West Within East: Sino-british Politics and Vision in the Pre-industrial Era
About This Novel
"East in the West" discusses the development and evolution of social ideals of equality and justice and organizational design in China and Britain in the pre-industrial era. In the process, it recovers the hidden role that China's justice tradition played in the political discussion and system construction of social justice during the British Enlightenment in the 18th century. The book uses structural analysis as a framework and creatively adopts cross-lingual and cross-visual research methods. It focuses on four aspects: the definition of people, social identity equality, natural cosmology, and freedom of speech. It specifically analyzes China's political discussions and institutional construction during the Tang and Song Dynasties, as well as the later British translations and quotations of Chinese materials and the praise and criticism of China's image. Bao Huashi draws on extensive literature and visual materials to illustrate that in both China and Britain, when faced with increasingly indulgent privileges and authoritarian power, many celebrities and lofty ideals adopted similar strategies to rationally fight back. Today, however, we are only familiar with inventions from the so-called "European Early Modern Period." In fact, the historical development of China and Britain in the pre-industrial era had many similar experiences, such as the rise of educated non-aristocratic people, the popularization of printing technology, the increase in mass literacy, the expanding art market, the emergence of the public sphere, etc. It was these common experiences that led to the revolutionary interaction between the two different cultural traditions in the 18th century.
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