Description:

The definitive history of China's philosophical confrontation with modernity, available for the first time in English.
What does it mean for China to be modern, or for modernity to be Chinese? How is the notion of historical rupture—a fundamental distinction between tradition and modernity—compatible or not with the history of Chinese thought?
These questions animate The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, a sprawling intellectual history considered one of the most significant achievements of modern Chinese scholarship, available here in English for the first time. Wang Hui traces the seventh-century origins of three key ideas—"principle" (li), "things" (wu), and "propensity" (shi)—and analyzes their continual evolution up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Confucian scholars grappled with the problem of linking transcendental law to the material world, thought to action—a goal that Wang argues became...

Review

Hui Wang's The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought arrives in English as something between a monument and an earthquake. At nearly a quarter-million words, this translation of the first two volumes of Wang's four-volume Chinese original is the kind of scholarly production that reshapes fields by sheer weight. But what makes the book genuinely destabilizing is not its length. It is the consistency with which Wang refuses every available framework for narrating the relationship between Chinese intellectual history and modernity—and the rigor with which he builds an alternative from within the Confucian tradition's own conceptual resources. The book is not, its author insists, a search for the Chinese origins of modern thought. It is a reconstruction of how Chinese thinkers produced and reproduced their own intellectual world across eight centuries of structural transformation, and what that internal history might say to a global academy that has rarely been willing to take Confucian thought on its own terms.

This is an argument against teleology in all its forms. Wang rejects the Kyoto School thesis that the Song dynasty marked an "early modernity" parallel to early modern Europe. He rejects the May Fourth narrative that reads Chinese history as a long stagnation broken only by the traumatic arrival of Western ideas. He rejects the secularization story that treats the rise of Neo-Confucian "Principle" as a rationalization akin to the European Enlightenment. And he rejects the empire/nation-state binary that frames modern Chinese state-building as a simple passage from one political form to another. In place of these, Wang offers the concept of "transsystemic society" (kuatixi shehui) and a method he calls reading from "the internal perspective and horizon" (neizai shiye). The result is a book that positions itself as the methodological counterweight to two centuries of Western scholarship on China—and as an intervention in contemporary Chinese debates about how to understand the civilization that produced the present.

The argument's foundation, laid across the book's opening chapters, is that the establishment of the Heavenly Principle (tianli) worldview in the Song dynasty constituted a fundamental transformation in how Confucians evaluated politics, morality, and institutions. Wang's claim is not that Song thinkers invented something called "modernity" before Europe did. It is that they faced a structural problem—the separation of institutions from ritual—that forced them to develop a new mode of moral evaluation, one that could no longer ground legitimacy in existing bureaucratic and political arrangements. The ancient unity of rites, music, governance, and cosmology had fractured. The centralized bureaucratic state, the commercial economy, the examination system: these were facts of Song life that could not simply be wished away. Yet they could not provide their own moral justification. The School of Principle responded, Wang argues, with a paradoxical mode of thought: it critiqued the new conditions by appealing to antiquity while simultaneously accepting the historical rationality of those very conditions.

The passage that crystallizes this argument deserves to be quoted at length. Wang writes: "We can summarize the basic stance of the School of Principle in this way: it opposed the techniques of politics (imperial power and bureaucratic government under the conditions of centralized administration) with Heavenly Way / Heavenly Principle, opposed market movements with a recovery of the patriarchal clan system, opposed trade and tax law with the 'well-field' system, opposed the examination system with a school system, opposed the official ranking system with the ideal of perfected virtue, and opposed foreign cultures (Buddhism) and historical changes with the restoration of antiquity." Every term in that sequence names a real historical conflict. The well-field system was an idealized ancient land-tenure arrangement that had no purchase on Song property relations. The patriarchal clan system was being transformed by the rise of commoner landlords. The examination system was the engine of social mobility and the object of intense ethical anxiety. To invoke these ancient forms was not, Wang insists, to be a reactionary. It was to construct a moral standard outside the existing institutional order—a standard that could judge that order without being reducible to it.

