Is China Trying to Sever Plato from NATO? Chang Che on Beijing's Embrace of the Greco-Roman Classics

Summary

Sinica Podcast: Is China Trying to Sever Plato from NATO? Chang Che on Beijing’s Embrace of the Greco-Roman Classics
Host: Kaiser Kuo | Guest: Chang Che
Date: March 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Sinica features journalist and scholar Chang Che, exploring China’s burgeoning enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. With increasing state interest in the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, host Kaiser Kuo and Chang Che evaluate whether this marks a genuine intellectual revival or a top-down civilizational strategy. The discussion covers the shifting balance between organic scholarly curiosity and political instrumentalization, the formation of "classics" departments in China, the impact of Sino-Western academic exchange, and the deeper currents of civilization discourse.

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Key Themes & Insights

1. Why Are Greco-Roman Classics Booming in China?

• Personal and Political Contexts: Chang Che recounts how he was drawn to the topic by his background in Latin and his encounters with classicists returning to China during the COVID-19 pandemic (16:08-18:58).
  • "The classicists were the ones who seemed most welcome in China, which really piqued my interest." – Chang Che [18:58]
• Contradicting Decoupling Narratives: Despite talk of East-West "decoupling," the emergence of thriving classics communities in Beijing felt "against the kind of narrative at the time" (18:58).

2. Authentic Curiosity Meets State Involvement

• Intellectual curiosity initially drove the revival (the “wonder” Kaiser describes), but since 2022, the Chinese state has moved "from the background to the foreground" (22:08).

• Central government figures, notably Li Shulei of the Politburo, are now actively sponsoring events and shaping institutional priorities (23:13-24:18).

  "The question that one has to ask when you talk about the state's involvement is not whether or not the state is involved—the state is involved. The question is, what kind of involvement is it?" – Chang Che [23:14]

• Institutional Complexity: Chinese universities traditionally lack Western-style "classics departments." New departments are being created, often encompassing both Western and Chinese classics in a single, hybridized structure (24:49-26:28).

3. Framing in the West vs. China

• Kaiser challenges the "asymmetrical" framing: When China supports classics study, it is seen as a strategic project; when Americans study Chinese classics, it is not (26:28-27:56):

  "Is there something asymmetrical going on here?" – Kaiser Kuo [27:56]

• Chang notes both bottom-up and top-down drivers: increased access to knowledge and state goals of boosting cultural power (29:13-30:41).

4. "Severing Plato from NATO"? The Xi Jinping Letter

• Xi Jinping’s 2023 letter to Greek scholars positions China and ancient Greece as twin civilizational poles, pointedly omitting "the West" as a modern, political entity (32:58).
  • "What remains is ancient Greece, newly available as this kind of civilizational ally to China rather than an ideological adversary." – Kaiser Kuo [32:58]
• Both see the move as part of a "defensive civilizationalism"—asserting China’s uniqueness against the dominance of Western universalism, rather than an offensive cultural challenge (56:20).

5. The Strauss/Schmitt Connection and Intellectual Crosscurrents

• Central to the revival is Liu Xiaofeng—a philosopher influenced by Leo Strauss—whose approach resonates with traditional Chinese textualism.

  • "Great truths inhere in great texts, and all you need to do is read them deeply enough..." – Kaiser Kuo [42:43]

• Strauss’s sense of modernity in crisis found a receptive audience among China’s post-Tiananmen intellectuals (44:44-46:54).

6. Transnational Academic Exchange & Tensions

• The "porosity" of US-China exchange is crucial: hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study in the US, translating debates and paradigms back and forth (49:13-50:47).

• The 2019 "incident" at the Society of Classical Studies in San Diego—where Daniel Padilla Peralta's call for classics’ self-abolition went viral—became a touchstone for Chinese graduate students, who invoked comparisons to the Cultural Revolution (47:33-52:01).

  "The discourses are very porous between China and...we have 320,000 Chinese international students that go to the US every year." – Chang Che [49:13]

7. Civilizational Discourse and Its Limits

• Following Chenchen Zhang, Kaiser underscores how civilizational rhetoric enforces both "difference internationally" and "unity domestically," often suppressing internal pluralism (44:48-54:42).

• China’s partnership with Greece is propelled both by diplomatic ties and the mythic cachet of Greek civilization, but the broader “Global Civilization Initiative” remains fuzzy and non-pluralistic (55:20-56:20).

8. The Human Dimension: He Yanxiao and "Chinatown Classics"

• The episode’s central character, He Yanxiao, embodies the tensions: a Chinese scholar trained in the US who struggles to fit into either intellectual system.

  • He draws on research into K-pop’s cultural flow to argue for the significance of east-to-west exchanges in classical studies (58:07-60:14).
  • "He wasn’t cognizant of the fact that he was Asian...until he went to the United States." – Chang Che [60:14]

• "Chinatown classics" is He’s term for the gatekeeping he encounters in both the US and China: his innovative work on cross-cultural connections is often sidelined by both traditions (61:04-64:26).

9. The Future: Institutionalization and State Ambition

• The state’s ambitions are to develop more formal Western-style classics departments where students are schooled in both Greek/Latin and Chinese classics (68:20-69:47).

  • "China wants to have institutionalized study of the classics that incorporates the understanding of ancient Chinese and ancient Greece or Latin within a university." – Chang Che [68:20]

• Chang doubts that official conferences alone will build genuine "cultural power," but individuals like He Yanxiao may bridge gaps through substantive scholarly work (66:34-67:37).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Defining the Project:
  "Should we understand what the Chinese state is doing ultimately as an effort to sever Plato from NATO? To decouple the ancient West from the modern West?" – Kaiser Kuo [12:46]

• Epistemic Humility:
  "Honestly, we should just be like, I approach this with a sense of humility. Like, I actually don't know." – Chang Che, on Xi’s intentions [32:58]

• On Intellectual "Porosity": "First of all, I think it’s just a reminder that the discourses are very porous between China and—you know, and it’s not just porous because of the Internet. It’s porous because so many Chinese people study in the US..." – Chang Che [49:13]

• Civilizational Assertion vs. Pluralism:
  "It’s a very specific bilateral claim. It’s not a genuinely pluralist one at all." – Kaiser Kuo [53:50]

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Important Timestamps

• Intro & Framing the Topic: [00:00–12:46]
• Chang Che’s Personal & Contextual Journey: [15:47–22:08]
• State Involvement & University Changes: [22:08–26:28]
• West-East Framing Asymmetry: [26:28–32:58]
• Xi Jinping’s Letter – Plato & NATO: [32:58–38:18]
• Strauss & Post-Tiananmen Chinese Intellectualism: [40:26–46:54]
• US-Chinese Academic Crosscurrents & The “Incident”: [47:33–52:01]
• Civilizational Discourse – Exclusions & Diplomacy: [52:44–56:20]
• He Yanxiao, “Chinatown Classics,” and Institutional Challenges: [57:20–64:26]
• Structural Power Asymmetries & The Future: [66:27–69:47]
• Speculating on the Revival's Trajectory: [69:47–71:46]
• Scholarly Callouts & Recommendations: [71:47–75:23]

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Further Resources Recommended by Guest

• Dong Xianjiang (Fordham) – Classics and Confucianism in contemporary China
• Simon Luo (NTU Singapore) – Chinese intellectuals in contemporary theory
• Entertainment: House of Dragons (TV) [74:32]
• Music: Matt Roberts’ "Ah Q Orchestra" (jazz ensemble in Beijing) [75:26]

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Tone

The episode adopts a reflective, conversational, and inquisitive style—skeptical of simple narratives, alive to intellectual nuance, and alert to both the political and personal dimensions of scholarship on China.

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Takeaway

China’s embrace of Greco-Roman classics is neither simply state propaganda nor pure academic curiosity. It is a complex, shifting field shaped by genuine intellectual engagement, state ambition, evolving institutional structures, and the increasingly porous intellectual exchanges across the Pacific. Civilizational discourse, as both frame and instrument, shapes the story—but not always neatly or by design. The fate of the revival will depend as much on individual scholars as on top-down initiatives.

