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Göran Malmqvist (Stockholm University): Politics and Philology at the End of the Qing Dynasty

Abstract:

My talk will deal with Kang Youwei’s activities in Sweden 1904-05, his intellectual background, his utopian work Datongshu 大同书 and his participation in the reform movement during the summer of 1898. Finally I deal critically with his politically motivated excursion into philology and his utterly futile attempt to prove that Zuozhuan 左转 and the Guwen古文 Classics were forgeries from the beginning of the Later Han period. At the end of my talk I discuss the highly negative appraisals of his works in textual criticism, presented in the 1930s by the Swedish Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren and the Chinese historian Qian Mu 钱穆.