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USES AND MISUSES OF A CHINESE RENAISSANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2013

MARK GAMSA*
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University E-mail: gamsa@post.tau.ac.il

Extract

To adopt the least contentious of several definitions, the currents of thought and motifs in the arts that we associate with the Renaissance had their beginnings in fourteenth-century Florence. By the end of the fifteenth century they had spread out to other Italian cities while, during the sixteenth century, the Renaissance became a cross-European phenomenon. But was there also a “Renaissance beyond Europe”?

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 For this trajectory, see the articles in Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikuláš, eds., The Renaissance in National Context (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Goody, Jack, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar. Review articles so far have been sympathetic: Alazard, Florence, “Une ou des Renaissances?”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2011/4, no. 58–4, 125–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, acknowledged a critical reception of the book by other French historians (at 131); but Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, “Many Renaissances, Many Modernities?”, Theory, Culture & Society 28/3 (May 2011), 149–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, applauded Renaissances together with Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge, 2010).

3 Goody, Renaissances, 24.

4 See Burke, Peter, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Brotton, Jerry, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford, 2002Google Scholar; republished as The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, 2005); and, for still more radical claims and a list of publications exemplifying the “trend toward an increasingly cross-cultural, global perspective on Renaissance Europe”, the editor's introduction in Jyotsna G. Singh, ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Chichester, 2009), 25 n. 8.

5 Goody, Renaissances, 198–240. This chapter in the book, like the chapters on Islam and India, was co-authored with the Cambridge University Germanist Stephen Fennell.

6 Joel L. Kraemer presented his concept of “The Renaissance of Islam” in the introduction to his Humanism in The Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden, 1986), a volume followed by Kraemer, , Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam: Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani and His Circle (Leiden, 1986Google Scholar; 2nd revised edn 1992).

7 Goody, Renaissances, 196, on “the Indian Renaissance”. On the first mention of the term, at 185, it may be seen to derive from Rowland, Benjamin, The Art and Architecture of India: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain (Harmondsworth, 1953)Google Scholar.

8 “The Song period has been called a Renaissance and it certainly appears as such”. Goody, Renaissances, 248, gives the reference to this statement as “Elvin 1973”. On Gernet's and Elvin's work, see more below.

9 The “spiritual Renaissance” mentioned in a book by Etienne Balazs (1905–63); the parallel to the European Renaissance that Arthur R. V. Cooper, translator of the volume Li Po and Tu Fu for Penguin Classics in 1973, discerned in the two Tang dynasty poets; and the several “golden ages” and “dark ages” identified in Chinese history by a number of other anglophone writers. Goody, Renaissances, 213–14, 216.

10 Ibid., 38, 234, 255.

11 In the concluding lines of the book: ibid., 274. Note that, while he quotes Mark Elvin on “a renaissance of learning” in the Song, Goody disapproves of his attempts to answer the question why imperial China did not develop a “modern economy”. Ibid., 222, 229.

12 Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

13 Gamble, Sidney D., Peking: A Social Survey (London, 1921), 158–62Google Scholar. One of the organs of the movement, the Xinchao magazine published in Peking from January 1919 to March 1922, carried the English title The Renaissance below the Chinese title on its front cover.

14 See Part 5, “The Chinese Renaissance”, in Gernet, Jacques, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster, J.R. and Hartman, Charles (Le monde chinois, 1972), 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973)Google Scholar. Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance, 45, presented the Song only as one of the four (unsuccessful) Renaissance movements that had preceded the movement for New Culture in the twentieth century.

15 In Konrad, N. I., West–East: Inseparable Twain, trans. Kasanina, H.et al. (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar, see especially the chapters “The Philosophy of the Chinese Renaissance (The Sung School)” and “The Renaissance Epoch”.

16 Shaffer, Lynda, “China, Technology and Change”, World History Bulletin 4/1 (Fall/Winter 1986–87)Google Scholar, 1, 4–6, attributed such reasoning to the pioneering historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham (1900–94), to accuse him of posing an “unfair” question. Jack Goody, too, critiqued Needham in The Theft of History for asking why China was overtaken by the West in science and technology in the sixteenth century. For yet another geographical perspective cf. Mirkovic, Alexander, “Did the Balkans Have a Renaissance?”, World History Bulletin 26/2 (Fall 2010), 24–8.Google Scholar

17 Pomeranz, Kenneth, “Putting Modernity in Its Place(s): Reflections on Jack Goody's The Theft of History, Theory, Culture & Society 26/7–8 (Dec. 2009), 3251CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 47 n. 3. Responding to this remark in a forum on his book in Theory, Culture & Society, Goody, “Supremacy or Alternation?”, ibid., 148–55, was ready to leave the question to sinologists, while restating his position that the Song “has frequently been compared to the Italian Renaissance” (151).

