The Celestial Empire Far Away (Upper and Lower)

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 seven centuries, it constructs three types of utopianized Chinese images before the Enlightenment and three types of systematically ideologicalized Chinese images thereafter, using the peak of the Enlightenment as a dividing point. It not only analyzes the meaning process of the formation 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 modernity, exploring how the image of China, as the "other" of the Western modern self, participates in constructing the experience of Western modernity and the process and methods of this construction. It explains the underlying motivations and intentional structures behind the formation of the image of China.