China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision is an inspiring and highly engaging work that explores the international outlooks of modern Chinese thoughts and culture. Reading a wide array of cultural texts ranging from political theory and fiction to cinema and theater, Ban Wang delineates the tension and interaction between nationalism and internationalism in China's nation-building projects in the modern age.
A central intervention that China in the World strikes is to rethink the binarism of empire and nation-state. While the historical trajectory of twentieth-century China has commonly been perceived as a transition from an old-style empire to a modern nation-state, Wang problematizes this teleological narrative by recognizing the mutual imbrication and transformation between the two. In so doing, Wang reveals the inadequacy of the presumed universalist model of the European nation-state to account for the historical specificities of modern China and advocates a historicized, comparative method that...