18 Menzies, Gavin, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; and cf. Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (London, 2002). For an analysis of the problem see Prazniak, Roxann, “Menzies and the New Chinoiserie: Is Sinocentrism the Answer to Eurocentrism in Studies of Modernity?”, Medieval History Journal 13/1 (April 2010), 115–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Hideo, Kiyama, “The ‘Literary Renaissance’ and the ‘Literary Revolution’”, Acta Asiatica 72 (March 1997), 2760Google Scholar. Kiyama points out, however, that Zhang did not make regular use of his term wenxue fugu and, when doing so, in 1906, could apply it to both “the Italian renaissance and . . . the current movement in China to revive ancient learning” (ibid., 30). On uses of the European Renaissance by Zhang and other writers in the Scholarly Journal on National Essence (Guocui xuebao) see Weizheng, Zhu, “China's Lost Renaissance”, in Zhu, , Coming Out of the Middle Ages: Comparative Reflections on China and the West, trans. and ed. Hayhoe, Ruth (Armonk, NY, 1990), 188–97, 190–92Google Scholar; and more in Hon, Tze-ki, Revolution as Restoration: Guocui xuebao and China's Path to Modernity, 1905–1911 (Leiden, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Kaske, Elisabeth, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden, 2008)Google Scholar, chap. 5, on the inspiration drawn from “the European Renaissance” by conservative Chinese philologists in the 1900s.

20 See Wright, Arthur F., “On the Uses of Generalization in the Study of Chinese History”, in Gottschalk, Louis, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago and London, 1963), 3658, 46–7Google Scholar. On calls for a new “post-Confucian” historiography during the 1920s and early 1930s see Moloughney, Brian, “From Biographical History to Historical Biography: A Transformation in Chinese Historical Writing”, East Asian History 4 (Dec. 1992), 130, 20–21Google Scholar.

21 “This literary revolution marks the first stage in the Chinese Renaissance, for here will be found a spirit essentially different from the earlier stages of modernisation”. Shih, Hu, “The Renaissance in China”, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 5/6 (Nov. 1926), 265–83 (record of speech in Chatham House, London, followed by discussion), at 270–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Shih, Hu, The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures 1933, 2nd edn (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. The Chicago lectures are at the centre of Zhou, Gang, “The Chinese Renaissance: A Transcultural Reading”, PMLA 120/3 (May 2005), 783–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also available as a chapter in Schildgen, Brenda Deenet al., eds., Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (New York, 2006), 113–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Eber, Irene, “Thoughts on Renaissance in Modern China: Problems of Definition”, in Thompson, L. G., ed., Studia Asiatica (San Francisco, 1975), 189218Google Scholar, which follows Hu Shi's generalizations on the Chinese Renaissance through to another series of invited lectures, delivered at Berkeley in 1956. See also Grieder, Jerome B., Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Sun, Lung-kee, “The Other May Fourth: Twilight of the Old Order”, in Chow, Kai-Winget al., eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham, MD, 2008), 271–92, 281Google Scholar.

24 “Without the benefit of an intimate contact with the civilization of the West, there could not be the Chinese Renaissance”. Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance, 47.

25 Gu followed the same strategy in his book in English, The Spirit of the Chinese People (1916). Müller, Gotelind, “Gu Hongming (1857–1928) und Chinas Verteidigung gegen das Abendland” (Gu Hongming and China's Defence against the West), Orientierungen, 1 (2006), 123, 12–14Google Scholar.

26 Cf. Mackerras, Colin, Western Images of China, 2nd revised edn (Oxford, 1999), 65–6Google Scholar.

27 Cf. Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London, 1971)Google Scholar, 38: “The paradigms which order ‘reality’ are part of the reality they order . . . language is part of the social structure and not epiphenomenal to it, and . . . we are studying an aspect of reality when we study the ways in which it appeared real to the persons to whom it was more real than to anyone else”.

28 Schildgen et al., Other Renaissances.

29 See Fitzgerald, John, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, 1996)Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, “The Unfinished History of China's Future”, Thesis Eleven 57 (May 1999), 17–31.

