Chinese Thirdspace

Sebastian Veg, School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences:
Liu focuses on a parallel tradition of Chinese writers and intellectuals reaching from the late Republican era to the present. The thinkers of the third space rejected the dominant binaries of East and West, liberalism and communism, and tried to create an intermediate zone in a time of political polarization. For this, they were criticized by more political writers like Lu Xun, as well as being persecuted by politicians. The book makes an important contribution in moving the readers’ gaze away from the highly politicized canon of twentieth-century Chinese literature and prompting readers to think about other lineages and other possibilities in the development of the modern intellectual history of China.

Jie Li, Harvard University:
From philosophical treatises to martial arts novels, from cine-poems to cyberspace, Jianmei Liu shows how Chinese writers and intellectuals constructed public spheres to accommodate heterogeneous ideas and carved out aesthetic realms to transcend ideological binaries. Erudite and revelatory, Chinese Thirdspace presents salient alternatives to the contentious polemics of a tumultuous century.