Transcript

[A]

The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time, scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gul, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast is and will remain free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support. I'm still looking for new institutional support and the lines are open. You can reach [e-mail] and listeners, do your part. Support my work. Become a paying [e-mail] seriously man, help me out. I know there's a ton of really great stuff out there on Substack. Those substack subscriptions do start to add up, but I think this one really delivers very serious value for your hard earned dollar. So do subscribe. Help me to continue to be able to bring you these conversations. There's a particular kind of intellectual experience that I think many of us who follow China closely would recognize. You encounter something, a policy initiative, say, or a cultural trend, a political gesture that seems to demand elaborate explanation. And then you catch yourself and you ask, wait, well, does it really? Would I be asking this question if the same thing were happening somewhere else in some other country? And sometimes the honest answer is, no, you wouldn't. I've been having that experience a lot lately as I've been preparing for today's conversation. The subject is China's growing enthusiasm for the study of the Greco Roman Classics, Ancient Greek and Latin American, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero. Cicero. If you're a Latin purist, and Thucydides. And my first instinct, I will confess, was, you know, the instinct shared by most of the commentary that I've read on this phenomenon. That is to reach immediately for explanation, to ask what this tells us about Chinese statecraft, about soft power, about the grand strategic ambition of the Chinese Communist Party. And look, you know, those questions are not wrong. They're definitely interesting. We're going to spend a fair amount on this episode on those questions. But I want at least to pause at the starting gate and ask whether there isn't something slightly off about that framing, something that we might want to interrogate before we proceed. The United States has hundreds of Sinologists. We don't typically ask what strategic calculation drives American scholars to spend their career studying the hundred schools of thought from the Warring States period or studying Tang poetry. We tend to assume that intellectual curiosity is self explanatory, that falling in love with the civilization's texts, its foundational works, its ideas, that's something that happens to people and doesn't require a geopolitical alibi. I think it would be worth keeping that asymmetry in mind as we go. That said, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting, I think there are things happening in China's relationship with the Greco Roman Classics that go beyond individual scholars following their curiosity. There does seem to be a state dimension, and it's real. It appears even to be accelerating and understanding what the state is doing here and why, what it means. That's a puzzle that's worth taking seriously. So this is a longer than usual intro, but bear with me because there's a fair amount of ground to cover before I bring today's guest on Doubtless many of you know that it's the writer Chang Che. I beg your indulgence. Some of you will know that I've been thinking a lot recently about what I've called civilizationist discourse. The political tendency to frame contemporary conflicts not as clashes between states or ideologies or interests, but as something deeper and older. The collision of distinct civilizations, each with their own irreducible essences, its own genius, its own historical destiny. I mean, it's a tendency with actually a long pedigree, not as long as you might think. We all know it from, you know, Samuel Huntington, but you can trace it back to Oswald Spengler writing in the wreckage of World War I, arguing that Western civilization was in a period of inevitable decline. But history was not some single progressive story, but a series of, you know, self contained cultural organisms, each moving through its own kind of biological cycle of birth, of flourishing and death from Spengler. It flows in darker channels through the 20th century and resurfaces really in our own time in figures as varied as Alexander Dugin, the Russian quote unquote philosopher whose Eurasianist ideas have saturated the intellectual atmosphere around Vladimir Putin, and in the civilizationist rhetoric that has grown louder in the west itself under the influence of Trump and the nationalist right, where Western civilization has become a kind of battle cry invoked with fervor that tends to be, you know, inversely proportional to any actual familiarity with what the Greeks and Romans produced. Last month I published an essay on my sub stack and fair warning, it comes in at a daunting, I think, like 14,000 words. So maybe, you know, set aside an afternoon or just skip the thing. I called it the Civilization Trap and its central argument, and I'll try to distill it here as briefly as I can, is that civilizationists discourse tends to emerge at moments of political crisis and anxiety. Polities tend to reach for civilization as like a frame when they feel that their identity, their standing, their whole way of life is somehow under threat. That frame, I think, tends to be seductive precisely because it transforms these contingent, historically specific problems that countries are facing economic anxieties, political legitimacy crises, geopolitical competition into something that feels ancient and essential and therefore beyond ordinary political negotiation. It performs a very particular double operation. It claims difference and distinctiveness internationally, insisting on the irreducible uniqueness of one's own civilization against others while simultaneously enforcing unity and homogeneity domestically, using civilizational identity to delegitimize internal dissent, to marginalize minority voices or alternative traditions. Now, that last formulation is not mine, actually, not originally mine. It belongs to Chen Shenzhong, a political scientist whose work on Chinese nationalist discourse and its interactions with the global right wing populist movements. It's been some of the most illuminating writing I've encountered on these questions. So Chen Chen Zhang, in fact was the direct intellectual spark for the Civilization Trap. I was at a conference in London and heard her speaking about some of this and it really set me thinking. She's also done really fascinating work on how the Chinese Internet concept baizhuo, which was a thing that people translated variously as white left, I actually think it translates better as libtard. It's a derogatory term that emerged actually on Chinese social media around like 2014, 2015 to describe Western liberals. And it turns out to tell us something quite profound, I think, about how Chinese nationalist discourse and Western right wing populism have been contaminating each other across the supposedly impermeable membrane of the Great Firewall. And that's something that Chen, Chen Zhang has worked on a lot. We're going to come back to some of her ideas once we're into the conversation because they really help to illuminate what's happening in this classics story, in which ways that I find genuinely clarifying. So now, China and the Greco Roman Classics. In November of 2024, on the very day of the American presidential election, which I think we can agree generated a certain ambient anxiety for the people interested in the future of the liberal international order, this Cambridge classicist by the name of Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing all jet lagged and disoriented, having been flown business class to the World Conference of Classics halfway around the world in Beijing. What he found at the palatial Lianci Lake Convention center, which is north of the city, was something he later described as the strangest and most momentous event of his academic career. 400 scholars from around the world, nine simultaneous sessions. Sounds like a music festival. I mean, the hall was the size of a damn football field. There was a letter and a reading of said letter from Xi Jinping himself. There were ambassadors there, politicians. Whitmarsh wrote about this experience in a really memorable essay in the Times Literary Supplement. And it's one of our jumping off points today. But here's what I want to say about Whitmarsh's essay and the commentary it sparked and about a certain tendency in how the Western press has covered China's classics enthusiasm more broadly. There is a risk, which I think is worth, worth dealing with here, of treating the phenomenon entirely through the lens of CCP statecraft, as if the whole thing were simply a soft power operation like top down and totally instrumentalized from the get go. That can only really be understood as a geopolitical maneuver. It's like you're trying to understand the operating system of the west so you can mine it for ideas or undermine it. I don't think that's right. I don't think that's really what's going on here. The genuine intellectual enthusiasm, I think is real and we'll meet, you know, a character who is central to the piece that we're going to be focusing on. Who's, you know, for whom. That, that genuine intellectual, you know, interest is very organic. It precedes, I think, the State's involvement and the story of what happens when authentic scholarly curiosity meets state co optation. That's actually a more Interesting and more complicated story than pure cynicism tends to allow for. So today's guest knows this territory really better than almost anyone I know. Chang Che was, all too briefly a colleague of mine at the China Project. And I remember reading his work back then and thinking, this guy's not going to be writing for a scrappy little China focused startup for very long. And sure enough, he went on to write for the New York Times, and now he's writing for the New Yorker and a whole bunch of other great publications. And it was the New Yorker that published his extraordinary piece last month, How China Learned to Love the Classics, which got quite a bit of viral attention. I mean, I saw it passed around constantly on Twitter. And that, of course, is the occasion for today's conversation. But what I want to note before we bring him, really bring him in is, is that this is not Chong's first time at this particular rodeo. I mean, back in, what was it, January 22nd? January, I think it was. Yeah, January of 2022, when he was still my colleague, he published a piece for us at the China Project on kind of the same phenomenon. And it was, I should say, one of the most widely read. I think it was actually the most widely read piece we actually ever published. What strikes me when I look at these two pieces side by side is how much the angle has shifted in four years. So the 2022 piece was more warm and more enchanted. It centered on a remarkable Austrian classicist by the name of Leopold Lieb. Is that how he pronounces his name? Yeah, Leopold Lieb, yeah, Leopold Lieb, yeah. Who spent like 30 years in Beijing now, right?

