Harvard-Yenching Institute Pusey Fellow
WANG Hui
Wang Hui is an intellectual historian at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His research focuses on contemporary Chinese literature and thought.
His early publications shed new light on the work of Lu Xun. In 1991, Wang Hui founded a journal Xueren ("The Scholar") together with Chen Pingyuan and Wang Shouchang. Xueren has been described as the first non-official academic journal to appear in China after 1989. From 1996 to 2007, Wang Hui served as the chief editor (together with Huang Ping) of Dushu("Reading"), the most important intellectual magazine in China during that decade.
Under Wang's editorship, Dushu sparked a series of influential discussions and debates on a range of urgent issues ranging from the agricultural crisis, to climate change, political reform, mass media, and published reconsiderations of history, theory, and the arts. In 1997, he published a long essay entitled, "Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity," a milestone in the debate between the so-called "new left" and "neo-liberal" in China.
His book, China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, has been translated by Theodore Huters and Rebecca Karl. Published in 2003 by Harvard University Press, it describes Wang Hui as unique in China's intellectual world for his ability to synthesize an insider's knowledge of economics, politics, civilization, and Western critical theory. A participant in the Tiananmen Square movement, he is also the editor of the most important intellectual journal in contemporary China. He has a grasp and vision that go beyond contemporary debates to allow him to connect the events of 1989 with a long view of Chinese history. Wang Hui argues that the features of contemporary China are elements of the new global order as a whole in which considerations of economic growth and development have trumped every other concern, particularly those of democracy and social justice. At its heart this book represents an impassioned plea for economic and social justice and an indictment of the corruption caused by the explosion of "market extremism."
His book The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought was published in China. An English translation is expected in 2010.
In May 2008, Foreign Policy described Wang as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world.
Wang Hui is a Harvard-Yenching Institute Pusey Fellow this spring. His keynote address at the AAS annual meeting is sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
