Biography of Wang Hui

Even Nandu, the representative of the liberal faction in China, recognized "Reading" as a platform for the exchange of ideas in China during Wang Hui's time, but he was unexpectedly dismissed in 2007, and was appointed as a professor at the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University in 2002. He has served as a researcher and visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of California, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, the University of Washington, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, among other universities and research institutes. His major publications include Defying Despair: Lu Xun and His Literary World (1990), Landless Wandering: The May Fourth and Its Echoes (1994), Wang Hui's Self-Excerpted Collections (1998), Deadly Fire Revisited (2000), and The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2005).

Wang Hui's four-volume work, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, is voluminous and complex. The first volume centers on the central proposition of the relationship between "reason" and "things," exploring the theme of "heavenly reason" in Song and Ming Confucianism; the second volume turns to the issue of "empire/state" to prove that they are not the same as "empire/nation. The second volume turns to the issue of "empire/state," demonstrating that they are the dominant modern dichotomies used by the West (including Japan) in analyzing China, and then arguing that they are fundamentally flawed in understanding the character of the state in the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China; the third volume analyzes the key thinkers of the late Qing and the early Republic of China, and reveals that, in refashioning the old world view of "heavenly principle" into a new world view of "matter," the old concept of "heavenly principle" has been transformed into a new world view. The third volume analyzes the key thinkers of the late Qing and early Republican period and reveals that, in reshaping the old "Divine Principle" worldview into an "Axiomatic Principle" worldview, they incorporated the Western concept of scientific axioms while maintaining the traditional ethico-political concept of "reason" in the "Divine Principle". "Against the above background, the fourth volume discusses how modern "scientific discourse***simultaneity" emerged as a central theme of twentieth-century Chinese thought. The four volumes sprawl out to 1608 pages, with the "Introduction" chapter alone running to more than a hundred pages. (Huang Zongzhi: In Search of Modernity in China)

He has edited a number of books, including Culture and Public ****ness and The Illusion of Development, and his essays have been translated into English, Japanese, Korean, and French.