This is where Wang's argument cuts against one of the most persistent habits in the Western study of Chinese thought: the impulse to read Confucianism as a legitimating ideology for state power. Wang's School of Principle is not a handmaiden to imperial authority. It is a critical enterprise that, by separating moral evaluation from institutional evaluation, created the conceptual space for judging the state by standards the state did not control. The claim is controversial, and Wang knows it. He takes explicit aim at the New Confucian reading—associated most prominently with Mou Zongsan—that treats Song-Ming thought as a self-standing moral metaphysics, a Chinese version of Kantian autonomy. Wang insists that the Heavenly Principle concept cannot be understood apart from its historical conditions: the fiscal pressures of the Two-Tax system, the north-south ethnic conflicts, the competition between the School of Principle and Wang Anshi's New Policies. The conflict between Zhu Xi and Wang Anshi, he argues, "cannot be ascribed to the problems of Nature and Way and political administration, but rather ought to be understood as a conflict between two different methods of moral evaluation." Wang Anshi sought to unify morality and institutions through the state's reform apparatus. The School of the Way refused that unification, locating moral authority in an internal standard—"Principle," "Nature," "Mind"—that transcended any particular institutional arrangement.

The richness of Wang's treatment of Song intellectual history lies in his willingness to let the contradictions remain unresolved. The Heavenly Principle worldview "involved an open-minded attitude toward historical change, with the propensity of the times itself being an inherent element of that worldview." This means that the same conceptual apparatus that critiqued commercialization also acknowledged its inevitability; the same scholars who defended the well-field system as a moral ideal accepted the Two-Tax system as an irreversible fact. Wang calls this the "natural propensity of Principle" (ziran zhi lishi), retrieving the concept from Liu Zongyuan's Tang-dynasty essay "On Enfeoffment" and tracing it through Zhu Xi's judgments on Wang Anshi. Zhu Xi could call the New Policies "unavoidable, because of propensity" while still criticizing them as not "of themselves taking the moderate path." The distinction is subtle but crucial: historical necessity does not confer moral legitimacy, and moral legitimacy does not require historical restoration. It is a mode of thought that has no easy parallel in European intellectual history—not conservatism, not progressivism, not the dialectic in any straightforward Hegelian sense.

When the book pivots, in its second half, to the late-Qing crisis and the thought of Wei Yuan and Kang Youwei, the stakes become explicit and contemporary. Wang frames the Opium Wars and the collapse of the tribute system not simply as a military defeat but as a confrontation between world-systems. "The conflict beginning in the mid-Qing period was one not only between states, but between world-systems and their attendant rules." The tribute system, which John K. Fairbank's influential scholarship had treated as a closed, self-centered ritual order, is shown by Wang to have already encompassed treaty-based diplomacy—the treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kyakhta (1727), the Lifan Yuan's management of Inner Asian relations—that complicate any simple opposition between "tribute" and "treaty." At the same time, Wang reads European international law as a regional Christian system whose claim to universality was produced by colonial expansion, not philosophical transcendence. He cites the American diplomat Caleb Cushing's frank admission to the US Senate in 1844 that international law "is in fact only the international law of Christendom," and notes that Oppenheim, writing in 1905, dated international law's origins to a mere four centuries prior.

Wei Yuan's Gazetteer of the Maritime States—the encyclopedic survey of global geography and politics completed in the wake of the First Opium War—is the pivot on which this argument turns. Wang reads it against the grain of its usual reception as a primer of Western learning. It is, he insists, "first of all, a military treatise." Its opening sections are devoted to strategies of defense, war, and negotiation. Its framework is furnished by the Gongyang commentary tradition on the Spring and Autumn Annals, with its categories of inner and outer, Chinese and barbarian, now transposed onto a genuinely global stage. "Wei Yuan was clearly convinced that the challenge faced by China was structural and systemic, and thus that there was no way to respond to and resolve this challenge through specific measures of war and trade alone." The insight matters because it reframes late-Qing statecraft thought not as a desperate borrowing from the West but as an internal reconfiguration of Confucian political categories to meet a new structural situation. Wang's Wei Yuan is not a proto-modernizer in the May Fourth sense. He is a Gongyang strategist operating with conceptual tools that long predate the European intrusion—and that turn out to be remarkably supple in the face of it.

