Lost Modernities Woodside, Alexander
06/2009, Letnik:
2001
eBook
In Lost Modernities, Alexander Woodside offers an overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three ...mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations. This book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history.
Lệ Quý Dôn (1726-1784) represented many things in eighteenth-century northern Việt Nam, the “kingdom of Tonkin” as Western visitors then called it. He was a highranking mandarin’s privileged son; a ...child prodigy; a first-place palace examination degree winner when still in his twenties; a poet; an envoy to China; a student of astronomy; an historian; an eminent defender of Neo-Confucian philosophy; and, above all, a brilliant and prolific writer. (There is some doubt about the exact size of his output. Twenty-one different works of his are said to be accessible today in Ha Noi libraries, and perhaps as many as
Argues that both reform processes share historically determined features, such as costly and shapeless state administration, traditional rural corporatism, and mandarinism; focus on role of ...intellectuals; since the 1970s. Use of the "latecomer" notion to objectify ordinary people as "the peasant problem", and turn political problems into administrative ones.
The Confucian philosophies on the oneness of the lives of rulers and the people served to blur the distinctions between civilian life and the governments in China, Vietnam and Korea. Western concepts ...of history were accepted in the 20th century in this region as a political compromise.
