Elisabeth Forster – författare

This is an important new study of Chinese discourses on war and peace from the end of the First World War to the death of Mao Zedong. Exploring these discourses and how they changed over this period, Elisabeth Forster focusses, in particular, on jus ad bellum and the question of whether it was just to start a war. She proceeds from the observation that, while many of China's successive and competing governments claimed that China was inherently peaceful, the peacefulness claim contrasts with the many wars China has waged or threatened.  She examines the logic of China's peacefulness claim, whether China developed a unique discourse on war and peace or was part of broader global conversations, and what we can learn from China about the global project to create world peace in the twentieth century and, especially, about that project's failure.

This is an important new study of Chinese discourses on war and peace from the end of the First World War to the death of Mao Zedong. Exploring these discourses and how they changed over this period, Elisabeth Forster focusses, in particular, on jus ad bellum and the question of whether it was just to start a war. She proceeds from the observation that, while many of China's successive and competing governments claimed that China was inherently peaceful, the peacefulness claim contrasts with the many wars China has waged or threatened.  She examines the logic of China's peacefulness claim, whether China developed a unique discourse on war and peace or was part of broader global conversations, and what we can learn from China about the global project to create world peace in the twentieth century and, especially, about that project's failure.

The year 1919 changed Chinese culture radically, but in a way that completely took contemporaries by surprise. At the beginning of the year, even well-informed intellectuals did not anticipate that, for instance, baihua (aprecursor of the modern Chinese language), communism, Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu would become important and famous – all of which was very obvious to them at the end of the year. Elisabeth Forster traces the precise mechanisms behind this transformation on the basis of a rich variety of sources, including newspapers, personal letters, student essays, advertisements, textbooks and diaries. She proposes a new model for cultural change, which puts intellectual marketing at its core. This book retells the story of the New Culture Movement in light of the diversifi ed and decentered picture of Republican China developed in recent scholarship. It is a lively and ironic narrative about cultural change through academic infi ghting, rumors and conspiracy theories, newspaper stories and intellectuals (hell-)bent on selling agendas through powerful buzzwords.