The book's intellectual climax comes in its extended treatment of Kang Youwei, the late-Qing reformer whose utopian vision of "Great Unity" (datong) has been alternately celebrated as a Chinese precursor to socialism and dismissed as the crank cosmology of a man who never quite grasped modernity's real mechanisms. Wang takes Kang with extraordinary seriousness. He reconstructs Kang's scholarly project—the attack on the Old Text classics as Liu Xin's forgeries, the elevation of Confucius to Sage-King and "New King," the reading of the Spring and Autumn Annals through the Three Ages framework—as a politically motivated argument for constitutional monarchy, centralized administration, and the transformation of the Qing multiethnic empire into a sovereign state. Kang's 1888 Forged Classics of the Wang Mang Period was, Wang shows, an intervention in the regency crisis of the Guangxu era. To equate Liu Xin's forgery with Wang Mang's usurpation was to argue, under the cover of classical philology, that "a false monarch and a false scholar" had once before deceived All-under-Heaven—and that the Cixi regency was its contemporary recurrence.

The argument deepens when Wang turns to the internal logic that links Kang's state-building program to his universalist vision. "Now is the Age of Disorder," Kang wrote in a 1902 letter to overseas Chinese, "and so the state cannot transcend directly to global datong; those in the old ways of an absolute monarch can likewise not transcend directly to the age of democracy." Constitutional monarchy was, for Kang, a necessary intermediate stage—a bridge from the Age of Disorder through the Age of Approaching Peace toward the Age of Great Peace. Wang draws out the implication: Kang's centralization of imperial power contains an intrinsic "logic of self-negation." The same imperial authority that must be strengthened in the present is the authority that will be superseded when the Three Ages reach their culmination. Centralization is the means by which centralization is overcome. The nation-state is the form through which the nation-state is transcended.

Wang's treatment of Kang's Book of Great Unity pushes this dialectic to its limit. Kang's datong is a vision of radical equality: the abolition of private property, the socialization of reproduction, the dissolution of the family, the transcendence of racial and national boundaries. Wang reads it as the Confucian counterpart to European socialism—"a historical movement that developed from the Confucian tradition in response to the independence of the nation-state." Where European socialism grew from the Christian tradition's critique of the secular religion of the nation-state, Kang's datong grew from the Confucian tradition's resources for imagining a world beyond the Middle Kingdom. Both were responses to the same structural pressure: the consolidation of the nation-state form as the default unit of political legitimacy. Both sought to transcend that form from within.

The parallel is illuminating, and Wang does not oversell it. He acknowledges the contradictions that riddle Kang's universalism. Kang's racial egalitarianism—his insistence that "Manchu and Mongolians are all of the same race as us"—coexists uneasily with a "scientific" hierarchy that treats white, yellow, brown, and black races as unequally capable of assimilation. His feminism, which denounces sexual discrimination as "the most appalling, unjust, and unequal matters and affairs" and demands that "women should be considered exactly the same as men," is grounded in Confucian "natural humaneness" rather than a rights framework—a grounding that is both its strength (it does not depend on Western liberalism) and its limit (it has no clear institutional mechanism for enforcement). And the grand synthesis between Explorations of the Reforms Advocated by Confucius and The Book of Great Unity remains, as Wang admits, constitutively unstable. The "lasting entanglement, contradiction, and disjunction between the transcendence of the nation-state found in the logic of datong and the desire for wealth and power found in the logic of strengthening the country" is never resolved. It is held open as a productive tension—an antinomy built into the structure of modern Chinese thought itself.

