The Meaning of Freedom: Yan Fu and the Origins of Chinese Liberalism

June, 2008
Cloth, 400 pages,
ISBN: 978-962-996-278-4
The Chinese University Press
$52.00

This book is about how Yan Fu introduced the Chinese intellectual world to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill by partly grasping Mill's ideas, partly misunderstanding and projecting onto them indegenous Chinese values, and partly criticizing or resisting them. Rather than bending Western liberalism to the purposes of Chinese nationalism. Yan initiated a distinctively Chinese liberal tradition that became a major strand of China's modern political culture.

Related Subjects

• Asian History

About the Author

Max K. W. Huang is a Research Fellow of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. He specializes in the intellectual history of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His books include The Rejected Path: A Study of Liang Qichao's Accommodative Thinking (Chinese, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1994 and 2006;Beijing, New Star Publisher, 2006) and The Raison D'être of Freedom: Yan Fu's Understanding and Critique of John Stuart Mill's Liberalism (Chinese, Yunchen wenhua, 1998; Shanghai shudian, 2000).

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