About

This web site is devoted to the subject of intellectual life in contemporary China, and more particularly to the writings of establishment intellectuals.  What you will find here are essentially translations of Chinese texts that my collaborators and I consider important.  Click here for tips that will help you get the most out of the site.  Click here for the 15 most popular translations, and here for my personal favorites.​

The site is run by David Ownby (ownby.david@gmail.com), Professor of History at the Université de Montréal, who established it in 2018, and has been posting new translations to it every two weeks ever since.   The site grew out of a larger research project entitled Reading and Writing the China Dream, led by Timothy Cheek (professor of history at the University of British Columbia) , Joshua Fogel (professor of history at York University), and myself, and involving any number of colleagues and graduate students in Canada, China, and elsewhere.  Indeed, the project had a robust and innovative training component, which you can read about here.  The project was originally funded by an Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, but this grant expired in 2019.   
 
The site organizes our translations in a variety of ways.

• The Maps menu follows the nomenclature used by Chinese intellectuals and regroups intellectuals according to their affiliation:  Liberal, New Left, New Confucian, other. 
• The People menu lists all intellectuals whose texts we have translated alphabetically, for ease of use. 
• The Projects menu regroups the texts in terms of intellectual or publication projects in which we are engaged, thus providing a larger context in which to understand the intellectuals and their work.
• The Themes menu regroups the text by theme.