ABSTRACT
The rise of world history as a way of inquiry about China’s position in the globalising human community was a major development in the country’s intellectual culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet to what extent did China’s intellectual traditions affect this process? In this chapter, I analyse the process in which the transformation of the Confucian tradition (especially its late development after the twelfth century, or Neo-Confucianism) contributed to the rise of world-historical consciousness through the confluence of the perspectives of temporality and spatiality. Prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese scholar-officials prioritised historical time over global space. The awareness of global space would increase during the nineteenth century, but, as the case studies on Guo Songtao 郭嵩濤 (1818–1891) and Xue Fucheng 薛福成 (1838–1894) show, well into the century a number of Chinese scholar-officials, including those who were considered to be more “open-minded”, still relied upon historical time to make sense of contemporaneous global affairs. Historical and literary scholarship had marked that by the turn of the twentieth century, however, there is a significant change. Changing political vocabulary reveals how a new sense of spatiality placed China as a political entity at the margins of global space and in a lagged position in world-historical time and gradually transformed the Chinese worldview among educated elites. This new sense of time and space became an important source for the conceptualisation of the world in China.