[B]

I think so, yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Teaching Latin and Greek and in the process becoming, you know, really, by his own account, more Chinese than he is Austrian. Its emotional keys is something maybe closer to wonder. The 2026 New Yorker piece is richer. It's more complicated, more politically awake, for sure. The state has moved, though, from the background to the foreground. The questions have definitely sharpened. The central human figure here that I made reference to is a young Chinese scholar who's really caught between two academies, between two traditions, two whole discourse communities, really, each of which I think finds him somehow insufficient, which is the tragedy. That shift in angle, what accounts for it, I think it reveals something about what's actually changed in the last four years. It's one of the things I'm eager to explore with Chong today. There are questions I want to put to him that have been nagging at me since I read that piece back in 2022. But especially now, I mean, should we understand what the Chinese state is doing ultimately as an effort, you know, to sever Plato from NATO? Right, to decouple the ancient west from the modern west, to make Aristotle available as like, a civilizational ally to China while somehow keeping John Stuart Mill at arm's length? Is the study of, like, Greco Roman antiquity in China best understood as a kind of competitive intelligence operation, like an attempt to read the source code of Western Civ to understand its operating logic and perhaps eventually fork it? What does it mean that the key intellectual figure in China's classics revival, Liu Shaofeng, found his way to, you know, the Greco Roman world through Leo Strauss? Right. And what exactly is the Straussian idea that traveled so well across that enormous cultural distance? And what do we make of your main character, He Yanxiao, your remarkable protagonist, Chang, who fell in love with the Odyssey, reading the Odyssey, not watching the new movie, reading the actual Odyssey. As a Chinese high school student, he taught himself Ancient Greek, got a PhD at the University of Chicago after getting his undergrad degree at Bloomington in Indiana. And he now finds himself at Tsinghua University, belonging neither fully to the Chinese nor the American Academy, practicing a kind of scholarship that both systems find slightly illegible. So anyway, Chong, welcome back to Seneca. It's. It's genuinely wonderful to have you and welcome to my home.

[B]

Thanks for. Thanks for having me, Kaiser. It's been a long time.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. And you live in Tokyo these days, huh?

[B]

Tokyo.

[A]

Oh, man, I envy you. It's a great, great city.

[B]

You're welcome to come.

[A]

I think I may take you up on that. It's not, not too far away. So like I said, you know, welcome back. So you, you were on, I think we talked last time about the Shanghai lockdowns back in 22, right? In April. Feels like a long ass time ago.

[B]

That's true.

[A]

Yeah. So I want to start by asking you something that's partly personal. So how did you first get pulled into this subject of, you know, the Chinese interest in the Greco Roman world? You know, that, that old piece for the China Project? It reads like somebody who already been kind of living with this material for a while. Where did it begin for you?

[B]

So there's a simple answer and then there's a kind of contextual answer. The simple answer is that I studied Latin. So I was a Latin student in middle school, high school. I didn't do it in college, but, you know, I was a big fan of ancient philosophy and took a lot of Classes. So I was aware of it, and I was always aware of the classics debates around that time when I really started to be more like just kind of, you know, when you're in college, you're sort of politically awakened and you're sort of aware of what's going on around you. That's really when the classics had started to enter politics, Right? So that was around the time of, you know, Charlottesville. You know, these sort of really key American moments that turned, you know, classics imagery. You know, there were, you know, people on the right, people on the right side of the political spectrum who were, you know, donning certain, you know, certain Roman imagery. And, you know, that. That kind of the. The fact that classics was such an important part of politics was something that I was aware of in the US Before I went to China. So I think that carried with me the contextual reason is just that, you know, I had come to China when I. When it was around 2020, and that was a period that was kind of like the height of decoupling. You know, there was a lot of news stories about, you know, Chinese banning foreign textbooks and. And all these kind of stories about the businesses, you know, feeling, you know, tepid about working in China. And Donald Trump was calling coronavirus the Kung Fu virus, you know, Flu. Yeah, the Kung flu, exactly. So it was a really. It seemed like, you know, these two countries were really decoupling. And at the same time, you know, I was aware just by being here that there was a lot of classicists who were coming back from the United States back to China, because it was Covid. Right. So everyone's kind of deciding where they wanted to spend their time. They were coming back from the U.S. they had just studied. People like He Yan Xiao, who had just studied, finished their PhD, came back, and they were, you know, welcomed with open arms in the university. They were getting a lot of interest among. They were telling me how there were lectures. There were so many Chinese people coming and. And listening, and they were like, oh, my God. You know, this is such. So different from in the U.S. you know, when I. When I taught, you know, you know, homer in the U.S. like, no one showed up to my classes. And in China, it was the complete opposite.

[A]

Where were you running into these people? I mean, were they like, just at the bars you were hanging out at, or.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think I was. It's. It wasn't the bar, but I think just talking to people in Beijing. I would go to Beijing and I'd meet with, like, professors, and then I'd meet with like people who are kind of like my age. Right. So they were all kind of in my age group and I just didn't do the PhD. I just decided to, you know, go to China. So I think just from that network of people my age connected to sort of east, west, sort of traveling between the east west, we just kind of got to know each other. And a lot of them were classicists. Right. Some of them were human humanists. Right. And, and the classicists were the ones who seemed most welcome in China, which really piqued my interest.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it was sort of a story that graded against the kind of narrative at the time. And so I was especially interested because of that.

[A]

So this is how you, you discover Lieb? Yeah. Presumably through one of these people.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, so I saw that he was mentioned, I think somewhere online. I was, I was sort of looking into this topic and looking at who, who could I tell this story through. And I just found this guy on, I think there was an article before that had just mentioned him and it piqued my interest. I just emailed him, was like, hey, you know, I know that you're teaching Latin at Renda, you know, can I just come and like watch you? And he was like, yeah, why don't you come to the church where I teach like 6 year olds like how to speak, you know, Latin. And all these people are like six, seven, eight, you know, and they're coming from all over the country to come and learn Latin. It was, it was incredible scene. I mean, it was insane, frankly.

[A]

So, yeah, I was always struck by, I mean, I, you know, having moved to the states in 2016 and you know, being sort of people my age had kids who were in middle school, high school. A huge percentage of them were studying Latin. It was really bizarre to me, but I never really thought to interrogate that. I just sort of felt like, you know, hey, if they were in China, I'd have them learning, you know. So I guess since I'm in America now, I'll have my kids learn Latin. Is that, is that the thinking?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think this is really uncharitable. But I'm going to say this because like my parents thought this way, right? They just thought like you could get, you know, you could do well in the SAT potentially by just knowing some root words. Like they just thought that it was like you might give you some advantage, you know, and so that they made me do Latin. And at the time I didn't question it.

[A]

And so the tiger mom theory.

[B]

Yeah, just. This is just the tiger mom approach. No, but to be serious though, I think that there's a couple like, dimensions. I mean, that's one. Right. There's a kind of. Maybe it's more practical, but there, I think there is an element of like Chinese. Just have a general appreciation for this. Oh, you know, Latin is sort of evocative of like Rome and this sense of like the classics. Like, I think that there is a kind of.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

There's a vibe that's, that's a little bit different for that. That sort of rings differently for them than like Spanish.

[A]

Yeah, A veneration for the ancient. And you know, it's, it's just held in such esteem still that.

[B]

Exactly right.

[A]

I totally get that. So you come back though, four years later to essentially the same topic, very different piece, very different tone, like I said. And you know, different in where it locates the sort of center of gravity. So, you know, the 2022 piece centers on Lieb and there's something, you know, pretty utopian about it. I would say this is Austrian guy, you know, he's become more Chinese and it's through his devotion to the classics. You know, this, this idea of Hu Xiang FA Ming, right, That's in there, the mutual illumination as this kind of animating spirit of the whole enterprise. But the New Yorker piece is. It's warm, definitely warm in a lot of ways. Hu Yinxiao, this scholar that you hang the piece on, he's quite wonderfully drawn. But I'd say the piece is also kind of more unsettled. Certainly has more elements of politics in it. The State has moved from the background of the foreground. What happened in those four years that made you change the way you saw that story?

