Li Zehou, The Confucian World

Text of Professor Li's Address

LI ZEHOU is widely regarded as China’s leading scholar of traditional and modern intellectual history and philosophy. In philosophy, his specialization is aesthetics, but he has also written on numerous subjects in both ancient and modern thought. In recent years he has been a forceful independent thinker and spokesman in his own right. His works on aesthetics, Kant, ancient thought and modern political thought have been translated into German, Japanese, Korean and English. His book, The Path of Beauty, was published in English by Oxford University Press in 1988.

Professor Li’s scholarly reputation has received international recognition not merely for itself but because of the prominent role he has played in inspiring an intellectual revolution in China that led to the democracy movement in the 1980s. Professor Yu Ying-shih of Princeton has written, "Through these books he emancipated a whole generation of young Chinese intellectuals from Communist ideology." As a result, he was attacked by the party as a "thought criminal," was placed under house arrest for three years after the Tiananmen massacre, and his works were banned in China.

As the result of substantial U.S. official and academic pressure, the Chinese government granted Professor Li permission to visit the United States in 1991. Subsequently, the U.S. government granted him permanent resident status. Professor Li has held numerous academic positions since that time, including appointments at The Colorado College, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, Swarthmore College and The University of Colorado, Boulder.

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