Keping Wang is a Fellow of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) where he was head of Aesthetics Section of CASS Institute of Philosophy from 2005 to 2016, philosophy professor of CASS Graduate School, and Professor of Beijing International Studies University where he worked as Director of Institute for Trans-cultural Studies over a decade. Professor Wang is a former visiting fellow of St. Anne’s College of Oxford University (2000), visiting Professor of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Sydney University (2010) and Sciences Politiques de Bordeaux (2017). His major writings in Chinese include the Moral Poetics in Plato’s Laws (2015), Plato’s Poetics in the Republic (2005, 2014) and Aesthetics in Tourism (2015), with publications in English including the Rediscovery of Sino-Hellenic Ideas (2016) and Reading the Dao: A Thematic Inquiry (2011).
With the rise of China in the 21st century, this book offers a trans-cultural and thematic study of key Chinese concepts which influence modern day Chinese thinking across the spheres of politics, economics and society. It reflects on the major schools of Chinese thought including Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism, providing a historical perspective on the ideological development of China in terms of the relationship between man and nature, social ethics, political governance, poetry education, aesthetic criticism and art theory. It also explores primary aspects of Chinese poetics and aesthetics with reference to the interaction between the endogenous theories and their western counterparts. Written by a leader in Chinese Aesthetics against the background of both globalization and glocalization at home and abroad, this is a key read for all those interested in the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of contemporary China.