30 The German example was discussed in the first issue of the Kuomintang-edited Fuxing yuekan (Renaissance Monthly) in 1932. See Kirby, William C., Germany and Republican China (Stanford, 1984), 151, 165Google Scholar. Admiration of Germany's recovery after the Great War (as expressed by Sun Fo, the son of President Sun Yat-sen, who saw it as a model for China) was once again in evidence in Chinese interpretations of Germany's “revival” (fuxing) under Hitler. Chiang Kai-shek's fascist organization, the Blue Shirts (1932–38), styled itself the Zhonghua fuxingshe (Chinese Renaissance Society). Cf. ibid., 64, 160–61; and, on Fuxingshe, esp. Wakeman, Frederic Jr, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar.

31 Samarani, Guido, “Alberto De’ Stefani and Sino-Italian Relations Just before the Second World War”, East and West 43/1–4 (Dec. 1993), 301–10, at 307Google Scholar.

32 Jeans, Roger B. Jr, Democracy and Socialism in Republican China: The Politics of Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), 1906–1941 (Lanham, MD, 1997), 203Google Scholar.

33 Fung, Edmund S. K., Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge, 2010), 108–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See Schwarcz, Vera, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar. Interpretations of the Enlightenment by PRC scholars today are available in English in Feger, Hans, ed., The Fate of Reason: Contemporary Understanding of Enlightenment (Würzburg, 2013)Google Scholar.

35 Zuoren, Zhou, “Wenyi fuxing zhi meng” (The Dream of a Renaissance), reprinted in Hu, Yang, ed., Lishi jiyi yu lishi jieshi: Minguo shiqi mingren tan Wusi (Historical Memory and Historical Analysis: Famous Persons of the Republican Period Discuss May Fourth) (Fuzhou, 2010), 422–4Google Scholar.

36 See on this journal Katalin Till, “A Brief Flowering: A Study of the Modern Chinese Magazine ‘Literary Renaissance’”, MPhil thesis submitted to University of London, SOAS, 1995.

37 Chun, Allen, “From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan”, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 31 (Jan. 1994), 4969CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 A main proponent of these views has been the conservative cultural critic He Xin (born 1949). His essays are collected in two volumes under the title The Renaissance of the Chinese Nation and Future of the World (Zhonghua fuxing yu shijie weilai) (Chengdu, 1996). On this author (ironically, an exact namesake of the translator of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; see below), cf. a trenchant entry by Barmé, Geremie R. in Davis, Edward L., ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York, 2005), 344Google Scholar.

39 Liu Junning, “Zhongguo, ni xuyao yi chang wenyi fuxing!”, Nanfang zhoumo, 7 Dec. 2006. Cf. the discussion forum in the Beijing monthly Yishu pinglun (Arts Criticism) 5 (2007), 14–22.

40 Xue's book had a foreword by General Jiang Baili (aka Jiang Fangzhen, 1882–1938), a main figure in Kuomintang contacts with Mussolini, who urged readers to learn from the success of Italian fascists in realizing their theory of cultural revival. Godley, Michael R., “Lessons from an Italian Connection”, in Pong, David and Fung, Edmund S.K., eds., Ideal and Reality: Social and Political Change in Modern China, 1860–1949 (Lanham, MD, 1985), 93–123, 110–11Google Scholar.

41 See Mark Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age (shengshi)”, China Heritage Quarterly 29 (March 2012). The television series was also marketed as a three-volume book under the same title (Beijing, 2008); cf. Xianghua, Hong, ed., Fuxing zhi lu: Zhongguo jueqi de 30 ge lishi guanjian (The Way to Revival: Thirty Historical Keys to China's Rise) (Qingdao, 2007)Google Scholar, reissued in 2009 and advertised as a best seller. Even as the Renaissance trope has been extensively employed in state propaganda, it is also being claimed by an anti-government Internet blog, operating from abroad and associated with the banned Falun Gong movement (atruechineserenaissance.blogspot.com).

42 To quote the museum's website, this exhibition “demonstrates the glorious but long course of achieving national happiness and prosperity and fully reveals how the people chose Marxism, the Communist Party of China, socialism, and the reform and opening-up policy”.

43 The film's original Chinese title is “The Great Exploit of Party-Building” (Jiandang weiye). This, in turn, alludes to the title of a previous self-congratulatory production, Jianguo daye (literally “The Great Enterprise of State-Building”; English title: The Founding of a Republic), a film covering the years from 1945 to 1949, which was released for the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC in 2009.

44 Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age”.

45 Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “In Search of a Modern Humanism in China”, New York Times, 13 May 2010.

46 See Elliott, “The Historical Vision of the Prosperous Age”; and Barmé, Geremie R., “Shengshi Zhongguo: China's New Prosperous Age”, China Heritage Quarterly 26 (June 2011)Google Scholar. Barmé notes the connection to images of the Renaissance and their uses since Hu Shi, observing that “In China's modern history. . . enlightenments, rebirths and revivals have often been hastily announced and hailed in a mood of anxious exuberance”.

