Dans le cadre des cours « Histoire politique et sociale de la Chine moderne » et « Pouvoir et société dans la chine moderne et contemporaine » dispensés au Master Chine/Japon, un exposé par Bart Dessein (Université de Gand)

The many ways in which Confucian intellectuals endeavoured to reformulate their thinking in the confrontation with Western philosophies, religions, and ideologies in the late imperial and Republican periods has been the subject of many academic works. Less attention has been devoted to the way also the Chinese Buddhist community was influenced by elements of European modernity. An important exception to the latter observation is the famous Buddhist monk and reformer Taixu (1890–1947).

Taixu has especially been studied with respect to his creation of so-called ‘renjian Fojiao’ (‘Buddhism for the human society’) and of the famous ‘Buddhist Academies’ (Foxue yuan). Less known, however, is that Taixu was also influenced by socialism, communism, anarchism, and nationalism. Especially the ‘Christian socialist’ Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) appears to have had an impact on this Buddhist monk.

In this lecture, Bart Dessein will discuss Claude Henri de Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme – Dialogues entre un conservateur et un novateur – Premier dialogue, an incomplete work published in April 1825, as well as his De l’organisation sociale, fragments d’un ouvrage inédit, a work he wrote in his younger years, but that was published only posthumously.