Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao

Sam Crane is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Williams College, USA. Fluent in Mandarin, which he began learning while researching his doctoral thesis in the 1980s, he first visited China in 1983, and is a former faculty member of the John Hopkins academic campus in Nanjing. The author of The Political Economy of China’s Special Economic Zones (1990), The Theoretical Evolution of International Political Economy (1991), and the highly personal Aidan’s Way: The Story of a Boy’s Life and a Father’s Journey (2003), about life with his severely disabled son, Crane has long been fascinated by ancient Chinese philosophy, particularly the classical texts of the pre-imperial era.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

1 Key Concepts of Confucianism and Daoism 13

2 Birth 37

3 Childhood 65

4 Work 93

5 Marriage and Family 109

6 Public and Political Life 133

7 End of Life 169

Index 195