[B]

I don't think that there's a difference in the way that I saw the story. I think the difference is just that the State has gotten involved in a very clear way by supporting classics engagement with the West. That was the clear difference when I was writing it from Lieb's perspective. There wasn't really as much of a top down, central government, institutional affiliation with the Classics. But by the time that I wrote it for the New Yorker, there was already, you know, Li Shulay is, is in the Politburo, right. And he is a major, you know, he's a central government figure, very influential, and he is sort of personally spearheading this Gu Ding Shi Da Hui, the World Classic Conference. World Classics Conference. And you know, these, these business class flights that whitmarsh is flying through are sponsored by the central government. Right. So the grassroots interest, and I think that you mentioned the word wonder. Like, I still carry, like a wonder about this topic, but what's changed is this added dimension that the state is now involved.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I think that, you know, the question that one has to ask when you talk about the state's involvement is not whether or not the state is involved, the state is involved. The question is, what kind of involvement is it? Right. And I think, you know, we can go into this a little bit more, but, like, I think that the answer is actually quite surprising, which is that the state is involved, but it's not really involved as. As sort of granularly as one might think. Right. So there's a lot of space in this kind of environment. There's a lot of different kinds of viewpoints that can be accommodated in this kind of classics revival in China. And, you know, and there's kind of factions, right? There's kind of debates about what classics means, how we should. What kinds of classics we should elevate to be able to engage with the West. I mean, that's the kind of debate that I think I'm trying to get at in the piece.

[A]

Okay? So, I mean, I think that's perfectly fair. The state is more involved, and it's not just at the level of putting money behind these projects. It's actually taking an active role, a more active role in shaping discourse or involving itself in some of these debates.

[B]

So there's a couple ways that the state is involved. So one is that there is money that is earmarked for this kind of basically for universities to sponsor things that are categorized as classics. Now there's a question of, like, okay, well, how. What, what counts as classics, right? Because when you, when you enter a university setting and some, Some official goes, build a classics, like, we. We want. We like classics, right? There's just a host of questions. The first is like, we don't even have a classics department. Like, how, okay, so are we supposed to build a classics department? So that's, that's one. Is that right now universities are institutionally.

[A]

How do you respond?

[B]

Institutionally, right? There's a lot of questions about how do we respond to the central government's encouragement about Classics? And if you talk to administrators, it's kind of a nightmare because China doesn't have a classics department in the sort of original Chinese university. There's people who study. If you think about people who study the past, right, they can be in the Chinese department Zhou Wenxi. They could be in history, they could be in literature, they could be in philosophy. Right. So when you're a classicist and you come into the system, you actually have like four or five departments that you could be in and they're generally scattered across those departments. And so now because of this classics revival, there is pressure across the major universities to think about ways to institutionally rearrange so that universities have something like a classics department similar to the way that we have in the West. And so far there's only been basically like one or two universities that have actually managed to do this. One is. And they're all related to Liu Shaofeng. Liu Xiaofeng has been involved in them. One is Renmin University and the other is Sichuan University. So Sichuan University has a classics department.

[A]

Now, so are these Western classics departments or are they classics departments that also encompass the study of the Warring States philosophy?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So this is a great question. So in China, the definition of the classics, and this is a part of why it's interesting, is that it, the goal is for people who are in the Chinese classics departments to be well read in both Eastern and Western traditions. Right, Right. So I don't know exactly like how that works in terms of like your language specialty. Right. But it's going to be a home for Plato as much as Confucius. Like, you're going to be able to take classes with professors who specialize in both of those.

[A]

Okay, interesting. So let me pick up on something here that I hinted at before, you know, because there's this line in your New Yorker piece and I think it reflects conventional wisdom in a lot of Western commentary that I've seen on this phenomenon so far that quote, Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics. I don't think that's wrong. I do want to push on it a little bit because I hinted in my intro just now. I'm not sure if we would reach for that framing if the situation were reversed. Right. Even if we had a situation in which the federal government, through the Department of Education, godwit a bygone dream that would be was, was generously, lavishly funding the study of Chinese philosophy in our major universities.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Would we say, well, you know, Western officials or American officials tend to see the Chinese classics as a complement to their politics? Probably not. I mean, even though we might see resonances of legalism in some of the authoritarian right wing folks that tend to adopt these Roman and Greek names in there as their nom de plume, but I wonder if we had all these American scholars and we do, we have lots of them who are studying Warren Waring States philosophers. I don't think they are ever read though in our media, in our coverage, in the Chinese coverage as some state led project, right? Is there, is there something asymmetrical going on here?

[B]

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean I sort of, it's hard for me to think about because there isn't, there isn't that I can't imagine the hypothetical right now like, because right now there's not a government mandate to sponsor American what Sinologists to study like Confucian texts, right? So in that context, yeah, what I use, what I use the analysis the same. I mean, I don't know. I mean what I, what I think is, what I was trying to get at with the line is. And actually I think that I should have been maybe a little bit more clear about what I meant there. I mean I think that there's more of a space issue. If I wanted to elaborate, I think I, I think I probably tried to elaborate and got caught. What I'm trying to say is that, you know, you can think about the classic survival in China in two ways. I mean one is just, and this is not unique to China, this happens everywhere, which is that you have genuine intellectual curiosity, right? And I reflected that in the leap in the Leopold Lee piece. And China's classic survival has a, there's a lot of prosaic drivers to China's classic survival, right? One is just the increase in education, right? Every, there's just a lot more people who are, who are young, educated in China who are able to access knowledge like, you know, Greek and Latin, right? So that's one sort of prosaic driver. So there's a bottom up element to this and there's scholars in the system. Even, even, you know, within this Chinese system there's scholars who are just genuinely curious about studying Latin and Greek and find like he and Xiao, right, who just fall in love with the topic, right? And, and Huang Xiao was involved in the World Classics Conference, right? But he is just a guy who like really liked the Odyssey and he, and he's involved in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences invitation list, right? So there's that kind of complexity. But then there's also politicians who have different incentives, right? They're looking to satisfy certain KPIs, right? And Xi Jinping has these KPIs right now, which, you know, the Global Civilization Initiative. There's, there's all this kind of effort to bolster China not just as a kind of economic power, but also as a cultural power. Right. And so that initiative is now entering this kind of classic space. And I, and I think that that's what I'm trying to say is that there's, there's politicians that are interested in using this kind of drive to, to satisfy some, some sort of KPI. Right. And I think that I see this, we see this in, in the US as well. Right. Honestly, I see a lot of parallels between what you see in China and the U.S. i mean, what, what Trump is doing with just general, you know, the Smithsonian. Right. And trying to change certain aspects of, of the Smithsonian's sort of memory, understanding of American history.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That kind of thing, I think is, is quite similar to what I'm seeing in the official level in China, although I think the official level in China is much more hands off and a little, and much more delicate and sort of.

[A]

Yeah, it's also much more ancient. I mean, look, what Trump wants to screw with goes back to the earliest, to the 17th century, right. It's not like he's, he's trying to rewrite our understanding of the Peloponnesian War. Right?

[B]

Oh, but I think that if they, I mean, I think that if the, if Trump had his way, I mean, he, he would want to influence, I mean, look at what they're doing with the universities. Like, I think that if, if they had their way, they would want to influence the way that classics is understood as well.

