It is continually rewarding, offering up new avenues of inquiry and revisiting links between Chinese modernity and the country's imperial history. Three centuries on from Kangxi, there are still plenty of blanks in the map of modern China. For anglophone readers, this very overdue translation helps us see the lie of the land.
(09/04/2015) The present book is an erudite, ... Read morestimulating, thought provoking, nuanced, but highly condensed overture to Wang's ambitious macro history of the formation of Chinese intellectual modernity. Sensitive to both continuities and disruptions, Wang engages traditional thought as well as Western and Japanese scholarly discourse...It illuminates 21st-century Chinese discourse and provides ample food for thought for scholars grappling with interpreting modern and premodern Chinese intellectual history.
(03/01/2015) China from Empire to Nation-State, a stellar contribution to intellectual history, does something very rare: it enriches and expands our vocabulary. There will be no greater incentive to study the political and philosophical traditions of China
and of the non-West in general
than this consistently illuminating and bracing book.
Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia Show Less