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Published and with an afterword by Adrian Hsia. – Newly commented eBook edition.
„I consider it a singular plan of the fates that the greatest culture and the greatest technical civilization of humanity should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in China,” Leibniz wrote enthusiastically in 1697. His book “Novissima Sinica” formed, as it were, the prelude to much systematic preoccupation with the Middle Kingdom by renowned German philosophers and writers.
The anthology German thinkers on China presents a selection of central and influential texts on the German reception of China over four centuries, by authors ranging from Leibniz, Kant, Lichtenberg and Herder to Hegel, Marx and Franz Mehring to Karl Jaspers. It vividly portrays how – in the course of the Jesuit mission, mercantilism and finally colonialism – the initially distant China increasingly moved into the consciousness of the spiritual Europe. However, it also becomes clear that almost all the thinkers’ understanding of Chinese society and culture remained to a large extent trapped in the collective fashions, ideologies and views of their own time and society.
(eBook) – ca. 390 pages – Language: German – 6,90 $ / 4,99 £
China Remembers
The PRC’s first 50 years, told through extraordinary personal journeys
Making history not only comprehensible, but also a reading experience that gets under the skin: this is the art that the two authors Zhang Lijia and Calum MacLeod have mastered impressively. China Remembers recounts the first fifty years of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1999) in 33 interviews with contemporary witnesses from all walks of life: From the founding of the state by Mao Zedong and the mass movements of the 1950s and 1960s to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy and China’s rise to become a great economic power in the 1990s. Each of the historical sections as well as each individual interview is expertly introduced, and so one does not have to be a an expert on China to follow the moving memories of the interviewees, who include soldiers, farmers, street vendors, priests, teachers, singers, interpreters, business people, architects, refuse collectors and many other professions.
China Remembers offers authentic voices of a group of remarkable raconteurs for those who are willing to listen as well as for those whose ears are attuned to subtle cultural messages from the ancient and ever vibrant civilization. (Du Weiming, Professor Emeritus of Asia Center, Harvard University)
(eBook) – ca. 290 pages – Language: English – 9,99 $ / £ 8,90 ♦ Press reviews