The chapters by Jiang Qing as well as the four critical commentaries included in this book were discussed at a workshop titled “Confucian Constitutionalism and the Future of China” held in Hong Kong, May 3–5, 2010. The workshop was sponsored and funded by the Department of Public and Social Administration of the City University of Hong Kong. We are grateful also for the funding of the Center for Studies in Culture, Ethics and the Environment in Alaska and the Confucius Family Net in mainland China. We thank Professor Hon Chan, the head of the Department of Public and Social Administration at City University of Hong Kong, Professor Brian Partridge, the director of the Center for Studies in Culture, Ethics and the Environment, and Mr. Kong Weidong, the webmaster of the Confucius Family Net, for their support of the workshop.
We greatly appreciate Mr. Jiang Qing’s hard work in contributing to this book. Confucianism is both an intellectual effort and a way of life, and nobody we know brings these two aspects better than Mr. Jiang Qing. We (the two editors), along with our families, had the pleasure of visiting the Confucian Academy (Yangming Jingshe) that Mr. Jiang Qing set up in the mountains of southwestern China, and we are grateful for Mr. Jiang’s hospitality, friendship, and inspiration.
We would also like to thank the four commentators who wrote in-depth critical evaluations of Jiang Qing’s essays. Princeton University Press sent earlier versions of the manuscript to three anonymous referees, and we are very grateful for their reports, which helped us to improve the book. We would also like to thank Stephen Angle, Ci Jiwei, David Elstein, and P. J. Ivanhoe for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the introduction.
We were lucky that Dr. Edmund Ryden accepted the offer to translate the manuscript with his usual brilliance and efficiency. We are also grateful to Ms. Erika Yu, who spent many, many hours proofreading, checking notes, and standardizing terminology.
We are very grateful to Princeton University Press for funding the translation, and special thanks are owed to Peter Dougherty, Rob Tempio, and Ian Malcolm for their support and interest in this translation series.