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Eastern Wisdom: Race, Empire, and World Peace

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Lin Yutang and China’s Search for Modern Rebirth

Part of the book series: Canon and World Literature ((CAWOLI))

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Abstract

After Pearl Harbor, the USA entered the war and changed the dynamics of the world picture. Just as the battles were fought on many fronts, intellectually, three major evils of the twentieth century—Nazism, Communism, and Imperialism—were entangled with uneasy or implicit alliances and battle lines. Lin Yutang’s life practices and writings during this period reflect the beliefs and innovative thoughts of a liberal cross-cultural thinker on critical issues facing modern humanity at large. This chapter lays out the contours of Lin’s critical endeavors for a philosophy of world peace against both totalitarianism and imperialism, a philosophy that East and West, he argued, were bound to build up together.

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Correspondence to Suoqiao Qian .

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Qian, S. (2017). Eastern Wisdom: Race, Empire, and World Peace. In: Lin Yutang and China’s Search for Modern Rebirth. Canon and World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4657-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4657-5_9

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-4656-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-4657-5

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