Editorial

Guoxue/National Learning in the Age of Global Modernity

ABSTRACT: Guoxue as an idea and intellectual pursuit has a history of roughly a century in China. From its origins in the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), it has been integral to the search for a past that is appropriate to the formation of China as a nation. At the same time, its constitution over time has varied with changing conceptions of the nation, as well as its place in the world. Interest in guoxue declined during the height of the revolution, from the 1940s through the 1960s, but has enjoyed resurgence since the 1990s among scholars and the general public alike. This time around, it expresses a newfound pride in the past that has accompanied success in development, as well as an urge to bring inherited cultural legacies and modes of scholarship into a global dialogue on culture. While very much rooted in the history of modern China, it also parallels in this new phase a reassertion globally of traditions suppressed under the regime of Euromodernity. Its content remains vague, however, and subject to contention from different ideological perspectives.

KEYWORDS: guoxue, kokugaku, national learning, global modernity, nativism, cosmopolitanism, ethno-epistemology, ruxue, Confucianism

Mao Zedong in Contemporary Chinese Official Discourse and History

ABSTRACT: Rather than repudiate Mao’s legacy, the post-revolutionary regime in China has sought to recruit him in support of “reform and opening.” Beginning with Deng Xiaoping after 1978, officialhistoriography has drawn a distinction between Mao the Cultural Revolutionary and Mao the architect of “Chinese Marxism” – a Marxism that integrates theory with the circumstances of Chinese society. The essence of the latter is encapsulated in “Mao Zedong Thought,” which is viewed as an expression not just of Mao the individual but of the collective leadership of the Party. In most recent representations, “Chinese Marxism” is viewed as having developed in two phases: New Democracy, which brought the Communist Party to power in 1949, and “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” inaugurated under Deng Xiaoping and developed under his successors, and which represents a further development of Mao Zedong Thought. The Hu Jintao leadership has made an aggressive effort to portray “Chinese Marxism” as the most advanced development of Marxism that might also serve as a model for others. These interpretive operations have salvaged Mao for the national revolution and the legitimacy of the Communist Party. But it also presents a predicament in keeping alive memories of Mao’s policies, which the Party is not always able to control in political memory, as has been illustrated most recently in the Chongqing experiment.

KEYWORDS: Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping, “Chinese Marxism,” New Democracy, “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2008, xii, 334 pp.