Since we have had great support from the academic circle and a fair number of reviewed articles at hand, to be fair to our authors this issue selects a few of them according to a special theme and published here under the title of “A Historical Record of the Pursuing of Subjectivity vs. Individuality of Chinese Intellectuals.” Though these articles show traces of it, it may not be the original theme that these authors have in mind when they wrote their excellent pieces presented here.

The history of human social development could be interpreted as a history of struggle for the realization of ideals and values against the limitations posted by the external environment. Ideals and values are the most valuable creations of human species that transform the meaning of the world. This part of the species is called subjectivity. It bears the essences of human being qua human being. It often reveals as what one would be willing to sacrifices one’s life for. Environmental limitation is what we refer to as the fate or sometimes as the Mandate of one’s life. Human is finite but born with unlimited ideals. In human history, we find more than a few cases these idealists suffered from the limitations of their environment and caused more than their lives. In traditional societies, such limitations often expressed as the bounded and undemocratic social structures. There were idealists succumbed, some persisted in reformation, and some became martyrs and fought against such fates to the last minutes of their lives. Qu Yuan punched into the river in his homeland and Gao Panlong drown himself in his backyard are such cases. They did not compromise but chose instead preserving their dignity and integrity. Their deaths were the strongest protests to the inhumanity of our society and to the insurmountable limits of human fate. They blazed the direction of our history and shaped the modern world with the ideal of flourishing of humanity and development. The Chinese intellectuals that are figured in these articles seem to share a common thread. They highlighted the actualization of human values throughout Chinese history though their stories carry much personal traits. The common thread is what here called subjectivity. The different stories are their individual faces, which bear their individuality. To be sure, the terminology deployed in each of these articles has their individual faces, which could not be limited by the editor. Tao reveals its Being in unimaginably rich ways.