Introduction to Chinese Culture: Greatness, Crisis, and the Way Forward offers a structural reinterpretation of Chinese civilization by placing I-Culture, also known as Third-Position Culture, at the center of analysis. Rather than approaching Chinese culture through doctrines, customs, or moral ideals, Wang Desheng reconstructs it as a presence-centered civilizational system, organized around how the self is situated within coexistence, structure, and meaning. At the heart of the book is a decisive shift in perspective. Chinese civilization, Wang argues, does not primarily ask what exists or how mechanisms operate, but instead asks: who is present, how presence is structured, and whether coexistence can continue. This orientation defines I-Culture-a form of civilization in which judgment, value, and stability are centered on the third position of interactional presence, rather than on objects or abstract laws. To formalize this insight, the book introduces a structural framework composed of distribution, field, and value. Through this framework, familiar phenomena-human relationships, social face, family organization, ritual order, and harmony-are reinterpreted as functional mechanisms of Third-Position Culture, rather than emotional habits or ethical abstractions. The book identifies three foundational social projects generated by I-Culture: Human-relationship engineering, which stabilizes continuity across time; Face engineering, which prevents immediate breakdown in dense social fields; Intergenerational engineering, which preserves structural coherence across generations.

When these projects operate coherently, Third-Position Culture produces low-frequency stability without coercion. When their evaluation standards are replaced by visibility, comparison, and performance, the same mechanisms reverse direction-turning continuity into obligation, stability into pressure, and harmony into exhaustion. Wang defines this reversal as regressive compensatory decay. In the final section, drawing on his original SIO (Subject-Interaction-Object) and SDE (Structure-Difference-Entanglement) theories, Wang argues that artificial intelligence intensifies both the crisis and the opportunity of Third-Position Civilization. He proposes a transition toward a Meaning Civilization, grounded in happiness as transformation, truth as reproducible structure, and freedom as the capacity to exit, transition, and re-enter. Neither nostalgic nor ideological, Introduction to Chinese Culture provides a disciplined structural diagnosis of I-Culture and a clear path beyond its historical limits in the AI era.