ABSTRACT
As children of the Enlightenment, we members of the scholarly community professionally and personally involved in the study of traditional China and its modern transformation inadvertently subscribe to a set of Western cultural assumptions, making a sophisticated appreciation of the process by which China as a civilization-state adapted itself to the impact of the West painfully difficult. Although we rarely engage ourselves in a critical reflection on the Enlightenment mentality, an intellectual effort that has preoccupied some of the brilliant minds from North American and Europe in the last two decades, we are deeply affected by it. For one thing, the conceptual apparatuses we have employed in analyzing China and the symbolic resources we have tapped in interpreting China are Enlightenment in character. In other words, we approach our subject of inquiry from the Enlightenment perspective.