[A]

I wouldn't put it past him for sure. I just don't think he has the intellectual metal to actually think about those things. But yeah, unfortunately there are some people around him who do. So. Yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm really curious about is what is then the state actually trying to do to the extent that we can determine that. Because, you know, that Xi Jinping letter is really kind of the hinge moment in your piece. You know, the thing that transforms this long standing intellectual enthusiasm into something with explicit state backing and strategic direction, I guess. Xi writes to the Greek scholars in early 2023. I mean, he congratulates them on the opening of their joint center. And the letter contains this remarkable formulation that China and Greece, glittering at each other from opposite ends of the Eurasian continent, should work together to promote mutual learning. And what strikes me about that framing is not what it includes. You know, Western civilization likes to ground itself in Greece and Chinese civilization. But what it leaves out, right, it's not China and the west, it's Not China and Europe, it's China and Greece. Ancient Greece implicitly is twin poles of this kind of civilizational order that predates and in some sense supersedes the modern international order. I mean, there's kind of temporal surgery that he's doing here. The modern west, liberalism, constitutionalism, NATO. Right. You know, the rules based international order, all that stuff gets quietly set aside and what remains is ancient Greece. Right. Newly available as this kind of civilizational ally to China rather than an ideological adversary. I mean, that's my guess at what, what the bigger picture motive here is maybe is that a fair reading of the letter and what you think it's doing?

[B]

I mean, honestly, we should just be like, like I, I approach this with a sense of humility. Like, I actually don't know. Right. Like, I, I think that what, like my initial impression from the letter is just kind of how remarkable it is that he is very respectful to ancient, like you say the ancient, ancient Greece. Right. But he's, you know, Xi Jinping is also potentially most likely the author of document number nine. Right. Where he was very clear about his approach to modern liberalism and Western democracies.

[A]

Right. So just for people who don't remember, document number nine was this document that was internal party document that was leaked and emerged around 2013. I think it was 2013, 2014, something like that. And it basically identified seven sort of deadly sins, these things from the west, you know, that included things like historical nihilism, anything constitutionalism, a lot of, you know, these perfidious Western ideas, multi party

[B]

democracy, like all these sort of things.

[A]

Right. To destabilize Chinese politics.

[B]

Yeah. And the irony is like, you know, the, at least, you know, traditional classicists would say that those ideas were sort of derived from ancient Greece. Right. So in a way, that letter is quite provocative in and of itself because it's doing something that, at least from the Western point of view is, hey, we're, we're the descendants of, you know, ancient Greece. Right, Right. So how can you say that you don't like modern liberal democracy, but you're friends with ancient Greece, you know, like, so that's, that's an interesting sort of dynamic.

[A]

So that's why I keep thinking that the move should be, is to sever, like I joked, to sever Plato from NATO.

[B]

Right, yeah. Right. Okay. So I don't like, it's really an open question like how much Xi Jinping is like actively doing like, you know, doing that. Like we need to sort of make a.

[A]

And we're saying Xi Jinping is a stand in for the whole.

[B]

For the whole.

[A]

Probably more.

[B]

For the whole system. Yeah, exactly. For the whole system. And what they're trying to do with this, I mean, one. So I think some things that are uncontroversial, right. Like, one is that I think in general, in this current moment, when the Chinese, specifically the Communist Party, is trying to position themselves as having some kind of inheritance from the ancient past, Confucius or Chinese civilization, they want to engage with Greece because Greece is in some ways clearly the inheritance of the ancient Greek tradition. And so they like the fact of affiliation with them, of engaging with them in this way, because they want to show that they too, hey, we are the inheritors of the Chinese civilizational tradition. And so I think that there's a kind of simple reason to just sort of associate. And Martin Kern, I quoted him in the piece, who sort of said this. He was just like, yeah, I mean, you know, you guys have, you guys have Socrates, we have Confucius. You know, like, I think it's just a pretty simple idea, right, to get on board, which is just, let's just affiliate with each other so that people will affiliate us with kind of the inheritors of the Chinese canon. And then in terms of whether or not this other deeper layer is there, I'm not sure which is kind of the Straussian layer. Right. And the reason why I say this is because Strauss is famous for sort of severing the ancients from the moderns. I mean, one of his core concepts, idea of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. And so to what degree is that kind of Straussian idea playing a role in this is an open question. I mean, you could argue that this, there is a relationship, but I don't know if it's like, direct influence. But there may be a kind of synchrony because Liu Xiaofeng is playing a larger role in sort of this kind of classics push. And he is one of the major interpreters of Strauss. But I just, I don't know, I don't have enough sourcing to really pull that out.

[A]

Okay, I want to get into the Strauss connection in a second, but I want to talk about. I mean, I guess I'm pleased to see that you are taking this sort of humble, this, this, this kind of epistemic humility here. You don't know what really their intention is. There's no, you know, perfect evidence for it. That's, that's, that's great. Whitmarsh, though, who's a character in your Story, he seems to have a pretty clear idea. I mean, and his, his Times Literary Supplement piece, it sort of gets at it. When he finally got to speak at Yangchi Lake, he made this argument that he. Later in your ear piece, he wonders, might have been accidentally perfect for the occasion. He told the assembled dignitaries that classical Greece is an invention of the classical Greeks themselves, meaning there is no timeless essence. There's no unchanging civilizational spirit just waiting to be recovered or to be deployed. It was a post classicist argument, the kind of thing that you'd expect from somebody who'd spent years pushing back against the use of antiquity by moderns, you know, by the. Especially by the modern nationalist right, and, you know, more power to him for that. But he later said to you, maybe it was the right speech after all, as a warning rather than a repudiation. So it seems to me that he is suspicious that there is a motive that's analogous to what the nationalist right in the west has been using the classics for. And that his insistence that there is. That there is no timeless essence, that it's, that it's an invention of the ancient Greeks themselves, is meant to say to the Chinese, don't try to enlist this in a national project.

[B]

No, that's true. That's right. Yeah, yeah. No, no, but. So, okay, so I'm not saying that Whitmarsh is wrong. I think Whitmarsh is. What Whitmarsh is right about is that in any, this attempt by the government to kind of push classics, it has assumptions. And Whitmarsh and most classicists in the west do not buy those assumptions. The assumption being that there is some kind of essence of Chinese culture that we need to sort of mine. Right? Like that is certainly there, especially among the official, Official dumb. Right. But to what extent the people who are involved, who are being enlisted, because the Chinese government is. The Chinese system is a huge system, right? There's, there's, there's people who sort of express their wishes and then there's a lot of people who implement it on the way down. And ultimately this is being implemented at the university level. Right. So very low down in the system, this is, this classics push is being revived. So what's happening there? I don't know to what extent, you know, university administrators and scholars believe that, but I think at the very top of the government, there is an assumption, look, we need to support classics because we want to have academics who are well versed in the Chinese classics so that they can sell, you know, they can Jiang Zhong Guo Gui, like, they can tell our story well, Chinese stories well. Right. So there is an assumption of a kind of. What I think in the west is a. Is something that the classics departments have long repudiated. Well, not long. For the past few years, they have seriously repudiated, which is what they call like a classical ideology. This idea that there is some essence that you can pass down. Right. And that is a powerful dimension in the Chinese government revival of classics. To what extent that it's actually like, I think the distance, the division I want to make is between what officials like Xi Jinping and Li Shu Lei. Like, actually, I don't even know if Li Shulay believes this. I think Xi Jinping believes this. Right. And what is going to happen in China with regards to the classics build out, I think those are two different layers, because one is an implementation layer and the one is just kind of like the. Their wishes being sort of expressed later.

