The Humanities in China and Taiwan Today

Abstract

Are the humanities in trouble in China and Taiwan, such as we witness elsewhere in the world? In her brief commentary, Lydia H. Liu reflects on the contributions by Wang Hui and Fan-sen Wang, who offer illuminating analyses of the state of the humanities in contemporary China and Taiwan. In the past, upward mobility in East Asian societies often depended on one's hard work and superior command of the Confucian classics. Today, the legacy of meritocracy may still be alive and continue to be endorsed by the various governments, but the processes of globalization have introduced new factors, such as the hegemony of performance indexes and the journal impact factor, that are pushing the humanities (and sciences) in dangerous directions.