C. K. Yang: Sociology in China and the Encounter of Civilizations

Yang Ch’ing-k’un, known in the West as C. K. Yang and among his friends simply as C. K., lived and worked during one of history’s greatest intercivilizational encounters: that between China and the West. I am using the termintercivilizational encounterin the strict sense the sociologist Benjamin Nelson uses it: Sociology is at a turning point in respect to the horizons it is obliged to confront and the perspectives and methods it is obliged to adopt in order to make sense of the perplexing and tumultuous sociocultural processes of our time. We dare no longer suppose that these processes