[A]

Fascinating. So let's talk a little about Liu Xiao Feng, you know, because he. He's a philosopher at. He is translated and edited like a ton of works of ancient Greek and Latin into Chinese. And I guess he's probably like the. The gateway for a lot of people, including he and Xiao, who's, you know, another your characters. The gateway through which he arrived, as you suggested, is through Strauss. Right now, Western audiences, especially right now in this particular political moment, the name Strauss tends to arrive with a lot of baggage. Right. Strauss gets associated with, you know, American neoconservatism with Cheney and Wolfowitz in the Iraq war, but also more recently with the Claremont Institute and the supposed intellectual foundations of the modern Maga movement. A lot of these guys, the. The post liberals and a lot of these other folks who I've been reading a lot about, and through this and also. But through his own relationship with Carl Schmitt, he picks up some very dark associations indeed. Because Schmidt was a Nazi philosopher, Right. He was all about harnessing this stuff for the aggrandizement of the state. I want to suggest that the Straussian idea that actually traveled to China, though, the one that Liu found really electrifying when he wrote, you know, how could I be so close to this person? Talking to MA is something rather more basic and maybe more sympathetic, something I jive with more, which is that Straussian idea that, you know, that kind of textualist faith, right? This idea that great truths in here, in the great texts, and all you need to do is just read them deeply enough and you can unearth these great enduring truths Plato and Thucydides reward really close, almost reverential reading. Wisdom is there in the text, waiting for the sufficiently attentive reader. I mean, it strikes me that this idea has a deep and venerable Chinese analog, Right. And it predates Strauss by 2 millennium. The entire Confucian scholarly tradition is built on something very, very similar.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Neo Confucianism, especially this conviction of the classics contain inexhaustible moral and political wisdom. They reward a lifetime of close study and reading. Right. I feel like that may be the resonance key there.

[B]

No, I think that that is definitely a reason. I don't know if that was the reason why he said, how am I so close to this man? And the context of that line, I don't think suggests that it was has to do with textual reading. But you know, somebody that is really good on this is Dongshan John. He's a professor at Fordham and he's written a lot about the classic survival in China. And he told me that that was one of the reasons why Strauss. So he was a professor. He was a professor at Beida or not? Sorry. He was a student at Beida around Strauss fever. So he's great on the kind of Strauss. He was like, there for Strauss and Schmidt fever.

[A]

Like, Strauss fever was roughly when it

[B]

was like early 2000s.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Right. And so, you know, he was like, around the time when, like, everyone was not everyone, but like in the philosophy departments, it was like all the rage.

[A]

Evan Osnos wrote about that.

[B]

He wrote about that. Yeah, exactly. So. So that that period is a fascinating sort of sliver of Chinese, you know, contemporary history. But Dongshan, he told me that, you know, when I asked him, like, why do you think this is happening? Right. And he told me basically, like, two reasons at the time. I mean, one was. This was like years ago, but he said one, yeah. There's a kind of symmetry between the way that Strauss reads texts and the ways that Confucian scholars read texts. Right. And the way that they approach texts. And then there's also just like the general. I've already mentioned this kind of prosaic just. China is getting richer. People are, you know, entering the middle class. They're more interested in learning about the world. And they. And I think you mentioned this a little bit too. Like, I think that Chinese are. They're already kind of primed for, like, thinking about civilizations, right? It's through civilizations. And so they're sort of. They're like, oh, you know, let's learn about the west, like the Western civilization. Right. And so there's that kind of hunger and drive and maybe a framework in which they think about things that way.

[A]

Yeah. And they have been primed to think of them. So. Yeah, I mean I think that's, that's.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, very, very true. But I just want to sort of bring up the other reason that I think is also equally important, which is that Strauss and the Chinese intellectuals who come out of Tiananmen have a very similar approach to the world. Like they think about the world in very similar ways. Primarily they see, quote, unquote, modernity in crisis. Right. There's this kind of sense of crisis. So. So Strauss thinks that the modern west has sort of like lost faith in itself. That the principles that sort of animated the west seem to have is being challenged by new theories like historicism and relativism. And he's trying to sort of grapple with this question of like, why does it feel like Western civilization is like sort of nowadays like the modern west is self undermining itself and this. And he has this kind of concept of a crisis. Right. And that idea is something that Liu Xiaofeng brings to the Chinese context. And not just Liu Xiaofeng. A lot of scholars who come out of the 1989 Tianmen movement feel like China is in a period of crisis because the movement that animated 1989, the New Enlightenment, the belief that China would sort of progress into this liberal democracy and become, you know, join the civilized world, failed. Right. And it failed brutally. And the Chinese intellectual perspective was very different from the West. The way that the westerners read in 1989. Right. The Westerners thought the, like the government was to blame. Obviously if the government didn't do it, we would have, we would have gotten there. Right. But the intellectuals tended to see it as like an indictment on the movement itself. And so there was a lot of self reflection in that period about how do we look for other ways to ground our societies. Very true. So that kind of turn, the sense of crisis with the modern world and this turn to the ancients, that was a pattern that Strauss was very, that very much animated Strauss's career and very much sort of really resonated with the intellectuals who, who are kind of lost in the post 89 movement.

[A]

So you read my long ass civilization essay. So you'll recognize that I make that argument that it's in these moments of crisis that the sort of civilizational recession happens.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. And I think that both Strauss and the sort of disillusioned, disillusioned intellectuals after 89 both were in this period of, like, reflection and being, like, okay, well, if we can't ground our societies. And like, they were kind of the early defectors of this kind of triumphalist end of history movement. Right. They were like, we can't, we can't do this anymore. So what else can we do? What, what, what can we, what else can we search for besides a borderless universal truth that cannot be? Like, if that's not there, then we have to look for more particular. We have to look closer to home. So if we're looking closer to home. And that's why the Confucian revival comes up.

[A]

Right? Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think there's definitely some connection there. But this is not the only thing in your essay, your marvelous essay that has modern politics impinging on the study of classics. And I want to talk a little bit about Daniel Padilla Peralta and that talk that he gave. And it connects to the work of Chen Chin Zhang that I mentioned in the intro. You describe what classicists now simply call the incident. So, in 2019, at the Society of Classical Studies conference in San Die, a scholar named Dan El Padilla Peralta gave a talk on the underrepresentation of minority scholars in the field and where an exchange with an audience member actually becomes, depending on your perspective, either a flashpoint for necessary reckoning or like a symbol of the field consuming itself in wokeness. Right, right, right. So Padilla Peralta said he hoped classics would die and die swiftly. And what's striking is that this moment, this very, very American, very specific eruption at a very, very specialized academic conference, it ripples all the way across. And Chinese graduate students are talking about it. They circulate an anonymous article describing what they saw as the absurd reality of American academia. And they invoke comparisons to the Cultural Revolution, prompting one Chinese commentator to write down with Confucius, burn the pantheon. Different formula, familiar flavor. What does that moment tell us about, about the relationship between these two discourse communities, the American classics world and the Chinese one?

[B]

Well, I think it's. First of all, I think it's just a reminder that the discourses are very porous between China and, you know, and it's not just porous because of the Internet. It's porous because so many Chinese people study in the US we have 320,000 Chinese international students that go to the US every year. Right. And, you know, guess what they're doing over the winter breaks? They're going back to China. Right. And. And that's not a That's not just a physical movement. Like, that's a constant exchange of ideas. And so that's something that we should maybe just highlight is like part of this classic survival and is, of course, it's state led, but it's also because of the exchange, the product of the engagement for decades between China and the US And I think classics is one outgrowth of it. But like, feminism is really popular in China right now. Right. And that's also an outgrowth of just better education, more interest among Chinese studying abroad in the US and sort of absorbing the sort of zeitgeist of what's happening. And so I think that's just really important to keep in mind that this is a really great anecdote about just how porous the communities are. Yeah. And then also just this was something that, you know, I added that in there because I think that it was important to note that the incident that happened in 2019 at this conference was very much American coded. It was very much about internal debates about American history and the past. Right. It was about. This was a. These are debates that I was familiar with when I was in the university.

[A]

Right.

[B]

About how do we understand, like, how do we sort of deal with the legacy of slavery, how do we deal with exclusion in the current academy? And those debates were not happening independently of China. Of China. Yeah. Outside of the United States. Right. So there were Chinese scholars and classicists who actually got. Which is kind of ironic. Right. Because the point of, you know, people like Pertina Peralta, what they want to do is they want to open up classics to more people of color. More women, more people of color. Right. But ironically, the Chinese. The Chinese classicist community who were studying Greek and Latin didn't like that. A lot of them were not happy with the way that that was approached because they had initially come into the field. A lot of them came into the field because they wanted to study the classics, like they wanted to study the canon.

[A]

They had no problem with dead white men.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. They didn't have a problem with dead white men. Right. So there's this kind of weird thing going on where there's this weird irony that the. The people that. And so. So Yan Xiao Henchiao is an interesting example of somebody who was. Was able to somehow bridge that weird divide at that really critical juncture in that political juncture where things started to kind of break between the Chinese classicists and the American sort of academy.

[A]

That's so fascinating.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've seen so many, you know, I've been Part of many discourse communities, whether it's, you know, on rock and roll music and watching how things transmogrify as they cross the Pacific, is always really interesting to see how our spats on one side or the other look to the other side. It's always interesting. And clearly now, even what happens here in China, we're seeing nei Gen and 996 and things like that. These concepts are very China specific. Crossing the Pacific in the other direction now and becoming part of Silicon Valley lingo.

[B]

It's totally. Yeah, totally.

[A]

So I mentioned Chen. Chen Zhang's idea that, you know, civilization discourse does a real. A double job. It claims difference and distinctiveness internationally. You know, it asserts the irreducible uniqueness of one's own civilization against others while simultaneously enforcing unity and homogeneity domestically. You know, it uses civilizational identity to kind of delegitimized internal dissent, like I was saying, or, you know, minority voices or alternative traditions. But when I look at what happened at Yangchi Lake through that lens, it almost perfectly illustrates a point. So, you know, you have externally this kind of elaborate bilateral piety. You know, China and Greece, these twin poles of Eurasia, mutual learning and civilizational equals and all that. But I notice that their framing excludes a lot of other civilizations. I mean, it excludes India, it excludes Mesopotamia, it excludes the Arab world. Rome itself gets relatively short shrift in this. It's all Greece, Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, that's an interesting thing to have happening. It's a very specific bilateral claim. It's not a genuinely pluralist one at all. And then internally, you know, Whitmarsh noted, and this Greek culture minister that you have in the Lina Mendoni, they spoke explicitly about the harmful effects of scholarship that tends to pander to minorities. Right. Which is the topic we were just on at a conference ostensibly devoted to pluralism and a mutual understanding and learning. That tension like a generous toward other civilizations in the abstract, but hostile to difference within. Does that strike you as deliberate? Or is it more kind of an inadvertent symptom of how this whole civilization discourse gets deployed?

[B]

So one thing to keep in mind is that the World Classics conference itself was actually quite eclectic. Like, they invited. It wasn't just Greek scholars and Chinese scholars. They invited scholars of different civilizations, like a bunch of other civilizations. But I think that in the propaganda, you know, it was like, we want to affiliate with Greece because Greece is cool, right? And there's just this kind of cultural social cachet that they want to kind of grab at. And the, the other thing to keep in mind here is that China and Greece just in, in diplomatically right now are pretty close. Right, right. And, and so that's in another dimension to this that people should keep in mind is that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's very important.

[B]

And in fact, China like I think owns like a port, the prayers, like it's like a state owned company that runs the port or something. Like there's, there's really good sort of economic and cultural exchange going on. And I think that you could also argue that all of this is actually just kind of building a top of like an economic partnership with Greece as one sort of dimension to this and why it's focused, why it's sort of China and Greece focused. But I mean, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with like the, the China sort of global civilization initiative. Like does that include, does that include.

[A]

It's supposed to.

[B]

Yeah, it's supposed to. Okay, so it hasn't like, you know,

[A]

I mean, they're a little fuzzy. I mean if you read the thing, there isn't a very good definition of what constitutes a, a civilization or I mean, it flicks at these ideas that there are these civilization states, you know, that don't fit neatly into the sort of Westphalian idea. But yeah, I mean it's very deliberately fuzzy.

[B]

I think the point that you made though, I think is really important in the article, which is that, you know, why does China think this is important is because for the whole, like, for years, right, Decades, they've been constantly trying to say, look, there's also other valid ways of running societies besides liberal democracies. Right? Like they've been under the shadow of like a universalist paradigm for decades and they need to kind of assert themselves. And so one way to do that is to say, look, we have our own civilization, we have Confucius, we have,

[A]

you know, that is, yeah, what I describe as sort of the defensive civilizationalism.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

This is exactly what I think is actually happening. That's, that's pretty much the extent of this state project at this point. I don't think it's tipped over into, you know, just sort of homogenization or anything like that. But yeah, I, I mean.

[B]

Right, yeah. And I think that, that, that was the kind of like the reception of the article sort of that, that kind of interpretation. There, there was kind of an interpretation that China was like trying to like use classics as like offense. Like, I don't think that that was, I don't think that was the case.

[A]

Yeah, good, good. I mean, I, I, I don't think that was, yeah, part of it. I want to talk a little bit about because, you know, he's really the soul of the piece. It's, he's really kind of the figure in whom all these tensions meet and, and don't neatly resolve. I'll start with something that might seem like a digression, but I promise it isn't. You describe how Khalil and Shawl's thinking about his own scholarly identity was actually transformed not by anything in the classical world, but by reading academic work about K Pop. How does that work? I mean, he was specifically reading this ethnomusicologist named Michael Fuhrer and his argument that K pop represents a reversal of the long standing narrative of cultural flow from west to East. So it's almost like he has this sort of assertive like, hey, East Asian civilization is cool too thing going.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I brought up the K Pop, like the K pop thing is, is just good color. No, I mean it is, it is kind of quite interesting that that's the case. And I never thought that I would ever write the words K Pop in an essay I've ever written. But I think that the reason I brought that up is just to show that unlike some of the other Chinese classicists in the Western Academy that felt alienated by the kind of post classical turn, Yin Shao managed to find his like, like he is well respected in that community, right, because of the work that he does. Like, he's managed to develop intellectual interests that fit within the current kind of what is considered cutting edge in the, in the Classics academy now, right? And like, the question is like, so, so one, one question is like, how did he, yeah, how did he manage to do that? And one way is that he managed to sort of see K Pop as this kind of, oh, look, this, you know, this is something that is from East Asia, right? And it's a kind of cultural flow that is sort of moving from, from east to West. And we typically, you know, scholarship typically focuses on the reverse, right, of Western cultural flow to the east, right? And you know, and what he did was he saw a similarity between the specific period that he studies in Roman history, where certain Eastern ideas did in fact flow to Rome, but scholars didn't actually pick that up. Like, scholars weren't really looking for Eastern influence in the west, they were looking for west, like Rome's influence on the east, right? And so he's using this kind of contemporary example as a case of, like, how scholarship across time is biased in a way, in terms of like the east, west flow of culture. So that's just his way of inserting himself into a debate that's kind of vogue in the academy right now in classics, which is just, how do we reverse these long time sort of assumptions and paradigms that maybe sort of old white interpreters may have sort of assumed. Right. Like, oh, you know, we're the center of the universe, so how do we influence other people? Right.

[A]

And totally makes sense. Yeah.

[B]

Right. But I think what's interesting about the other thing that's interesting about that is like, the fact that he wasn't cognizant of the fact that he was Asian and that Asian, his Asian ness was important in his theorizing until he went to the United States. Right, right. That it wasn't. He wasn't like, he started out interested in classics and he just, he just comes to the United States at this moment when race is such an important issue in the United States. Right. And the. And the classics begins to kind of cleave on those issues and on those lines. And he's like, I didn't even think of myself as Asian. But then now I think about it, I'm like, yeah, I guess I am Asian. And like, I guess I do have certain distinctiveness.

[A]

America will do that to you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So. So that was a surprising sort of result of that kind of debate and how Yanqiao was able to manage that.

[A]

So what's this idea of his about Chinatown classics? I mean, it's this phrase he uses to describe, you know, what happens to his work when it encounters, like, the gatekeeping instincts of both the American and Chinese academies. How does he understand this idea?

