Book prize jury focuses on traditional culture when picking winners
The revival of traditional Chinese culture is the focus of the latest Wenjin Book Award, one of China’s top book prizes.
The awards, which are in their 13th edition this year, were bestowed in the National Library of China on World Book Day, which fell on Monday.
Nine winners were selected from 1,874 books — usually non-literature — published in 2017 nationwide, and the works were jointly appraised by 81 libraries and a 14member panel.
One winner was The One Hundred Classics of Traditional Chinese Culture (Volume 1 to 10), which includes Analects, an ancient Confucian classic; a Classic of Poetry,a collection of poems from the 11th to the 7th century BC, and I Ching, a Chinese divination book; the oldest surviving Chinese
classic from the Western Zhou Dynasty (c.11th century to 771 BC), as well as commentaries by modern experts.
“The book uses recent academic work to explain traditional culture to the public,” says Han Yongjin, the director of the NLC.
“The annotations reflect old traditions, but they also show new views, which is a highlight of this series,” he says. Thirty Great Inventions in
China, another winner, uses a new angle to review the history of Chinese scientific technology, breaking the stereotype of the “Big Four Inventions”, which refer to papermaking, gunpowder, the compass, and printing, which were all created in China.
“The Big Four were talked about for too long because they greatly helped the development of Western civilization as well,” says Feng Lisheng, the author of the book.
“However, they cannot reflect the panorama of Chinese technological history.
“Scientific creativity is highly advocated in today’s China,” he says. “And this book re-evaluates our achievements.”
The book also includes two modern inventions — biologist Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice in the 1970s and artemisinin, a medicine used against malaria which was discovered by Nobel Prize laureate Tu Youyou.
The book Liang Xun Chuan
Jia (“Good Mottos Passed Down Generations”) tells the importance of traditions, morals, regulations, and values in Chinese families that help to form a country’s collective cultural foundation.
Xue Yi Wei Ji (“Learn to Promote Oneself”) discusses the history of the education system and purpose of education in ancient China, and looks at how we see things today.
Chen Guying, a philosopher from Taiwan and now a professor at Peking University, hails the trend of highlighting Chinese traditions at the awards ceremony.
“When I was in France in the 1980s, I was astonished to find a high school student had to read 15 to 20 Western classics,” says Chen. “Now, it’s a wise choice for us to also stick to our own cultural identity by reviewing ancient classics.”
But, Deng Xiaomang, a philosopher and author of Zhe
Xue Qi Bu (“The Start of Philosophy”), another winner, says that books on themes like philosophy find it hard to attract reader interest in the digital era.
“People see such books as useless,” he says. “However, we are also to blame, for our inability to blend Western philosophy with a modern Chinese context.”
His new book, which introduces abstract jargon, however, has been warmly welcomed.
“It’s a surprise,” says Deng. “But it also encourages scholars to be more creative to make academic achievements popular with the public.”
In popular science, Space
Journey, which looks at behind-the-scene stories of two Chinese astronauts’ trips into space with Shenzhou XI in 2016, and Quantum Mechanics For Children were recognized by the jury.
Two translated works also made the winners list. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived from the United Kingdom traces the history of DNA studies and Le Beau Livre de la Terre (“A Beautiful Book of the Earth”) from France uses a wide range of high-definition images to show geological changes.