Benjamin I. Schwartz

This interdisciplinary study examines patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately AD 1100 to 1949.

This interdisciplinary study examines patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately AD 1100 to 1949.

These writings, representing over a generation of work by one of our most acute commentators on Chinese history, are collected here for the first time and introduced with a masterly prologue. They cut across the boundaries of different fields of knowledge to better understand modern China and traditional Chinese culture. Schwartz's writings are deeply concerned with the conceptual frameworks and presumptions which we as twentieth-century Westerners bring to bear in our study of foreign cultures. He brings the entire complexity concerning modernity to his analysis of the millennial political, social, and cultural history of China. This is also an excavation of the conscious life of the Chinese past, an interpretation of the persistent dominant cultural and sociopolitical orientations of Chinese culture. The constancies of behavior and attitudes are made plain in the contingencies and complexities of short-durational and generational history.

Examines the development of the philosophy, culture, and civilization of ancient China and discusses the history of Taoism and Confucianism

An event of the first magnitude in the history of Neo-Confucianism was the debate between Chu Hsi (1130–1200), principal architect of Neo-Confucianism, and Ch’en Liang (1143–1194), who represented an admixture of Confucian humanism with utilitarian approaches to current questions. The issues that engaged them—the conflict between ethical and practical considerations in politics and society, and the tension between traditional values and historical change—persist as human problems to this day. This volume analyzes that debate and its place in the lives of the two philosophers within a detailed intellectual and historical context. The development of Ch’en Liang’s thought is traced through an examination of his writings, including the rare, hitherto unutilized 1212 edition of his works. Although Ch’en Liang was overshadowed by rival schools of thought in traditional China, contemporary Chinese esteem him as a person who epitomized the spirit and content of much modern criticism of the Neo-Confucian cultural legacy. This is the first book in a Western language to focus closely upon his challenge to Chu Hsi and Chu Hsi’s response.

In a serious effort to divine the secret of the West's success in achieving wealth and power, Yen Fu, a Chinese thinker, undertook, at the turn of the century, years of laborious translation and commentary on the work of such thinkers as Spencer, Huxley, Adam Smith, Mill, and Montesquieu. In addition to the inevitable difficulties involved in translating modern English into classical Chinese, Yen Fu was faced with the formidable problem of interpreting and making palatable many Western ideas which were to a large extent antithetical to traditional Chinese thought. In an absorbing study of Yen Fu's translations, essays, and commentaries, Benjamin Schwartz examines the modifications and consequent revaluation of these familiar works as they were presented to their new audience, and analyzes the impact of this Western thought on the Chinese culture of the time. Drawing on a unique knowledge of both intellectual traditions, Schwartz describes the diverse and complex effects of this confrontation of Eastern and Western philosophies and provides a new vantage point to assess and appreciate these two disparate worlds.