Hui Wang

The writer is a renowned professor in Beijing, but this book was lost on me. Some interesting chapters, but also a lot of philosophical babble. What chapters 6 & 7 have to do with China in the 20th century is not clear to me. I certainly read much better books on equality than those boring chapters. Not sure whether part of my disappointment with the book comes from poor translation, or/and being not familiar with Chinese philosophical thinking (even Western philosophical thinking is hard to follow for me often). If you come across this book and want to give it a try, I would read only the last chapter, which is the most convincing… (meer)

China's Twentieth Century by Wang Hui is a study of 20th century China in societal and political manner. Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.

This is a complicated book that had me struggling for the first half of the 20th century. This is mostly because of my lack of familiarity of internal Chinese history outside of the Boxer Rebellion before Mao. The early 20th century does play an important role in understanding China's path through the twentieth century. The book skips periods that I would see as important from my studies but did introduce me to a different thinking about China's role in the Korean War and it hot and cold relationship with the Soviet Union. It also described China's view of WWI. Both of these views are not typical of Western thinking of education.

Hui isn't hesitant about breaking out political philosophers. Although frequently turning to Marx, he does bring in Hegel and others. This book is heavy on philosophy and internal Chinese sociology. The view from inside China is interesting and unique and will give readers a different perspective of China and the troubles and progress. Society is far less monolithic than many believe and there is a growing division in classes. The peasants and the farmers are not the ones who are making the progress and have been left behind in their revolution.

Although a very complex read, the view of a respected Chinese scholar inside of China offers insight that into the culture and workings of society. A detailed account of what Hui calls the short century and the long revolution.… (meer)

The essays contained in this book constitute an inquiry into the nature and contradictions of China’s post-1978 reform era, an exploration into the complicated role of the 1989 protests within China’s transition to a market economy, and a critical inquiry into Chinese intellectuals’ failures to fully grasp the complexities of the Chinese state’s turn to neoliberalism during the reform era, which Wang Hui argues have led many of China’s intellectuals to become complicit in the exploitative policies and agendas of Chinese neoliberalism. This work is at once a critical assessment of China’s recent period of social, economic, political and intellectual history (and their conjunctures) and an intervention into contemporary intellectual debates in China that aims to set future research agendas. In writing these essays, Wang Hui hopes to prevent intellectual critiques of neoliberalism from continuing to move in a conservative direction, hoping instead to prompt intellectuals to offer critiques that pressure the state to uphold freedom and democracy by pressuring it to remain accountable for the people’s social welfare.… (meer)