Xueren (English: The ScholarThe Scholar was the translation preferred by the editors of Xueren, appearing thus in their journal, but the title is sometimes also translated Scholars.) was an influential Chinese independent intellectual journal that ran from 1991 to 2000.Wang Chaohua. "Introduction: Minds of the Nineties," p. 17. One China, Many Paths. Ed. Wang Chaohua. New York: Verso, 2003. It was founded and edited by Chen Pingyuan, Wang Hui, and Wang Shouchang under the sponsorship of a Japanese foundation. In order to work around censorship conditions in the Chinese publishing industry that make it more difficult for periodicals to get approval than books, Xueren was published as a "series" in the latter format. Other journals that have taken the same approach include Res Publica and Horizons.
Scholar Chaohua Wang locates Xueren'''s origins in "the self-examination of intellectuals intimately involved in the ferment of the eighties":
The project of its editors [. . .] was to retrieve the history of modern Chinese scholarship (xueshu shi), a tradition they felt was in danger of being obscured or forgotten under the pressure of imported theories. In doing so, they wanted to clarify their own intellectual identity and responsibilities. What was their position in a historical chain of scholarly development? When and how should a scholar speak out on public issues?
Co-founder Wang Hui characterizes his and his colleagues' motivations similarly, but without a critical approach toward "imported theories" in academe as a primary component of their intellectual project, and with more of an eye toward directly socially relevant goals. According to him, Xueren was created to facilitate an effort by young intellectuals to "reconsider" modern Chinese history in the wake of the failure of the 1989 democracy movement, a "process of reflection" that
included serious reconsideration of modern history, conscientious rethinking of attempts to carry out radical reform on the basis of Western models, close investigation of the Chinese historical legacy and its contemporary significance, and necessary critiques of certain of the consequences of radical political action.
However, Wang Hui states that Xueren "did not pursue any particular academic agenda."Wang Hui. China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, pp. 84 and 202. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Example table of contents The 648-page seventh issue of Xueren (May 1995) printed the following table of contents in English (though all articles were in Chinese):
Page Title Author 1 On Kant's Cultural Philosophy Hong Qian 5 Hong Qian: A Rational Life Wang Wei 15 Hong Qian and Otto Neurath Fan Dainan 31 Mority Schlik on Content and Form Han Linhe 43 A Commentary on the Eastern Flow of Western Geography During the Late Qing Guo Shaunglin 85 Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism Between China and the West Lydia H. Liu 121 Cai Yuanpei's Philosophy of Gender Equality Xia Xiaohong 163 Liu Shipei's Research on Chinese Academic History Wu Guangxing 187 The Issues Raised During the Debate Between Xiong Shili and Liang Shuming Jing Haifeng 211 The Vijñānavāda School and the Concept of Hetu Luo Zhao 271 A New Look at the Origins of Tibetan Culture Wang Xiaodun 303 A Study of the Dagger-Axe with the "Bi bing" Inscriptions Found at Jingmen Luo Zhao 325 The Mo Sword and the Military Affairs of the Great Tang Empire Li Jinxiu 341 The Bagu Eight-Part Essay and Classical Chinese Prose of the Ming and Qing Chen Pingyuan 373 On the Adherents of the Ming Dynasty Zhao Yuan 395 On the Relationship Between Changzhou 常州 Woman's Culture and the Yanghu School Writers 阳湖派 Cao Hong 419 In Search of New Models for Research on China Liu Dong 469 Reaching Out From Tradition: The Connection Between Peace and Political Order He Huaihong 501 The Fate of the Doctrine of Two Categories of Truth: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Xu Youyu 523 Theory and Practice: A Study of the History of Philosophical Thinking Zhang Rulun 561 Song See Yeol and the Zhuzi School of the Lee Dynasty in Korea Chen Lai 577 Ogyu Sorai and His Innovations to Japanese Confucianism Wang Zonghiangz Notes on Academic History Research 601 Breaking Away Form [sic] the Cycle of the Han and Song Schools Chen Shaoming 615 A Brief Account of the Revival of the Xunzi School During the Mid-Qing Yang Hu 627 A Critique of Xiao Yang's "The Law of Causality, Historicism, and Autonomy" Chen Lian
See also Dushu, a journal of which Wang Hui would become editor in 1996, and which had been in the mid-to-late eighties a key popularizer of the "imported theories" to which Xueren'''s founding was in part a reaction
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