PREDICTING A NEW NATION: Yijing Studies in Twentieth-century China

This article examines the transformation of the Yijing(I Ching, Book of Changes) into a blueprint for creating a nation-state in post-imperial China. It focuses on three pivotal moments when the Yijing was modernized: (1) its new function as an empirical narrative of social evolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, (2) its new mission to support the nation’s modernization from the 1920s to the 1960s; and (3) its new image as a commodity in the print market since the 1990s. Together, these three pivotal moments reveal a paradox of modernizing the Yijing. As more efforts were made to refurbish the Yijing as a text about China’s modernization, the more the Yijing became a vital force of critiquing and destabilizing that modernizing mission. In the end, the modernization of the Yijing did not make it a symbol of Chinese modernity. Rather, it turned the classic into a critique of contradictions and alienation of our contemporary life.