Changing Referents

"Jenco analyzes China's early intellectual debates regarding the utility of Western learning and China's desperate attempts at political reform following two disastrous Opium Wars with Great Britain, defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and the country's descent into national collapse in the 1920s and 1930s. This provides a springboard to examine the relevance of non-Western, cross-cultural discourse on contemporary comparative political theory." -- S. C. Hart, College of William and Mary, CHOICE "In Changing Referents, Leigh Jenco quite brilliantly and fundamentally recasts our view of the ways Chinese thinkers responded to the crises that immersed them from the late nineteenth-century on. She shows that the ideas generated in China during these times represented original and quite viable solutions to unprecedented problems, with the ideas themselves and the process by which they were derived still offering lessons to those who would pay close attention to them. This is a thoroughly liberating study, in all senses of the word." -Ted Huters, author of Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China "Drawing on illuminating interpretations of Chinese debates over 'Western Learning' one century ago, Jenco makes provocative arguments for a mode of cross-cultural learning that moves beyond conventional inclusion or assimilation. Remarkably, her critical sensitivity in combination with constructive creativity is well informed by not only cutting-edge Western theories but also formidable knowledge of Chinese intellectual history, rarely seen in a political theorist. This book opens a new and promising alternative for the rethinking and remaking of contemporary political theory in both the West and China." -Liu Qing, Professor of Political Science, East China Normal University "By studying Chinese debates over the 'Western Knowledge,' Jenco brilliantly throws light on some of the most intricate questions of our time: the relationship between society and knowledge, self and other. The book breaks new ground in comparative theorizing that moves beyond the safe pieties of globalization and multiculturalism. It uses Chinese intellectual history to demonstrate that the project of deparochialization of ideas will be genuine only if it recognizes the deep ways in which knowledge and society constitute each other. A major contribution to comparative theory and intellectual history." -Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President, Centre for Policy Research Delhi "Must all thinking in the modern age necessarily take place on Euro-American terms? Answering in the negative, Leigh Jenco argues-and more importantly, demonstrates-that China's nineteenth- and twentieth-century "Western Learning" debates can offer theoretically credible alternatives to current methods for engaging otherness and confronting ethnocentrism." Leigh Jenco is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.