So a few thoughts https://twitter.com/MarkLutter/status/1381597765432659970

When it comes to ancient Chinese texts, we are actually in a boom of translation. More has been done in the last 15 years than the previous 100. This has not been noticed outside of specialists in warring states/spring and autumn annals era China. But it is happening.

What we don't see a lot of is translation in classics of imperial China. The Song Dynasty in particular is far less translated than it ought to be, given that is set up the intellectual framework that determined the next 1000 years of East Asian history.

Su Shi is one of the missing voices I keep coming back to. I sort of thing his essays are to China what Montaigne is to the West. Not an exact analogy, but close enough.

Then there were the great debates over statecraft prompted by Wang Anshih, and the debates over Confucian orthodoxy which reached their apotheosis with Zhu Xi, something like the Chinese equivalent of Aquinas. There *was* a 200~ page translation of excerpts from Zhu a few years

back, but it was only a tiny bit of his whole corpus, which is 30 volumes long in Chinese.

And so on and so forth with the Song. There were a lot of thinkers--essayists, historians, philosophers--in that era that are not translated at all.

The last era of intellectual activity in China that I would love to see more translation of is the 1880-1950 period. That is when Western currents began to flow into Chinese thought and Chinese intellectuals really thought it was their duty to save their country by figuring out

a new path. But no one knew what that path should be so it was a time of incredible intellectual ferment. And some of these guys--and in this era, more than a few girls--were really just top notch thinkers and fantastic writers. The main vehicle for their thought was the essay.

And I think there is a ton to learn from that slice of Chinese history.

The bigger issue isn't translation of primary sources but secondary ones. Huge swathes of Chinese history are not available to us because the number of historians of China are small and the topics they

focus on are often too arcane. I've written about this before (cf https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2015/12/east-asian-military-history-few.html), but it is still *shocking* that we don't have a general military history of the Three Kingdoms or a general political history of the An Lushan rebellion and all that preceded it--despite

these being two of the most famous events in East Asian history, the stuff of legends and novels and video games and constant allusion. It is shocking how little political history of China has been written.

And it is through excavating that history, just as much as its thinkers, that a foundation for new thought may be laid.

But just to give you an example of one interesting topic with contemporary relevance: meritocracy. There are all these debates about it today. China has 2000 years of debates about the meritocratic ideal, and 1000 years of a strict meritocratic selection system in action.

Did it work? I mentioned the Song dynasty debates earlier in this thread; that was one of the big things they talked about. Was meritocracy possible? If so, what sort of merit should be selected for?

And then in the Ming dynasty the debate returned, as people begin to question the consequences of meritocratic selection pressures on society. There were vicious critiques of the system. Might they be relevant today? Yes, I think so, but good luck reading them