LIANG Shuming is an important Chinese philosopher who is often credited as one of the founders of the neo-Confucian movement, which aims to rejuvenate ancient Confucianism in the twentieth century. When the New Culture movement and Chinese Marxism rejected Confucianism as an obstacle to the modernization of the country, Liang was among the first to proclaim its relevance not only for China, but for all humanity. As a philosopher, he was concerned with the question of the ultimate meaning of life, finding his answer in Buddhism, but he dealt with this question in his other works, as can be seen in my doctoral dissertation on this topic at Peking University, published in English as The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming: The Hidden Buddhist (Brill, 2011). In Fundamentals of Chinese Culture translated here by Li, Liang's focus is on social and moral philosophy, attempting to express the specificity of Chinese experience compared with that of the West. His project is not to refuse the modernity brought by the West; on the contrary, he considers that the absence of a capitalist economy and of a nation-state has hindered the social development of the country. But he wants to combine this modernity with Chinese social and moral traditions. As he says, a strong social body needs also a strong spirit, and Liang finds this spirit in Confucianism as a practice by which a person can return to their true self, through introspection and ethics.

Liang received no academic training and he had a short academic career at Peking University. This explains why many of his works may appear to be collections of personal ideas, lacking systematicity. This is particularly true of the original work of this translation, which was written over the course of a nine-year period marked by the war against Japan and by the civil war. The original work was published in 1949, only a few months before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China.

For the reader today, the book presents three points of particular interest. The first is historical, allowing the reader to become familiar with the debates that agitated Chinese intellectuals before 1949. Liang is in contact with many important thinkers and he avidly reads their works that nourish his thought.