Xueren (English: The Scholar[1]) was an influential Chinese independent intellectual journal that ran from 1991 to 2000.[2] It was founded and edited by Chen Pingyuan, Wang Hui, and Wang Shouchang under the sponsorship of a Japanese foundation.[2] In order to work around censorship conditions in the Chinese publishing industry that make it more difficult for periodicals to get approval than books, Xueren was published as a "series" in the latter format.[2] Other journals that have taken the same approach include Res Publica and Horizons.[2]
Scholar Chaohua Wang locates Xuerens origins in "the self-examination of intellectuals intimately involved in the ferment of the eighties":
The project of its editors [. . .] was to retrieve the history of modern Chinese scholarship (xueshu shi), a tradition they felt was in danger of being obscured or forgotten under the pressure of imported theories. In doing so, they wanted to clarify their own intellectual identity and responsibilities. What was their position in a historical chain of scholarly development? When and how should a scholar speak out on public issues?[2]
Co-founder Wang Hui characterizes his and his colleagues' motivations similarly, but without a critical approach toward "imported theories" in academe as a primary component of their intellectual project, and with more of an eye toward directly socially relevant goals. According to him, Xueren was created to facilitate an effort by young intellectuals to "reconsider" modern Chinese history in the wake of the failure of the 1989 democracy movement, a "process of reflection" that
included serious reconsideration of modern history, conscientious rethinking of attempts to carry out radical reform on the basis of Western models, close investigation of the Chinese historical legacy and its contemporary significance, and necessary critiques of certain of the consequences of radical political action.
However, Wang Hui states that Xueren "did not pursue any particular academic agenda."[3]
The 648-page seventh issue of Xueren (May 1995) printed the following table of contents in English (though all articles were in Chinese):
| Page | Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On Kant's Cultural Philosophy | Hong Qian | |
| 5 | Hong Qian: A Rational Life | Wang Wei | |
| 15 | Hong Qian and Otto Neurath | Fan Dainan | |
| 31 | Mority Schlik on Content and Form | Han Linhe | |
| 43 | Guo Shaunglin | ||
| 85 | Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism Between China and the West | Lydia H. Liu | |
| 121 | Cai Yuanpei's Philosophy of Gender Equality | Xia Xiaohong | |
| 163 | Liu Shipei's Research on Chinese Academic History | Wu Guangxing | |
| 187 | Jing Haifeng | ||
| 211 | The Vijñānavāda School and the Concept of Hetu | Luo Zhao | |
| 271 | A New Look at the Origins of Tibetan Culture | Wang Xiaodun | |
| 303 | A Study of the Dagger-Axe with the "Bi bing" Inscriptions Found at Jingmen | Luo Zhao | |
| 325 | The Mo Sword and the Military Affairs of the Great Tang Empire | Li Jinxiu | |
| 341 | The Bagu Eight-Part Essay and Classical Chinese Prose of the Ming and Qing | Chen Pingyuan | |
| 373 | On the Adherents of the Ming Dynasty | Zhao Yuan | |
| 395 | On the Relationship Between Changzhou 常州 Woman's Culture and the Yanghu School Writers 阳湖派 | Cao Hong | |
| 419 | In Search of New Models for Research on China | Liu Dong | |
| 469 | Reaching Out From Tradition: The Connection Between Peace and Political Order | He Huaihong | |
| 501 | The Fate of the Doctrine of Two Categories of Truth: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present | Xu Youyu | |
| 523 | Theory and Practice: A Study of the History of Philosophical Thinking | Zhang Rulun | |
| 561 | Song See Yeol and the Zhuzi School of the Lee Dynasty in Korea | Chen Lai | |
| 577 | Ogyu Sorai and His Innovations to Japanese Confucianism | Wang Zonghiangz | |
| Notes on Academic History Research | |||
| 601 | Breaking Away Form [''[[sic]]] the Cycle of the Han and Song Schools | Chen Shaoming | |
| 615 | A Brief Account of the Revival of the Xunzi School During the Mid-Qing | Yang Hu | |
| 627 | A Critique of Xiao Yang's "The Law of Causality, Historicism, and Autonomy" | Chen Lian |