The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought [Hardcover]

David Martin Jones examines how China has been portrayed in European and subsequently North American social and political thought and what, if anything, this depiction tells us about the character of this thought. Such a question immediately evokes the spectre of orientalism and subsequent chapters explore whether the identification of an orientalist project invalidates the knowledge claims of European and North American social and political thought as it evolved from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.Introduction The Bewilderment of Names and Images: East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences 1890 - 1949 Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing: China's Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social and Political Science IndexDAVID MARTIN JONES is Senior Lecturer in Government at the University of Tasmania. He is author of Political Development in Pacific Asia and co-author of Toward Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia.