Excerpt

Of the many terms that circulated on the intellectual scene in early twentieth-century China, cosmopolitanism is perhaps one of the least likely to be taken as a given, a fixed notion where a set of values are easily pinned down. Chinese scholarship on cosmopolitanism in modern China tends to focus on its political implications.¹ Cosmopolitan thought, however, was also visible on the cultural and literary fronts when the concern for cultural transformation temporarily superseded political revolution in the enlightenment atmosphere of the early twentieth century.² A probe into cosmopolitanism's relationship with Chinese enlightenment thought, as embodied in figures such as…