Public Awareness and Chinese Culture

Author: Chen Ruoshui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-03-01
Features: This book explores the concepts of "public" and "social" consciousness in Chinese culture, with a particular focus on the former. Specifically, the topics covered include the nature and historical origins of civic morality, the relationship between civic theory and folk theory in China, the concept of "public" in Chinese history, and the "" (righteousness) and social perspectives in traditional Chinese culture. Most of the book's content is driven by an awareness of modern contexts, which gives the analysis a degree of universality. However, the author primarily approaches the issues from the concrete historical realities of Chinese society, examining spontaneous or externally triggered phenomena related to "public" and "social" consciousness. This approach, which has been rarely attempted before, is a unique contribution of the book.
Author Bio: Chen Ruoshui: Graduated from the Department of History at National Taiwan University and earned a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in the United States. He has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, the University of British Columbia in Canada, and the University of Tokyo in Japan. Currently, he is a researcher at the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and teaches at National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University. His research fields include the history of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960) and the intellectual history of China. He has written books such as Liu Tsung-yuan and Intellectual Change in T'ang China (《》) and A History of Chinese Culture (co-authored), and has published dozens of academic papers.