The Distant Celestial Empire - A Study of Western Images of China (Volumes 1 and 2)

Author: Zhou Ning
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-12-01
Features: This book studies the Western image of China in the general sense of social imagination. In the history of the Western image of China spanning over seven centuries, it divides the period with the climax of the Enlightenment as a boundary, constructing three types of utopianized Chinese images before this point and three types of systematically ideologicalized Chinese images thereafter. It not only analyzes the meaning process of the generation and evolution of the Western image of China, revealing the universal, stable, continuous cultural patterns that tend towards types or archetypes; but more importantly, it studies the image of China within the structure of Western modern spirit, exploring how the image of China, as the "other" of Western modernity, participates in constructing the experience of Western modernity, and explaining the underlying motivations and intentional structures of the generation of the image of China.