Rousseau en Asie

The articles in this volume deal with the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Asian countries. Rousseau's Social Contract, which had been translated into modern Chinese in 1900 by Yang Tingdong, was a source of revolutionary and republican inspiration in 20th-century China. The Vietnamese discovered Rousseau in works that attempted to bring about a peaceful reconciliation between their interests and those of the French colonizers, but in 1925 the ideas of Rousseau were used in French Indochina to fuel the rebellion and to inspire new forms of literary expression. Korea also discovered Rousseau, and its novelists did not fail to be influenced. In many Asian countries, both those who wished to construct their country on a European model and those revolutionaries who wished to throw off colonial oppression saw their ideas reflected in Rousseau.