China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought

This book examines the ideas of China in the works of major thinkers in the early European Enlightenment. Against the backdrop especially of the Jesuit accounts of China which these philosophers read, imperial China was interpreted in radically divergent ways. The book thus shows how the development of political thought in the early Enlightenment was closely linked to the question of China as a positive or negative model for Europe. The book also discusses how Chinese reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on Enlightenment writers’ different views of China as they sought to envisage how China should be remodeled.