Author ｜
Chelsea Yingqiuqi Lei
Abstract ｜
This study inquires into the cultural preconditions of a popular conception in contemporary societies characterized by the idea of turning crisis into opportunity. Building on Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis regarding the conceptual origins of modern crisis mentality in European cultures,this paper presents an analysis of the conceptual history of weiji 危機 (the Chinese word for “crisis”) in the Chinese cultural-historical context using the Jin-Liu Database Method. I argue that the history of weiji and its modern transformations are compatible with Koselleck’s basic theoretical framework relating “crisis” and “modernity.” The modern use of weiji originated in the late Qing reform movement, which saw the emergence of a discourse and widespread consciousness of Chinese nationalism. The proliferation of weiji-talk found in Chinese public press during the thirty-year period 1895-1925 was indicative of larger cultural transformations involving changes in the cultural conception of history. Within this context, the concept of weiji became drafted into ideologies of nationalism,republicanism, and Communism, the operation of which all depended on the new cultural mentality regarding the nature of historical change as linear and man-made. For this reason, the conceptual histories of “weiji”and “crisis” could be said to have converged during the 20th century on the basis of a deeper convergence of their underlying cultural conception of history. This convergence has provided an important cultural precondition for not only the pervasive idea of turning crisis into opportunity in contemporary societies but also the emergence and evolution of powerful ideologies including nationalism, communism, industrialism, capitalism,and scientism in modern China.
keywords ｜
crisis, weiji, modernity, conceptual history, cultural conception of history, nationalism, database method