Unfortunately and due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

During the past three decades, China has witnessed an enormous growth of intellectual interest in defining a Chinese cultural identity. At the center of this trend lies a claim that China’s future ought to be rooted in China’s own cumulative civilization, especially in the Confucian learning traditions. This exceptionalist turn in intellectual culture has provided a new legitimizing ideology that the Chinese Communist Party has quickly adopted to reinvent itself as the inheritor of China’s cultural traditions. Making sense of this contemporary turn requires us to understand the deeper roots of modern Chinese national thought. Different from the dominant view that modern Chinese nationalism is a product of Western-style modernization, this talk explores how the search for a Chinese cultural identity became central to the debates over political system and moral values in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If “cultural identity” was an answer, what was the question? Were there alternatives?

Wen Yu is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2018. Her research focuses on China’s social and political thought, ideological movements, and intellectual culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Her dissertation, "The Search for a Chinese Way in the Modern World: From the Rise of Evidential Learning to the Birth of Chinese Cultural Identity,” explores the roots and development of modern Chinese exceptionalism by tracing how the search for a Chinese cultural identity has become central to the intellectual debates over shared values in modern China. Her dissertation was awarded the 2017 Harold K. Gross Dissertation Prize.

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