The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in East Asia are known as a time of rapid change.

Whereas
change was a daily and concrete experience in a globalizing environment, it was also the object of
psychological fear and ideological desire. During that period, Asian countries and their intellectual and
political elites confronted the technical and military superiority of the western powers, as well as local
inner tensions and crises, by elaborating patterns of selective imitation, reconsidering their traditional
knowledge, and recreating their own cultural background. In order to conceptualize these strategies,
Asian intellectuals and political activists faced the theoretical problem of naming the change in which
they were living or to which they aspired. In those years, a new vocabulary emerged, constituting a
multifaceted discourse on change. Drawing on western cultural traditions, the new vocabulary consisted
of words such as enlightenment, renaissance, evolution, revolution and renewal. However, indigenous
terms such as i, bian, ge, and xin were also part of it. Nevertheless, quite independently of the cultural
context from which they emerged, these terms were resignified within the dynamic context of
modernising Asia.

On the one hand, traditional terminology and concepts from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism found
a new configuration that enriched their meanings. Such a process dislocated well-established cultural
roots and made them compatible with exogenous systems of knowledge including modern physics and
biology, Darwinism, Marxism, Liberalism, and Christian theology. On the other hand, East Asian
scholars applied terms such as renaissance and enlightenment to their historical predicament and, in doing
so, they appropriated them. In that very moment of appropriation, these terms started to exceed their
primary historical referent. They belonged no more to the west alone and became all-encompassing
metaphors, universals and tropoi that gave meaning to the experience of change.

The following collection of essays examines this emerging and transcultural discourse on change centred
in Asia, though not confined to it. The collection aims to show how different reflections originated in
different contexts across Japan and China, formed networks of ideas, and actively related to discussions
that were going on in Europe and America. Together, the essays tell a story that is not reducible to the
mere paradigm of cultural reception. They consider East Asia not only as a latecomer to the game of
modernity, whilst narrating the vicissitudes of a world facing the acceleration of historical development
and growing complexity from the specific perspective of China and Japan. Ultimately, this perspective
helps us understand the background against which a rhetoric of renewed centrality is growing in Asia
today and how it is entwined with a conceptualization of change that eschews monogenesis and all sorts
of linear paternities.

Mick Deneckere’s article, ‘The Japanese Enlightenment: a Re-examination of its Alleged Secular
Character’, explores the meaning and the limitations of using the term enlightenment to describe the early
Meiji period. Reading her contribution gives us the opportunity to reflect on the enlightenment from a
global perspective and to locate the Japanese case within a wider and much longer movement. Deneckere
does not describe the Japanese Enlightenment as a mere offshoot of an essentially European historical
experience. On the contrary, building on Sebastian Conrad’s seminal study ‘Enlightenment in Global
History: A Historiographical Critique’, she sheds light on a multiplicity of enlightenments which cannot
be explained by the paradigm of diffusion. In this framework, Deneckere analyses the specificities of the
Japanese advocacy for intellectual, social and national change in periodical publications and other media
from the Meiji era, and, by doing so, she opens up the definition of enlightenment to historical actors that
have so far remained marginal in the prevailing historical narrative. Describing an enlightenment that is
no longer a copy of the European model, she goes beyond the classic case of Fukuzawa Yukichi and
the Meiroku Zasshi, embracing figures, such as Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai, who have been
sidelined in the more traditional historiographical accounts.
Francesco Campagnola surveys the history of the symbolization of the Renaissance and humanism in
early Shōwa Japan up to the end of the Second World War. His analysis does not limit itself to erudite
books and purely scholarly essays but includes the transcripts of public symposia and articles in
newspapers in order to provide a wider picture of the developing Japanese cultural climate. The article
follows the fraught relationship between the Renaissance/renaissance, on the one hand, and humanism on
the other. Campagnola points out that, whereas the Japanese Romantics (Roman-ha) and other Japanese
authors added an anti-humanist slant to the Renaissance as a symbol for national regeneration, other
intellectuals belonging to different factions and schools employed the same metaphor in order to conceive
a different strategy with a view to imagining a new human being. He devotes particular attention to the
case of Miki Kiyoshi’s specifically Japanese brand of humanism. Finally, after describing how, in the
1940s, wartime censorship and militarist orthodoxy came to efface humanism from the discourse on
renaissance, the article ends with the underground survival of humanism in the critical and anti-
nationalistic form advocated by Watanabe Kazuo.

Li Man analyses the relationship between crisis and change in the decaying Qing Empire following the
First Opium War. Using Confucian official Wei Yuan as his compass, he depicts the theoretical battle
surrounding the notion of change itself and its intellectual and political meaning in mid-nineteenth-
century China. According to Li Man, making use of philological investigation for the character i, which
plays a major role in the history of premodern Chinese culture, Wei Yuan tried to offer a new definition
of change. Li Man’s article highlights how, in Wei Yuan’s philosophical disquisition, the ontological
level meets the political one. Thus, the denial of change as the essential meaning of i, by part of the
Chinese intelligentsia is criticized as a form of blindness to the incoming new world order. In this
changing world, Wei Yuan kept firm his defence of the motherland but advocated its transformation by
means of the acquisition of Western technique. In such a context of historical necessity and unavoidable
confrontation with external forces, the only possible choice was either to change or be changed. The
ontological reflection on the Way, as the fundamentally unchanged characterised by continuous change,
thus also becomes a criticism of those who, when faced with historical and political change, stuck to their
uncritical Sinocentrism.

Bart Dessein shows us how Gadamer’s perspective on European Renaissance, in which socio-cultural
transformation never completely effaces that which lies at its origin, also applies to nineteenth- and
twentieth-century China. He describes the climate of incertitude and self-doubt that characterized China
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and explains how German Idealism and Kant’s work
became a tool for revising and transforming the Confucianist tradition through the medium of Wang
Yangming. After a survey of the models of change, transformation and evolution entailed by the theory of
‘China as essence, the West as function’ (zhongti xiyong), Dessein particularly focuses on philosopher
Mou Zongsan and his discovery of a ‘moral self’ and of individuality as a possible category within
Confucian thought, as revised from a Kantian perspective. However, Dessein notices how Mou Zongsan
takes a decidedly anti-Kantian stance when, in accordance with Confucianist holism, he asserts that
personal cultivation and political governance are complementary principles. In the end, Dessein suggests
that the cases made by Mou Zongsan and the other new Confucianists render apparent how modernisation
in China was a ‘renaissance’ based on a reshaping of tradition, rather than a revolution from the outside.

This special issue is complemented with an introduction by global historian Wang Hui. A professor at
Tsinghua University in Beijing, a former editor of the influential cultural magazine Dushu, and a leading
public intellectual in China, Wang Hui is one of the world’s most eminent specialists in intellectual
history from a transnational perspective. His work, published in English by Harvard University Press and
Verso, has been translated into numerous languages.

The editors would like to express their gratitude to Prof. Wang for agreeing to take part in this special
issue as well as to Global Intellectual History for hosting it.
INSTRUCTIONS

 Aside from the three Intellectual Revolutions discussed in this section,

other intellectual revolutions also took place across history, in many

parts of the world such as in North America, Asia, Middle East, and

Africa. In pairs research on a particular intellectual revolution in any of

the four geographical locations. (Min. of 2 IR)

 After that, prepare a six-slide PowerPoint presentation and report the

highlights of your chosen Intellectual Revolution.

 Use the following guide questions for your presentation.

1. What is the Intellectual Revolution all about?

2. Who are the key figures in the revolution?

3. How did the revolution advance the modern science and scientific thinking at

that time?

4. What controversies met the revolution?