These tensions are not weaknesses in Wang's reading. They are its central insight. Kang Youwei emerges from these pages not as a failed utopian but as a thinker who grasped, with unnerving clarity, the contradiction at the heart of China's modern predicament: the nation-state was both the necessary condition of survival and the obstacle to the universalist horizon that gave Confucian civilization its meaning. Wang's Kang is a "self-critical antimodern modernist"—a figure who used the resources of the tradition to construct a vision of modernity that already contained its own critique. The formulation is dense, but it captures something essential. Kang's datong was not a retreat from modernity into nostalgia. It was an attempt to think modernity through to its own supersession, using tools that modernity did not itself provide.

The book's place within the intellectual traditions of the library's controlled vocabulary is revealing, and somewhat awkward. Wang operates recognizably within the materialist tradition: the analysis of land tenure, tax systems, class formation, and state structure is thorough and central to the argument. The anti-imperialist framing—the reading of international law as a colonial production, the exposure of the opium trade's structural role in British-India-China triangular relations—is explicit. The decolonial refusal to accept European conceptual frameworks as universal yardsticks runs through every chapter. And there is a deep engagement with the critical theory tradition's concern with the relationship between normative claims and historical conditions. Yet the book's most distinctive concepts—Heavenly Principle, the Three Ages, datong, transsystemic society, the separation of institutions from ritual—fall outside the canonical vocabulary entirely. Wang has written a work of Marxist-inflected, anti-imperialist, decolonial intellectual history whose central categories are drawn from the Neo-Confucian and New Text traditions. The library's taxonomy can register the book's politics but not its conceptual vocabulary. That is, in a way, Wang's whole point: the categories that matter most in Chinese intellectual history are not easily mapped onto the ones the Anglophone academy has ready to hand.

The book's weaknesses are real and worth naming. Wang's prose, even in Michael Gibbs Hill's fluent translation, is dense and recursive; arguments are restated in multiple keys across chapters, and the absence of a strong editorial hand is sometimes felt. The treatment of the Song material, for all its richness, leans heavily on a relatively small set of thinkers—Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi, Lu Jiuyuan—and the intellectual landscape outside the School of Principle receives less sustained attention than it might. Wang Yangming and the Ming dynasty School of Mind are treated largely as an extension of the School of Principle's internal logic rather than as a genuinely distinct formation, a framing that flattens some of the texture of late imperial thought. And the book's engagement with European thinkers—Weber, Tocqueville, Wallerstein, MacIntyre—is more occasional than systematic, raising questions about whether Wang's "dialogue" between traditions is a dialogue or a strategic appropriation that leaves the European side under-analyzed.

More substantively, there is a tension between Wang's methodological commitment to the internal horizon and the book's evident political investments. Wang is a prominent figure in the Chinese New Left, and his argument that China's modern state-building is best understood as the self-transformation of empire into sovereign state—rather than a revolutionary break or a colonial imposition—carries implications for contemporary debates about Chinese nationalism, territorial integrity, and political legitimacy. The book's claim that the centralized state "would far exceed" the imperial period in "hostility to diversity and pluralities of authority or culture" is offered as a historical observation, but it lands as a political warning. When Wang writes that Kang's datong "reveals the contradictions inherent in this process" of modernization and "offered a moral orientation outside of this modernization project," he is describing the late Qing. He is also, unmistakably, addressing the present.

None of this diminishes the book's achievement. The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought is the rare work of intellectual history that succeeds in changing the terms of debate. It demonstrates, with painstaking scholarship and genuine philosophical sophistication, that Confucian thought contains resources for thinking about modernity, empire, universalism, and the state that are not derivative of European models and cannot be reduced to them. Whether one accepts Wang's framework or resists it—and there will be readers who resist it, on grounds ranging from methodological to political—the burden of proof has shifted. The next scholar who wants to read the Song as an early modernity, or Kang Youwei as a failed imitator of Western ideas, or Confucianism as an ideological apparatus of empire, will have to contend with the arguments Wang has assembled here. That is what major scholarship does. It makes certain kinds of laziness impossible.

