A Century of Chinese Aesthetics

Abstract

The author offers a description of Chinese aesthetics in the 20th century, which was the period in which aesthetics in its narrow sense was developed in China. in recent years many studies have researched the history of Chinese aesthetics in the past century, but this article concentrates on its history in the context of Western influence on China, the social and political requirements of China, and the particular mental states of the Chinese intellectuals of this period. In the first part of the article the ideas of Chinese intellectuals on China vs. West and the old vs. the new are presented. The author shows how the Chinese attempted to develop Chinese society and culture and save the »endangered« nation by way of learning from the West. The second part presents the entry of Western aesthetics into China at first by way of Japan, and then directly. In the third part a background introduction to the »Great Discussion« on aesthetics in the late 1950s and early 1960s is presented, as well as a summary of the general ideas of some key aestheticians of that time. The fourth part gives a general introduction to the »Aesthetic Craze« of the 1980s, and points out that aesthetics maintained a profound connection with the political life of China both in the period of the 1950s and 1960s (before the Cultural Revolution) and in the 1980s. In the closing part the author attempts to offer an explanation of the »Aesthetic Cold« of the 1990s, and observes that currently there is a recovery and yet again a new development of aesthetics in China.