How have political conflicts impacted philosophical concepts and the rise of particular intellectual lineages in China? This question is part of a contested issue - the relative strength of state power and intellectuals' cultural authority. A nuanced fathoming of Confucian intellectual currents in Zhu Xi's wake reveals that his ideas were not as rapidly or universally accepted in the thirteenth century as they have retrospectively been portrayed. By exploring views of the Zhongyong and the succession and transmission of the Way (daotong), the authors demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between cultural authority and political culture. Their study highlights the independence of Wang Bo and Hao Jing on such issues.

Christian Soffel got his Ph.D. from Munich University in 2001. Since then he has worked as postdoc at Arizona State University (sponsored by a Feodor Lynen research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) and at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. In 2004 he received a position as assistant professor at the Institute of Sinology of the LMU in Munich, and in 2012 he has been offered a full professorship in sinology at the University of Trier. His research interests are Chinese history of thought, in particular Confucianism in the Song dynasty, traditional Chinese literature, and the impact of Confucianism on Chinese literati in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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