Intellectuals Utopian Dreams And The Question Of Human Rights In China

Author : Mab Huang
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 152758089X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intellectuals, Utopian Dreams, and the Question of Human Rights in China written by Mab Huang and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together 13 papers published by the author over the past 50 years, arranged chronologically, so the reader can follow the unfolding development of the author’s thinking on the issues discussed here. The essays primarily investigate the role intellectuals in the dramatic changes in China since the fall of the old imperial order, with an emphasis on the tension between the urge towards utopian dreams and the quest for human rights and democracy. The earlier pieces are two chapters from the author’s 1969 Columbia University PhD dissertation dealing with the Chinese Communist Party leadership methods and the conflict between the Party and the peasants during the time of the People’s Commune Movement. Several other essays on the question of human rights date from the 1980s and 1990s. The last two essays go beyond China to take up the debate on Asian values and the concept of peace in Asia. Given the unique perspective which differs from that of the ruling party and government in China, as well as the usual political realist perspective of the Western press, this book will contribute to a better understanding of the complex and entangled role of the intellectuals and the political process on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It will be helpful to both the academic community and the well-educated general public.

Author : David Der-wei Wang
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 988852836X
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context written by David Der-wei Wang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context: Texts, Ideas, Spaces decisively demonstrates the extent to which utopianism has shaped political thought, cultural imaginaries, and social engagement after it was introduced into the Chinese context in the nineteenth century. In fact, pursuit of utopia has often led to action—such as the Chinese Revolution and the Umbrella Movement—and contested consequences. Covering a time span that goes from the late Qing to our days, the authors show that few ideas have been as influencing as utopia, which has compellingly shaped the imaginaries that underpin China’s historical change. Utopianism contributed to the formation of the Chinese state itself—shaping the thought of key figures of the late Qing and early Republican eras such as Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen—and outlived the labyrinthine debates of the second half of the twentieth century, both under Mao’s rule and during the post-socialist era. Even in the current times of dystopian narratives, a period in which utopia seems to be less influential than in the past, its manifestations persistently provide lifelines against fatalism or cynicism. This collection shows how profoundly utopian ideas have nurtured both the thought of crucial figures during these historical times, the new generation of mainland Chinese and Sinophone intellectuals, and the hopes of twenty-first-century Hong Kong activists. “Wang, Leung, and Zhang’s collection is a timely contribution to utopian studies built on consistent, coherent, boundary-crossing approaches. Interdisciplinary in its very sense, the essays bring intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, and political theories together in dialogue. Of particular note are the essays that situate Hong Kong in a literary tradition that connects China, Hong Kong, and the beyond.” —Mingwei Song, Wellesley College “Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context is an impressive intellectual undertaking. The essays are highly engaging and offer powerful, multi-faceted approaches to utopianism in contemporary Chinese thought and practice. Stimulating and informative, the book as a whole addresses the dynamic interplay between the utopian and dystopian, thereby inspiring clarity in political thought and action in the present moment.” —Robin Visser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Author : Samuel Moyn
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674256522
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Utopia written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Author : Walter Wan Fai Lee
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9811232156
Total Pages : 522 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Principles And Laws In World Politics: Classical Chinese Perspectives On Global Conflict written by Walter Wan Fai Lee and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The search for universal principles and laws in world politics is a colossal common task for all civilisations. It should not be monopolised by the Western liberal paradigm. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, global conflicts have been satisfactorily resolved neither by communism nor liberalism. Humanitarian intervention, now under the cover of the responsibility to protect (R2P), has destabilised many societies, leaving justice undone. This inspiring book invites debates on the post-liberal imagination of 'emancipated Leviathan': an almighty political authority which exercises awe and force to restore order, as well as enshrines globally-negotiated values of common conscience and reinvented cosmopolitanism. Human well-being will truly become reality when we synergise pre-modern and pre-liberal ways of thinking, worldviews, ethics, and aesthetic styles by means of cross-civilisational, cross-disciplinary fundamental research, and let an emancipated Leviathan exercises principles and laws of virtue derived from the study.The starting point of such intellectual innovation is China. This book explores the application of classical Chinese resources to the innovation of thoughts in contemporary Chinese international relations (IR). It examines whether 'Knowledge Archaeology of Chinese International Relations' (KACIR), coined by the author, responds sensibly to today's issues of international ethics and global justice. The book contends that emancipative hermeneutics holds the key to the Chinese soft power puzzle. A bottom-up, non-nationalistic, and non-ethnocentric approach to the Chinese civilisation will reinvent intellectual pluralism and cosmopolitan elements in the Chinese tradition that interact constructively with and ultimately transcend the liberal Western model. Strolling from contemporary IR back to ancient Chinese philosophy, then striding into the future searching for common principles and laws, this insightful book is a must-read for those who want to reflect on global conflicts in this era of great uncertainty and transformation, as well as those who love to make our world a better place to live in.

Author : Mingwei Song
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231542542
Total Pages : 453 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Reincarnated Giant written by Mingwei Song and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the “Chinese dream,” the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.

Author : Jörn Rüsen
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781845453046
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thinking Utopia written by Jörn Rüsen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called "end of utopia" ("end of history," "end of narratives"). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East.

Author : Ma Jian
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1640093869
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China Dream written by Ma Jian and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

Author : Thomas Buoye
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0892641568
Total Pages : 657 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China written by Thomas Buoye and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future combines original essays by leading experts with excerpts from primary sources, the latest scholarship, Chinese literature, and Western media reports to provide a comprehensive textbook on contemporary China. Completely updated, China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future is the latest in a series of classroom units on China from the Center of Chinese Studies at The University of Michigan. It is not only ideal for courses on contemporary China but also an excellent supplement for courses in area studies, international affairs and economics, and women's studies. Each section, in addition to essay and excerpts, also includes a bibliography of additional topical works as well as suggestions for complementary video and internet teaching resources.

Author : Baogang He
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748699724
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Governing Taiwan and Tibet written by Baogang He and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could democracy realistically address the problems in China's national identity? Baogang He opens up a dialogue in which Chinese liberals can offer viable alternatives in defence of key democratic principles and governance.

Author : William H. Whyte
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812208501
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Landscape written by William H. Whyte and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use. Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.