Author:

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1990-07

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780804766647

Shimada Kenji is one of Japan's greatest sinologists, with formidable scholarly accomplishments in many fields--classical Chinese thought, Neo-Confucianism in China and Japan, late Qing thought, the 1911 Revolution, and Sino-Japanese relations. This book consists of two long essays touching on one of Shimada's abiding themes, the influence of domestic Chinese systems of thought on the development of Chinese revolutionary thought. This massive project engages Shimada's greatest strength, a profound awareness of and deep study in the history of Chinese philosophy and religion, when examining the people and ideas that culminated in the 1911 Revolution and the end of the imperial institution in China. Unlike most other scholars, Shimada takes his modern protagonists with complete seriousness when they draw on seemingly traditional ideas to justify radical change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zhang Binglin, the subject of the first essay in this book, is arguably the most misunderstood figure among the key revolutionaries of the 1911 period. The appearance of this classic essay, Zhang Binglin: Traditional Chinese Scholar and Revolutionary (1970), marked the first time that Zhang had been assessed as a whole person. Shimada explains how Zhang himself saw the inextricable linkage between a wholehearted devotion to traditional Chinese scholarship-indeed, the very preservation of that tradition-and the revolutionary cause. Often dismissed as a crackpot, brilliant or otherwise, or as a perverse intransigent incapable of comprehending the modern world as it passed him by, Zhang has never received the kind of attention in the West that his importance warrants. The second essay, Confucius in the Era of the 1911 Revolution (I978), deals with an issue that has never before received concerted attention. How could the figure of Confucius have been deified by the leaders of the 1898 Reform Movement and, less than two decades later, be excoriated by the leaders of the May Fourth Movement? Shimada analyzes the views concerning Confucianism of all the major groups (including the Qing government and over seas Chinese in Europe) in the period under study (1895-1919) before suggesting some answers to this fascinating question.