And what will China's rise mean for the rest of world? This book, written by China's most influential foreign policy thinker, sets out a vision for the coming decades from China's point of view. In the West, Yan Xuetong is often regarded as a hawkish policy advisor and enemy of liberal internationalists. But a very different picture emerges from this book, as Yan examines the lessons of ancient Chinese political thought for the future of China and the development of a "Beijing consensus" in international relations. Yan, it becomes clear, is neither a communist who believes that economic might is the key to national power, nor a neoconservative who believes that China should rely on military might to get its way. Rather, Yan argues, political leadership is the key to national power, and morality is an essential part of political leadership. Economic and military might are important components of national power, but they are secondary to political leaders who act in accordance with moral norms, and the same holds true in determining the hierarchy of the global order. Providing new insights into the thinking of one of China's leading foreign policy figures, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in China's rise or in international relations.
Author: John Makeham
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1994-07-22
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 143841174X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first Western study of the philosophy of Xu Gan (170-217), a Confucian thinker who lived at a nodal point in the history of Chinese thought, when Han scholasticism had become ossified and the creative and independent quality that characterized Wei-Jin thought was just emerging. As the theme of his study, Makeham develops an original and richly detailed account of ming shi, 'name and actuality,' one of the key pairs of concepts in early Chinese thought. He shows how Xu Gan's understanding of the 'name and actuality' relationship was most immediately influenced by Xu Gan's understanding of why the Han dynasty had collapsed, yet had its roots in a tradition of discourse that spanned the classical period (circa 500-150 B.C.E.). In reconstructing the philosophical background of Xu Gan's understanding of the relationship between 'name and actuality,' Makeham identifies two antithetical theories of naming in early Chinese thought—nominalist and correlative—a distinction that is as great as the Realist-Nominalist distinction of Western thought. He shows how Xu Gan's views on the name and actuality relationship were animated, on the one hand, by a rejection of nominalist theories of naming, and on the other hand, by a novel appropriation of correlative theories of naming. The study also analyzes two of the more immediate social and intellectual issues in the late Eastern Han (25-220) period that had prompted Xu Gan to discuss the name and actuality relationship: the ethos of the scholar-gentry (ming jiao) and Han approaches to classical scholarship. Makeham demonstrates how Xu Gan's critique of these matters is valuable not only as a late Han philosophical account of what had led to the demise of the 400-year-old Han dynasty, but also as a mode of conceptualizing that contributed to the new direction that philosophical thinking took in the third century C.E..
Author: Daniel K. Gardner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 0195398912
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume shows the influence of the Sage's teachings over the course of Chinese history--on state ideology, the civil service examination system, imperial government, the family, and social relations--and the fate of Confucianism in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China developed alongside a modernizing West and Japan. Some Chinese intellectuals attempted to reform the Confucian tradition to address new needs; others argued for jettisoning it altogether in favor of Western ideas and technology; still others condemned it angrily, arguing that Confucius and his legacy were responsible for China's feudal, ''backward'' conditions in the twentieth century and launching campaigns to eradicate its influences. Yet Chinese continue to turn to the teachings of Confucianism for guidance in their daily lives.
Author:
Publisher: Broadview Press
Published: 2018-11-30
Total Pages: 399
ISBN-13: 1460405641
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Philosophers of the Warring States is an anthology of new translations of essential readings from the classic texts of early Chinese philosophy, informed by the latest scholarship. It includes the Analects of Confucius, Meng Zi (Mencius), Xun Zi, Mo Zi, Lao Zi (Dao De Jing), Zhuang Zi, and Han Fei Zi, as well as short chapters on the Da Xue and the Zhong Yong. Pedagogically organized, this book offers philosophically sophisticated annotations and commentaries as well as an extensive glossary explaining key philosophical concepts in detail. The translations aim to be true to the originals yet accessible, with the goal of opening up these rich and subtle philosophical texts to modern readers without prior training in Chinese thought.
Author: Craig Benjamin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-05-03
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1107114969
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.
