Thanks to the active encouragement of several friends, I have had the oppor- tunity to compile and publish a collection of essays written in recent years on contemporary Chinese scholarship. The thrust of these essays is to reflect on the humanities and social sciences in today’s China in general so as to grasp their current state in depth and to speak on that basis about the major turn they are undergoing.
This turn is, most briefly, the breaking away of our humanities and social sciences from their long-standing “apprenticeship” and their achieving self- assertion. Because of the absolute right of modernity at this particular stage, Chinese academia since modern times has generally entered an apprentice- ship to foreign scholarship. There is no doubt that this apprenticeship has given rise to an unprecedented process of massive learning from abroad, and that the resulting achievements have been for our scholarship not only highly beneficial but also fruitful. But the true maturity of any academia is always accompanied by its ability to gradually break away from its apprenticeship and begin to acquire its own self-assertion, thus becoming a so-called auton- omous or self-authorised academia.