The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, by Timothy Cheek

In today’s world, scholarship and expertise are in crisis, and some claim that we have entered a so-called post-factual era. This unfortunate context makes Timothy Cheek’s work on Chinese intellectuals ever more topical. Cheek’s excellent book contributes to our understanding of the roles which intellectuals at various levels of the elite played in China’s modernisation and the ways in which these roles and the scholarly enterprise evolved over time. For many of these intellectuals, serving the public good was always the primary goal. While the long twentieth century certainly forced them out of their conventional positions, it also offered new areas to contribute to which had been unthinkable for late Qing scholar-officials.

Cheek’s goal in the book is to present the great variety of Chinese intellectuals and help us understand them in their respective contexts—in other words, seeing China the way Chinese...