中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumThe Future of the Past
On Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought
Authors: Zhang Yongle
Date: 2010
Published by New Left Review
Since the 1990s, Wang Hui has been an agenda-setting figure in the contemporary Chinese intellectual landscape. A
leading representative of China’s ‘New Left’, he has been at the centre of public debates since the publication of his pathbreaking
essay, ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, which aroused fierce and enduring intellectual controversy.
Under his editorship, China’s principal journal of ideas, Dushu,became the forum of many key theoretical disputes and policy discussions. His forced resignation from the journal in 2007 ignited another debate among the Chinese intelligentsia, as readers polarized over its political line and intellectual quality during his tenure. In contrast to all this uproar, however, his magnum opus on The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, whose four volumes appeared in 2004, caused scarcely a political ripple.1 Applauded by the left, and well received by many scholars of modern Chinese intellectual history, it met with almost universal silence from his political adversaries.