47 Szonyi, Michael, “Ming Fever: The Present's Past as the People's Republic Turns Sixty”, China Heritage Quarterly 21 (March 2010)Google Scholar, comments on the current vogue for a “concept of an indigenous Chinese modernity with its roots in the Ming [that] allows Chinese people today to challenge the hegemony of Western-style modernity without challenging the hegemony of modernity in general”. Cf. Horner, Charles, Rising China and Its Post-modern Fate: Memoires of Empire in a New Global Context (Athens, OH and London, 2009), 37, 42Google Scholar.

48 “All three nineteenth-century historiographies—Hegel's theodicity, Burckhardt's cultural history, and Marx's economic prehistory—conferred upon the Renaissance the status of inaugural epoch of the modern”. de Grazia, Margreta, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/3 (Fall 2007), 453–67, 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Engels's poetic description of the Renaissance in the preface to Dialektik oder Natur (1873), “Es war die größte progressive Umwälzung, die die Menschheit bis darin erlebt hatte, eine Zeit, die Riesen brauchte und Riesen zeugte” (in the English translation of Dialectics of Nature: “It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants”), has often been quoted in Chinese. Ruru, Li, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (Hong Kong, 2003), 67, 44–5, 71, 166Google Scholar, notes this in the context of Chinese theatre criticism.

49 Cf. Unger, Jonathan, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (Armonk, NY, 1993)Google Scholar; and Spakowski, Nicola, “National Aspirations on a Global Stage: Concepts of World/Global History in Contemporary China”, Journal of Global History 4/3 (Nov. 2009), 475–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Gilbert, Felix, “Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years: The Road to Cultural History”, Journal of the History of Ideas 47/2 (April–June 1986), 249–74, 272–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Huizinga, Johan, “The Task of Cultural History” (1929), in Huizinga, , Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans. Holmes, James S. and van Marle, Hans (London, 1960), 1776, 63Google Scholar. Cf. 69: “We cannot do without the names of periods, because they have become filled with meaning that is valuable to us, even though every attempt to motivate their validity only demonstrates the contrary”, and note also Huizinga's suspicion of “every name for a period which is taken too literally, or behind which too much is sought” (75).

52 Hume, Robert D., “Construction and Legitimation in Literary History”, Review of English Studies, new series 56/226 (2005), 632–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 637 (cf. 646: “the idea of uniformity across a period of decades is convenient but too silly even to be worth attacking”). A defence of periodization as a valuable intellectual enterprise is in Rabb, Theodore K., The Last Days of the Renaissance & The March to Modernity (New York, 2006), xxxxiGoogle Scholar. See also the forum on “Periodization, Then and Now”, History Workshop Journal 63 (Spring 2007), and the special issue “Medieval/Renaissance after Periodization”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/3 (Fall 2007).

53 A powerful rebuttal is McRae, John R., “Religion as Revolution in Chinese Historiography: Hu Shih (1891–1962) on Shen-hui (684–758)”, Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 12 (2001), 59102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Showing the superficiality of Hu Shi's writing on Chan Buddhism, McRae remarks, “Ultimately, all the problems of Hu Shih's work derive from a single point: his dedication to the pragmatic use of history” (98). Comparing Hu's scheme of periodization with that of William T. De Bary, he wonders “how history can be compartmentalized so easily. What factors differentiate the ages from each other, and what are the mechanisms and dynamics of change?” (100 n. 100).

54 See Arnason, Johann P., Eisenstadt, S. N. and Wittrock, Björn, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden and Boston, 2005)Google Scholar; and Bellah, Robert N. and Joas, Hans, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Boy, John D. and Torpey, John, “Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept”, Theory and Society 42/3 (May 2013), 241–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 See the American Historical Association presidential address by Bouwsma, William J., “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History”, American Historical Review 84/1 (Feb. 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1–15, reprinted with commentary in Martin, John J., ed., The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (London and New York, 2003), 2742, 39Google Scholar. Cf. the forum on the Renaissance, marking twenty years since Bouwsma's lecture, in American Historical Review 103/1 (Feb. 1998), 51–121; and Arlette Jouanna, “La notion de Renaissance: Réflexions sur un paradoxe historiographique”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2002/5, no. 49–4bis, 5–16. Most recently, see e.g. chap. 2, “Breve storia di una metafora” (The Short History of a Metaphor), in Nicola Gardini, Rinascimento (Turin, 2010).

56 One such critique of “early modern” is Caferro, William, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2011), 18Google Scholar.

