Chaohua WANG

Position

Independant scholar in Modern Chinese History and Literature, China

Discipline
History, Literature
Country
Chine
Chaohua WANG
Période

Octobre 2012 à Juin 2013

Biography

Chaohua Wang studied civil engineering in college after spending five years in the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution. The Reform Era provided her with the opportunity to pursue her interest in the humanities. She became an editor at a book-review journal in 1985 and then a graduate student majoring in modern Chinese literature. The 1989 Tiananmen protest brought her to the center of the student movement and saw her name listed after the military crackdown among the government’s most-wanted. While living in America as a political exile, she resumed her study at UCLA, earning her MA degree in modern Chinese literature in 1994 and Ph.D. degree in East Asian studies in 2008.She has been an avid observer of, commentator on, and participant in contemporary Chinese intellectual debates in the past two decades.

Search project

Beyond wealth and power: Cai Yuanpeis European sojourns and reforms in China, 1907-1930

A successful Confucian scholar-official before his thirties and a revolutionary thereafter, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) took three European sojourns in 1907-1926, each time for more than three years. Inspired by Neo-Kantian philosophy and ideals of the French Revolution, Cai, as Chancellor of Peking University carried out profound campus reforms in the late 1910s. In 1928 he became the founding president of the Academia Sinica.
Cai's pioneering work laid the basis for modern China's higher learning, with indelible European influence. However, his shifting focus, from individual emancipation by higher education to nationally oriented advanced studies, showed the difficulty of transplanting a Humboldt-style institution to a then war-torn, poor non-Western country, as well as the pressure of a modern intellectual division of labor on ambitious reformers.

Bibliography

WANG, Chaohua (collab., éd.).

One China, Many Paths, editor and translator, with an Introduction. London : Verso, 2003. 368 p.

WANG, Chaohua. Daodu (Introduction). In YUANPEI, Cai, Zhongguo lunli xue shi (A history of ethics in China, originally published in 1910). Taipei : Wunan chubanshe, 2009.

WANG, Chaohua. Modernity, East Asia. In CLINE HOROWITZ, Maryanne (éd.). New Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. p. 1479-85.

WANG, Chaohua. Yi gaming de Jingyi: Ping Peili Andesen 'Liang chang geming'

(In the name of revolution: On Perry Anderson's "Two Revolutions"). Sixiang (Reflextion), 2011, n° 18. p. 219-244.

WANG, Chaohua. Lishi zhongjie zai Zhongguo, (The end of history in Chins). Sixiang (Reflextion), 2010, n° 4. p. 207-231.