What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and inChina's Twentieth Century the country's leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China's more recent liberalization, to arrive at the cros...

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China's leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China's social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization.Arguing that China's revolutionary history and its current liberalization are p...

This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day.

Whither China? presents an in-depth and wide-angled picture of Chinese intellectual life during the last decade of the millennium, as China struggled to move beyond the shadow of the Tiananmen tragedy. Because many cultural and intellectual paradigms of the previous decade were left in ruins by that event, Chinese intellectuals were forced in the early 1990s to search for new analytical and critical frameworks. Soon, however, they found themselves engulfed by tidal waves of global...

A major motion picture (2007) from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain): an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II.In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly...

Opening a new window into Chinese intellectual discourse, this unique book is a critical engagement with the issues, problems, and meanings of contemporary Chinese intellectual thought. As key participants in these debates who have exercised a significant influence on the development of contemporary Chinese thought, the volume's contributors explore concerns over the role of the intellectual and the outcomes of knowledge production in the humanities. Masterfully translated, these essays pr...

Revisiting a transformative era of Chinese contemporary art through essays, archives, and striking visual documentation.The China Moment explores one of the most dynamic turning points in global art history. Published to accompany the exhibition at the documenta Institut Kassel (January–March 2026), the book sheds new light on the radical shifts in Chinese art during the 1990s and 2000s.This richly illustrated volume stands out thr...

In 2009 Slavoj Zizek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people.The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspect...

The Westphalian model of international relations has given us a zero-sum game of winners and losers that has proven to be ineffective in addressing the pressing issues of our times. Philosopher Zhao Tingyang has argued that by conceptualizing international relations from the planetary perspective of tianxia, we can develop a sense of “worldness” that at once acknowledges the plurality of moral ideals defining of the world’s cultures and seeks practical ways to formulate a shared m...

This remarkable book - the first in-depth examination of the civil liability regime for marine oil pollution damage from a law and economics perspective - examines the efficiency and effectiveness of the regime, with particular attention to whether it is in fact designed in the public interest or merely a distribution of risks and costs among interested parties. The question is asked: does the liability system give the potential polluter incentives to take precautionary measures to avoid p...

This innovative work offers the first comprehensive transcultural history of historiography. The contributors transcend a Eurocentric approach not only in terms of the individual historiographies they assess, but also in the methodologies they use for comparative analysis. Moving beyond the traditional national focus of historiography, the book offers a genuinely comparative consideration of the commonalities and differences in writing history. Distinguishing among distinct cultural identi...

The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectual...