The idea for this book emerged from a conversation at Tsinghua University in 2007. Daniel Bell’s old friend Sun Zhe (Sunny) had just moved to Tsinghua to direct the Center for U.S.-China Relations. They were having lunch at a restaurant called Yan near Tsinghua’s main gate, and Sun mentioned that Yan Xuetong was working on a study of pre-Qin international political philosophy and thinking about implications for the rise of China. That sounded like a promising work for the translation series, and Sun helped to set up a meeting with Professor Yan at, yes, Yan restaurant (the characters in Chinese are different). The trio agreed to work closely on the book, with Bell and Sun as coeditors. Special thanks goes to Sun Zhe for helping to conceptualize the project and for ongoing invaluable advice about how it should be carried out. We are also grateful to Xu Jin, who helped to coordinate various parts of the book project.
Yan Xuetong, it turns out, has an office just down the hall from Daniel Bell’s office. They have had many face-to-face meetings that made it easier to deal with issues and ambiguities. A panel on Yan’s work at Tsinghua was presented in June 2009 as part of the first general conference of international relations scholars in mainland China, and Yan’s three critics presented their papers. Yan’s book and his critics’ essays were revised, and the Princeton University Press sent the revised manuscript to three anonymous referees. We are grateful for the referees’ reports, which helped to improve the book.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of a translation series is to find talented translators willing to work on the project. We were lucky to find Dr. Edmund Ryden, who translates brilliantly from classical and modern Chinese and who has himself written insightfully on the international political philosophy of the pre-Qin thinkers. Thanks to Axel Schneider and Matt Kawecki for helping us to get in touch with Dr. Ryden.
We owe special thanks to Ian Malcolm and Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press for raising the possibility of this translation series and for their ongoing interest and support, and to Mr. P. H. Yu, chairman of the Tsinghua Fund for U.S.-China Research, who generously supports this project.