Notable Quotes

As a transsystemic society, China is a continuously emerging transcivilizational civilization that internalizes and takes on the traces of the other while maintaining its own unique vitality.

Preface to the English edition, introducing the concept of transsystemic society as a framework for understanding China's formation — transsystemic society, Chinese civilization, cultural formation, plurality

Transsystemicity means that the 'one' contains the essence of the 'many,' and that 'many' is the organic substance of the 'one.'

Preface, defining the core logic of transsystemic society as a political entity — unity and plurality, transsystemic society, political philosophy

The impetus for my inquiry was and is rooted in a particular propensity of the times, and this inquiry and exploration are an attempt to cut across the ruptures of history.

Wang Hui reflecting on how the stifling atmosphere after 1989 motivated the research, and describing the book's method — propensity of the times, methodology, rupture and continuity, historical motivation

Rather than say the School of Principle stood outside the aforementioned social relations and cultural tendencies to offer critique, it is better to say its attitude, both critical of the times and in favor of restoring ancient practices, formed a paradoxical method of thought.

Chapter 1, characterising the fundamental stance of Song Neo-Confucianism toward the emerging market economy and centralised state — School of Principle, paradox, critical theory, Song dynasty

Rather than call the establishment of Heavenly Principle a form of secularization, we should say that ritual practice and daily life practice alike were made sacred again.

Chapter 1, rejecting the European secularisation narrative as a framework for understanding Song Confucianism — Heavenly Principle, secularisation, ritual, daily life, the sacred

The myriad things follow the movements of the Way of Heaven; the myriad peoples are transformed by the cultivation of sagely virtue.

Epigraph to Chapter 1, from Zhou Dunyi's Penetrating the Text of the Book of Changes — Way of Heaven, moral transformation, cosmology, Zhou Dunyi

Heavenly Principle itself indicated the propensity of the times. In this respect, the establishment of the Heavenly Principle concept was intended to seek certainty and a preexisting foundation during a period when the propensity of the times was changing.

Chapter 1, on how the concept of Heavenly Principle emerged as a response to rapid social transformation in the Song — Heavenly Principle, propensity of the times, certainty, historical change

The critical force of Confucian learning lies in the close relation between the construction of a theory of restoring antiquity and the real and present institutions.

Chapter 1, explaining how Confucius's appeal to antiquity served as a critique of existing institutional decay — Confucianism, restoration of antiquity, institutional critique, moral philosophy

Within the discourse of ritual, such notions as ruler, subject, father, son, husband, wife, friend, and ally are both functional and practical, which means they could never stray far from definitions based on evaluative concepts.

Chapter 1, on the unity of fact and value in Confucian moral theory, where social positions are inherently normative — ritual, fact and value, moral theory, social roles

Confucius saw ritual propriety as humaneness. He tried, in the context of the collapse of the rites and music, to use the category of 'humaneness' to bestow ritual with substance once again.

Chapter 1, tracing how Confucius responded to institutional collapse by grounding ritual in inner moral motivation — Confucius, humaneness, ritual, moral restoration

The Song Confucians replaced ritual with Principle, and used this category of Principle to supply anew internal norms for the practice of institutions in a context where institutions had separated from rites and music.

Chapter 1, summarising the key intellectual move of Song Neo-Confucianism — Song Confucianism, Principle, ritual, institutions, intellectual history

The standard of humaneness lies in loving others, not in loving the self. The standard of righteousness lies in correcting the self, not in correcting others.

Dong Zhongshu's 'Standards of Humaneness and Righteousness' from the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals — humaneness, righteousness, Dong Zhongshu, moral standards, self-cultivation

Christianity transcends the political boundaries of European states while Confucianism fuses the cultural and political into a single, though complex, compound.

