Hong XuGraduate Student
Hong (Promise) Xu is a History Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. Previously, he was a world affairs journalist at China Central Television and then an independent journalist and scholar in Beijing. Xu was the founding editor-in-chief of The Kosmos, an independent Chinese quarterly of history and ideas. He is also an associate editor of VoegelinView and the author of China's Quest for Liberty: A Personal History of Freedom (St. Augustine's Press, 2019). His research interests lie in exploring the alternative visions of modern China, Chinese encounters with the West, and the history of freedom.
Xu's dissertation aims to recover the Chinese and Western Christian intellectuals’ alternative vision of modern China in the reform movements at the turn of the twentieth century. It will restore a broader and more nuanced understanding of Chinese modernization by drawing attention to the neglected religious, proactive, and non-statist approach to incorporating Western knowledge and transforming Chinese political, economic, and educational order. This project intends to provide new perspectives on modern Chinese history and the history of Christianity in China. It foregrounds the obscured religious dimensions of Chinese modernity by reclaiming the significance of Chinese Christian intellectuals in the late Qing reform movements along with Western missionaries.
Education
- C.R.U. Communication University of China
Research Interests
Modern Chinese History
History of Christianity in China
U.S.-East Asian Encounters
Dissertation
"Reforming the Central Empire: Shen Yugui, Young John Allen, and the Christian Intellectual Community in Late Qing China"
