Chinese cosmopolitanism has been the topic of two recent collections of essays. Mingliu Hu and Joan Everskog’s Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600–1950 (2016) presents the efforts of thinkers from the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period to understand their nation and its culture in a regional context; Christopher Rea’s China’s Literary Cosmopolitans (2015) focuses on two outstanding Western-educated scholar-authors, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu, a wife-and-husband team variously lionized and ostracized in the turbulence of the twentieth century. There were, of course, multiple Chinese cosmopolitanisms, complementing and competing by turns; the aging Qing elite felt allied to the largely Confucian world of their East Asian neighbors, while the post–World War I modernists of the May Fourth movement rejected that tradition and more often found inspiration in a world centered on London, Paris, or New York. While both groups might fit with the definition of being at home in the world, the...

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