This article argues that Anglophone works on Chinese democracy have tended to build their analyses on assumptions that tradition is either (1) a pre-modern phenomenon unrelated to China's democratization process, (2) a hindrance that should be gotten rid of if China is to democratize, (3) a static phenomenon which cannot but appear antiquated with regards to a dynamic, fast-paced modern China, or (4) an object from which modern agents can freely draw. In order to challenge these assumptions, this article suggests that modernity and democracy were translated into a Chinese milieu already ripe with Gadamerian prejudices; prejudices which not only modified the meaning of modernity and democracy, but also provided the very conditions without which modernity and democracy would not have been meaningful or understood at all. Max Ko-wu Huang's work can contribute to our understanding of the role played by various traditions in the process of translating democracy during the transitional period of modern China (1895-1925).

What was “China” before the twentieth century? This is not as simple a question as it might seem. Whereas nowadays Chinese textbooks propose that China is a sovereign country with a continuous history of 5000 years, historical textbooks from a thousand years ago were far less confident about the coherence of the Chinese territories and noted that periods of multi-state rule had been dominant over the course of time. In her inaugural lecture Professor Hilde De Weerdt explores different explanations for the finding that large unified empires dominated in Chinese history during the last 700 years. Based on her first two monographs, she revisits the history of two major institutions in Chinese political history that have been credited with holding successive Chinese empires together, the civil service examinations and the state. She discusses how the growing numbers of students preparing for the examinations created the most precocious information culture in the history of humanity. State archives, court gazettes, maps and treaties were shared among the cultured elite who saw political literacy as their prerogative. She proposes that the effect of the partial disclosure of court documents and decisions was not, as in European history, the arrival of a public sphere and a growing gap between state and civil society but rather the consolidation of imperial rule. Publicity became as important as censorship in the balancing of power between court and provincial elites. Looking towards the future of Chinese and comparative political history, Professor De Weerdt also calls for the adaptation of digital methods in the study of subjects that require access to large amounts of texts such as party politics, student mobilization, and collective action.