Sechin Y. S. Chien is an Associate Research Fellow at the Research Centre of Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei. He writes mainly on Western political philosophy, the history of political ideas, and the history of political discourses in Taiwan. He has published a collection of essays on modern political ethics (2001), and is currently working on a reinterpretation of liberalism. John Fitzgerald is Professor of Asian Studies and Head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has authored and edited a number of books on Chinese politics and Chinese-Australian history, most recently After the Rush (2004) and Rethinking China's Provinces (2002). His forthcoming book on White Australia, Big White Lies, focuses on issues of equality and dignity among Chinese-Australian communities from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.