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ORIENS EXTREMUS 61.2024 contains a roundtable on The Conceptual History of Modern China, a special section on Knowing China in a Modern World, guest-edited by Bruce Rusk, and four independent research articles:
Thomas Fröhlich et al.
Roundtable: The Conceptual History of Modern China
Bruce Rusk
Introduction: Knowing China in a Modern World
Leigh Jenco
Authentic, Accurate, Real: Validity and the Cult of Qing (Emotion) in Late Ming Poetic Criticism
Jérôme Bourgon
“Despotism, Certainly, but the Best of All” (Montesquieu)—China’s Autocratic Legality in a Comparative Historical Perspective
Gregory Blue
Making Europe’s China “Ancient”: The Epicurean Moment
Haun Saussy
An Empire Ruled by Outsiders: Kang Youwei on Imperial Cosmopolitanism
Luke Waring
Commerce and Classical Learning in Wang Chong’s Balanced Discourses
Zhang Zhongmin
张仲民
Politics of Hygiene in Revolutionary Base Areas of the CPC from1927 to 1949
Gao Ziwen
高子文,
trans. Stefan CHRIST
Nationhood, Modernity, and Discursive Construction: On the Origin and Development of the Concept of Huaju (Spoken Drama)
Bernd Spyra
Modern Traditional Prints: Entangling Chinese Popular Culture ina Transnational Ethnographic Collection
With this issue, Oriens Extremus enters its second sexagenary cycle. It was founded in 1954 as a "Zeitschrift für Sprache, Kunst und Kultur der Länder des Fernen Ostens", in a time when there were only a handful of periodicals for Asian studies in Western languages, the scientific community was small and the field was not very differentiated.
The first issues of Oriens Extremus had no "Editors' Note" and no explicit program. True to the subtitle, they combined articles on subjects as diverse as late Zhou art, pre-modern Korean history, Japanese Zen masters, human nature in Mengzi and Xunzi, Indonesian linguistics, Sumerian vocabulary, Sanskrit texts from Bali, Thai inscriptions, Burmese writing systems, Vietnamese lexicography, and many others. Written in French, German, Dutch, or English by a coterie of trusty scholars, none of them were peer-reviewed. Generous funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG) allowed for one or, for a short period, two issues per year.
Since then, much has changed. The scholarly community has grown, and numerous specialized journals have been founded around the globe. Consequently, Oriens Extremus has also narrowed its scope. For the last two decades, there have not been any contributions on Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, or Vietnamese topics, and, alas, no more articles in French or Dutch. Since 2013, a new subtitle – "Kultur, Geschichte, Reflexion in Ostasien" – signaled a shift from predominantly philological to interdisciplinary, theory-guided research. The editors have since encouraged contributions in the field of conceptual and intellectual history – to which the present issue provides another testimony –, further honing down the journal's scope and profile.
Nevertheless, a steady stream of contributions reaches us from all over the world, and rigorous peer-review has become indispensable. Whereas in the old days, quantity may have been a problem, now, in a time driven by fast-pace publishing, sometimes quality is. At the same time, the German Research Foundation has unfortunately decided to terminate its funding for all scholarly journals, making it more challenging to uphold the standards we have set ourselves.
Without the continuous support and encouragement from Harrassowitz Verlag, Oriens Extremus would be in dire straits. Still, adjustments to the circumstances were inevitable, and so the editors decided to henceforth publish Oriens Extremus in a two-year rhythm. As the tune changes, the rhythm can adjust. Therefore, a shift back to the publication of yearly issues is certainly not excluded in a future framework.