Modernization of the Chinese Past

The loss of direction and the ensuing search for orientation have been an integral part of China's modernisation process, the most serious attempt to find a direction following the Marxist approach that was carried to extremes under the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

The essays of this book show the tenacity of old traditions and how by the 1990s there was a clear and vigorous resurgence of old practices and references to the past, and that these in fact were manifestations of a rejection of the Cultural Revolution.

The essays include: Star Wars and the Confucian Ethic; Confucianism and Deng's China; The Invention of the Modern Chinese Self; Continuity in the Relationship Between Law and Administration; Changes in the Discourse on Political Morality in the 1980s and 1990s; Secular Karma: The Communist Revolution Understood in Traditional Terms; Before Tradition: the Book of Changes, Yang Lian's Yi and the Affirmation of the Self Through Poetry; Traditional Chinese Music in 1989: The Art Cup; Towards Self-Reliance?: A Selective View of Contemporary Chinese Art; Images of 'Feudal' Marriage in Recent Chinese Films; Irrational Belief Among the Chinese Elite; and Qigong, Daoism and Science: Some Contexts for the Qigong Boom.