Wang Hui quoting R. Bin Wong's insight comparing the political roles of Christianity in Europe and Confucianism in China — Christianity, Confucianism, political culture, Europe and China, civilisation

The greatest issue for late-Qing Confucianism was that the Doctrine for All could not help but be reduced to outmoded local knowledge alongside the empire's new position as a marginal region in global capitalism.

Chapter 8, on the existential crisis facing Confucianism when China was forced into the nation-state system — Confucian universalism, local knowledge, global capitalism, late Qing, crisis

China was no longer All-under-Heaven, but was one country among many. This was Kang Youwei's summary of the age of nation-states.

Chapter 8, on Kang Youwei's recognition of the fundamental transformation in China's place in the world — Kang Youwei, All-under-Heaven, nation-state, modernity, geopolitics

The Ryukyu Kingdom has been destroyed; Annam lost; Burma ruined. Our wings have been stripped away, and our belly and heart might be next.

Kang Youwei's 1888 memorial to the Qing Emperor, describing the centripetal collapse of the tributary system — Kang Youwei, tributary system, imperialism, national crisis, late Qing

By what means is the Dao implemented? It is through rites and music. By what means is the Dao adjudicated? It is through military force and punishment. By what means is the Dao sustained? It is through finance and the economy.

Epigraph to Chapter 7, from Wei Yuan, connecting the Way to the material foundations of governance — Wei Yuan, Dao, rites and music, governance, political economy

Those who excel in learning from the four Yi nations, may subdue those nations; those who do not excel in learning from the Yi, will be subdued by them.

Wei Yuan's famous formulation from Gazetteer of the Maritime States on the necessity of learning from foreign powers — Wei Yuan, learning from the West, self-strengthening, survival

The concept of the nation-state, in taking nationality as the fundamental category, cleaves the internal composition of society, rendering such historical relationships and political forms as secondary and outdated, and through this process asserts itself as the universal political imperative.

Chapter 7, on how the nation-state framework restructures and erases the complex internal relationships of societies — nation-state, nationalism, political form, universalism, historical erasure

In the writing and compilation of history, using an ethnic group, a religion, or a linguistic community as the unit of narrative is a common phenomenon in the era of nationalism. However, if these communities, religions, and languages are intermingled in a region, a village, or a family, then this narrative approach may result in the diminishment, overstatement, or distortion of these complex relationships.

Preface, arguing for the concept of transsystemic society against the nationalist fragmentation of history — nationalism, historiography, transsystemic society, complexity, distortion

Confucius himself said that the reason he wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals, was that 'What I might lodge into empty words is not nearly as good as seeing with depth and clarity records of the events of the past.'

Zhang Xuecheng on why Confucius embedded moral principles in historical narrative rather than abstract theory — Confucius, Spring and Autumn Annals, history and morality, Zhang Xuecheng

The concept of 'Han' originally was not a racial concept, but a cultural one.

Preface, on how the ethnic category of 'Han' was culturally rather than racially defined before modern nationalism — Han identity, race and culture, nationalism, historical categories

Confucian society does not require Tibet, Mongolia, or other regions to regulate their social relations according to Confucian ethical-political principles and ritual systems.

Preface, on how Confucianism as a political culture operated flexibly in the Qing's transsystemic society rather than imposing uniformity — Confucianism, Qing empire, pluralism, political culture, flexibility

To pull Confucianism away from government and the specific era or age is also to pull the essentials of perfected virtue — sagehood, humaneness, and the great man — away from their historical conditions.

Chapter 1, critiquing modern New Confucian scholars who treat Confucianism as apolitical individual ethics — Confucianism and politics, New Confucianism, historicism, moral philosophy

One may have position, but without virtue, and thus not dare to perform ritual in it; one might have virtue, but without position, one also dare not perform ritual for it.

Chapter 1, on the unity of virtue and position in classical ritual theory and the crisis when they separate — virtue and position, ritual, legitimacy, moral-political order