Tang Junyi

Tang Junyi’s modern Confucianism ranks among the most ambitious philosophical projects in 20th century China. In Tang Junyi: Confucian Philosophy and the Challenge of Modernity, Thomas Fröhlich examines Tang Junyi's intellectual reaction to a time of cataclysmic change marked by two Chinese revolutions (1911 and 1949), two world wars, the Cold War period, rapid modernization in East Asia, and the experience of exile.

The present study fundamentally questions widespread interpretations that depict modern Confucianism as essentially traditionalist and nationalistic. Thomas Fröhlich shows that Tang Junyi actually challenges such interpretations with an insightful understanding of the modern individual’s vulnerability, as well as a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Confucianism as the civil-theological foundation for liberal democracy in China.

Thomas Fröhlich, Dr. phil. (1999), Habilitation (2003), both at the University of Hamburg, is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Hamburg. He has published a monograph, edited volumes, and many articles on modern Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, including Staatsdenken im China der Republikzeit (Campus, 2000).

"Fröhlich...situates Tang in a discursive environment that includes many prominent figures of Western intellectual history and also materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that were of direct impact. The book is written for and will be welcomed by everyone who takes an interest in China's recent history."
-Barbara Hendrischke, University of Sydney, in Religious Studies Review, Vol.44 No.4, (2018)

"Fröhlich’s study is quite simply the best book on Tang Junyi out there, and one of the most sophisticated and rewarding investigations into Chinese intellectual history in general."
-Ady Van den Stock in Monumenta Serica, 67:1, 284-289.

"The author succeeds in giving us a profound and well-documented presentation of this great thinker of modernity. Simultaneously, he really engages in a philosophical conversation with Tang Junyi, making this work more than a descriptive sinological study; it becomes a valuable work in philosophy. It is a book whose extensive remarks and developments will require careful and lento readers--a book on intellectual history as it should be written."
-Joseph Ciaudo in Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 72(4), 1215-1221.