57 See Platt, Kevin M. F., “The Post-Soviet Is Over: On Reading the Ruins”, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1/1 (May 2009)Google Scholar, for a shrewd questioning of such “metaphorical pathways”.

58 Quoting McRae, “Religion as Revolution in Chinese Historiography”, 89, on Hu Shi.

59 See e.g. Khanna, Parag, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. An example from a Malaysian politician is Ibrahim, Anwar, The Asian Renaissance (Singapore, 1996)Google Scholar; in Singapore, the Singaporean diplomat Mahbubani, Kishore celebrated the growth of Asian power in “renaissance” terms in his Can Asians Think? (Singapore, 1998)Google Scholar.

60 Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was retranslated into Chinese from the 15th edn of the English translation by S. G. C. Middlemore in 1979 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan); this translation by He Xin was reprinted in 2009. The thematically arranged Ouzhou wenyi fuxing shi (supplied English title: A History of the Renaissance), in 12 vols. (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2008–10), under the general editorship of Liu Minghan, represents the state of current scholarship.

61 Conrad, Sebastian, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique”, American Historical Review 117/4 (Oct. 2012), 9991027CrossRefGoogle Scholar, calls for viewing the Enlightenment through the lens of the “global entanglements” that arose from “the production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century” (1010). As the same would not hold true for the fifteenth or the sixteenth centuries, Conrad is wrong to condemn Goody's work (both The Theft of History and Renaissances) for preferring the comparative approach (ibid., 1008). Comparison and the search for connections, moreover, are not mutually exclusive: cf. Wong, R. Bin, “Did China's Late Empire Have an Early Modern Era?” in David Porter, ed., Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800 (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, 195–216; and Kenneth Pomeranz, “Areas, Networks, and the Search for ‘Early Modern’ East Asia”, in ibid., 245–70. Wong works with “similarities and differences” across the “early modern” and “modern” divide; Pomeranz is “inclined to tack back and forth . . . between comparison and connection” (257).

62 An example of the comparative method, which also looks at Florentine merchants in India in the sixteenth century, is Jones, Dalu, ed., Lo specchio del Principe. Mecenatismi paralleli: Medici e Moghul (The Prince's Mirror. Parallel Patronages: The Medici and the Moghul) (Rome, 1991)Google Scholar. The assumption that a comparative analysis of “Renaissance” movements in Europe and Asia would mean the subjugation of the modern Asian movements to Western standards, as presented in Zhou, Gang, “Other Asias, Other Renaissances”, Concentric 34/2 (Sept. 2008), 87100Google Scholar, does not need to be accepted.

63 Again, contrary to the argument of Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History”, esp. 1026.

64 See Elman, Benjamin, “Global Science and Comparative History: Jesuits, Science, and Philology in China and Europe, 1550–1850”, introduction to special issue of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 26 (2007), 916Google Scholar; and Lee, Christina H., ed., Western Visions of the Far East in the Transpacific Age, 1522–1657 (Farnham, 2012)Google Scholar, for the former approach. For the latter see Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta and Molà, Luca, “The Global Renaissance: Cross-cultural Objects in the Early Modern Period”, in Adamson, Glennet al., eds., Global Design History (London and New York, 2011), 1120Google Scholar; and on the city in China that shipped porcelain to Europe, Gerritsen, Anne, “Global Design in Jingdezhen: Local Production and Global Connections”, in ibid., 25–33. For more on porcelain see Journal of World History 23/1 (March 2012)Google Scholar, issue on “Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History”. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance”, keynote lecture given on 24 June 2011 at the conference The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450–1700, Birkbeck, University of London; and Fernández-Armesto, “Eurasian Renaissance: Intellect, Art and Exchange”, lecture on 29 June 2012 at the British Library conference Renaissance Old Worlds: English Encounters from the Levant to the Far East, raised the suggestion that Chinese artefacts may have reached European courts in the late fifteenth century through diplomatic gifts from Qa'it Bey, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt.

65 See the conclusion of Standaert, Nicolas, “The Transmission of Renaissance Culture in Seventeenth-century China”, Renaissance Studies 17/3 (Sept. 2003), 367–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also collected in Carey, Daniel, ed., Asian Travel and the Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2004), 4266Google Scholar.

66 Burke, , “Renaissance Europe and the World”, in Woolfson, Jonathan, ed., Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography (New York, 2005), 5270, 53, 66Google Scholar.

67 See Burke, Peter, “Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances”, Theory, Culture & Society 26/7–8 (Dec. 2009), 1631, 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests that “in the case of China, connections with European humanism are unlikely . . . On the other hand, similarities are important”.