The first Summit Forum on the History of Chinese Thought was held in Kunming, Yunnan Province, from Oct. 24 to 25.

 

The first Summit Forum on the History of Chinese Thought was held in Kunming, Yunnan Province, from Oct. 24 to 25. Scholars engaged in heated discussions about the building of a Chinese school of the history of thought.

Wang Weiguang, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and director of the editorial board of the General History of Chinese Thought project, emphasized in a written speech titled “Building a Chinese School for Studies of Intellectual History” that building a Chinese school is an important path for globalization of intellectual history studies.

At the forum, Gao Xiang, secretary-general of CASS, editor-in-chief of the Social Sciences in China Press under CASS and deputy director of the project, pointed out the importance of properly handling four relationships during the compilation of General History of Chinese Thought: relationships between thought and concept, between society and thought, between commoners and elites, and between personal opinion and collective will.

Involving more than 100 scholars, the General History of Chinese Thought project was launched in October 2014, and it is on course to be finished in five years.
 

Before the project, famed Chinese scholar Hou Wailu led a team to publish a similar set of volumes titled General History of China Thought in 1963. It was hailed as a tour de force in studies of Chinese intellectual history, and it has exerted the broadest and most profound influence in the field.

Attending scholars said the success of the masterwork could largely be attributed to the authors’ consistent integration of ideological and social history. Only with such methodologies can studies of the history of thought “break new ground,” they added.
 

“Researchers dedicated to the discipline must be versed in economic and political history. The integration of intellectual and social history, to my understanding, should focus on relations of ideological changes with an economic base and a political environment. This is particularly true in the building of a Chinese school in studies of intellectual history, and no other way is better,” Gao said.

For thousands of years, Chinese thought seemed to be dominated by the ideas of a few prominent thinkers. Influenced by the narrow-minded view, most volumes on the history of thought shed light only on the small group while neglecting the masses and their practices. However, ideas are raised by ordinary people. It is the people who have built the foundation for the excellent ideological culture of mankind, scholars said.
 

Wang stressed the need to combine ideas of the common people with those of reputed thinkers and politicians to “return the history of thought to the people” and produce a volume of intellectual history that can truly represent the masses.
 

The forum was also the first event to ever gather scholars to conduct a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the history of thought.
 

Gao said that the trend toward interdisciplinary studies has been irresistible in the current era, where no single discipline can solve major theoretical and practical issues. The development of a discipline is increasingly based on the achievements of others, he said.
 

“Ideas are fresh and vivid. If we remain mired in the past and refuse to draw upon methodologies of other related disciplines, our studies will fall behind the international academic mainstream,” Gao said.

 

 

Zhang Chunhai is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.