[B]

I think he's just trying to say, you know, look, like. I think it's similar to what Daniel Patila Peralta at the incident, like the, during the incident. The reason, the context for the incident was that Padilla Peralta was. He did a kind of study of black, like the number of like, black classicists that are being published. And he sort of showed like a data that showed that, like, there was a slide that showed slide that was like, there was none. There was like, very little relative to white classicists. Right. And he was trying to make a point about, like, how the assumptions, you know, within these journals are excluding, you know, certain people of color in them. And I think Yin Xiao was kind of just building on that and saying, look, whenever I write about China related Topics like whenever I add a Chinese dimension into my Roman history work, and he's not randomly adding it, right. He's like saying he's doing scholarship that includes sort of intercultural exchange. Sometimes the evaluators will say that this shouldn't be in our journal. Like, we should do it in a different journal. And I don't know, like, I can't really evaluate that. Right. I mean, that's what he's saying is that, you know, these are genuine topics that should be discussed within these journals and they're being excluded. Right. That's kind of his point.

[A]

I totally get it, though.

[B]

Yeah. So let me bring up a sort of a broader point about what. What is happening here with the Chinatown classics. I mean, the point, I think, to keep in mind is these scholars like he and Qiao, these Chinese scholars, they want to be published in the best classics journals, right? And they want to be as classicists and not just Roman classicists, right. Clay and Shell is very bicultural, right. He. He's able to read Chinese and ancient Chinese, and he's also able to sort of work in the Roman history. And so he's able to sort of meld. There are certain topics, Right. That he's able to cover that other classes can't cover. So for example, his work on the Shonu, right, The Shonu, you know, the Central Asian civilization, its impact on the Roman history. Like, these are. These are genuine questions of history. And he wants to be able to publish in the top classics journals and say, look, I, as a Chinese actually have something to say about. About this period and something interesting and novel to say about this period, because I am Chinese and I can read Chinese, right? And that's a really profound thing. And I think that theoretically the. The. The Chinese classics, like the official encouragement of Chinese classics should. Should encourage that. Like, they do. They. They do want people like He Yan Xiao to be able to. To have that kind of standing and say, look, we are Chinese. We're here. We can sort of contribute to our understanding of ancient history by looking at ancient textual sources in multiple traditions. Like, that's kind of the direction that I think the Western classics has moved into. Right. But I think there's a kind of disconnect right now between how you do that in the academy. Like. Like somebody. Like the irony is that Clay and Zhao doesn't really fit in in the Chinese academy, right? He's not able to fit in in the kind of current climate and zeitgeist that's kind of influenced by Strauss and influenced by these kinds of ideas about essential, like, you know, an essential classical ideology and whatever whatnot.

[A]

It's funny you reached for the Xiongnu example because it was exactly that, that I took a course on Central Asian history. It was taught by a guy with a very, very unique name of John Smith at UC Berkeley in the late 1980s. And one of the first things that we read was Herodotus. The chapters were Herodotus describes the Scythians.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the sections of Sima Qian's Grand Historian that describe the Huns. And, you know, the descriptions are remarkably similar.

[B]

Oh, really?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

[A]

It's funny. So, yeah, I mean, classics does enter into the Chengnu are. Or anyway, Central Asian nomadic pastoral peoples are one of the conduits.

[B]

Yeah. One thing that I wanted to add also, I think, because it's. It's another sort of prosaic way of thinking about the classics revival that's not to do with the sort of states more sort of potentially nationalist or civilizational, you know, causes. Is that in general? Right. If you think about. And this is. This is a point that Martin Kern pointed to me. If you are a Chinese scholar and you're studying at, let's say, Yale, right. And you go into, like, a part, like a cocktail party, and you say, who is Shakespeare or who is Plato? You'd be laughed out of the room. Like, that's just unacceptable. Right. But if you're an American scholar and you're a Beida and you ask who Dufu or Sima Qian is, that's completely fine. Like, that's not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. Right. So there's a cultural asymmetry and just like, the global expectations about, like, how do we understand, you know, Chinese civilization versus Western civilization. Right. And in this current era where China is now, like. Like, why. Like, why would that. Why should that be the case? Right. And so I think that there's. There's this kind of. You can. You can, like, there's. Chinese actually do have some genuine reasons to be. Like, we. We kind of want our, you know, our ancient texts to be well read and well understood by the world.

[A]

So how does this. This state project, if. If it is indeed a state project, how does that address this asymmetry?

[B]

Well, I mean, it just. It's not. I'm. I don't know. Like, I don't actually know how it will address it, but it's. I think that there's a kind of. There are genuine asymmetries here, right. That have to do with just the, the, the level of soft power, you know, of China and just how, how people understand like China is an economic power, China is a technological power, but its cultural power is still very much lacking in this regard. And so I think that that is a motivating driver for the state. Now do I think that the states doing these classics conferences is going to help? No. Like if I'm going to sort of make my assessment up front, I'll say I don't think it's really like these big sort of splashy events are not going to help, but people like Clay and Xiao can do this, right. He actually is able to publish in these really big journals and he's able to use Chinese and bring in Chinese scholars. Like he's able to say, like, look guys, in order for you guys to really understand the Roman history, historical period, you need to understand the shown new. And if you don't understand, if you want to understand the shown, you got to understand this Chinese historian.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like he's able to make these connections and let, let the Westerners say, look, look, you got to understand China to understand yourselves.

[A]

Where is this going to be 10 years from now? I mean, just stepping back, if you had to characterize what China's classics revival is going to look like a decade out, what's your best guess? I mean, it's the states civilizationist agenda gradually crowd out the kind of genuine scholarly pluralism that figures like, you know, Yanxia actually represent. Does the international engagement produce kind of weird unintended consequences that complicate the neat bilateral framing that, you know, Xi's letter kind of says, with Greek and Chinese civilization as a sort of mirror image, or is there maybe another possibility, a third possibility, capability?

[B]

Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, well, so I think that what is the initiative right now? I mean, the, the concrete initiative is China wants to have instit. China wants to institutionalize a study of the classics that incorporates the understanding of ancient Chinese and ancient sort of Greece, ancient Greece or Latin within a university so that they can train a generation of scholars who are well, well versed in those traditions. That's something that the government is trying to support. And any university who applies for that kind of, who says, look, we're trying to do this the university, you know, the government is going to support them doing that. Right. And so what's going to happen in the next few years already? Right. We're seeing more and more universities trying to implement that. Right. And so you see Universities come out with classics majors, right? Classics departments, and there's going to be more hiring of professors. Right? So yeah, so there's just going to be more like the classics is going to be more departmentalized in China. It's clearly slow going because they've been trying to do this like there's very different iterations of this. Right. So like you're probably familiar with like the Guo Shui. Yeah. So there's always been synology, as we call it. Right, exactly. So that kind of institutional push is moving in the direction of having universities start to develop classics curriculums, departments and faculty.

[A]

This has to be music to a lot of the PhDs on the market right now.

[B]

No, exactly. Yeah. No, so totally true. So like, basically for, for, for like a disillusioned PhD, Classics PhD who are graduating from the United States, they might actually find opportunities in China. Right. Which is quite, which is quite an amazing story. So, so I think that that's, that's one. But 10 years from now, I mean, so we don't know like, because, because a lot of like China is very much like a leadership based system. Right. Like who the leader is really matters. So you know, there's so many things that, that in China where you know, there's a leader who's like really pushing it and then he like moves and then the new leader comes up and it just doesn't drops. It just. Yeah, it just drops. Right. So I don't know how long this will last.

[A]

Well, you know, it was four years between your Leopold Leap piece and this one. So maybe four years from now you do another one.

[B]

Another one that's like.

[A]

Yeah, you follow an American, you know, like your basic white American classicist graduates from, you know, a prominent Midwestern university and comes out and finds a job teaching.

[B]

No, but it's really slow going. Right. Because Liu Xiaofeng, his Strauss work was decade, like a decade ago. He's been doing this for a long time. But it's really only in the past few years that it's really gotten traction in the official among officials.

[A]

It's just been just a wonderful conversation and I think one of the more intellectually rich ones that I've had on Sinica in a while. So it was a real pleasure engaging with your piece and it got me thinking about so much stuff. It was just a ton of fun. It's a really essential reading. Again, it's in the New Yorker. Look for it. I think it got passed around. I think the graphic that they had for it, that illustration was quite clever. It was sort of a piece of Chinese pottery and a piece of Greek pottery kind of fused together or crack and join. But yeah, it was great. You can read that side by side with the 2022 China Project piece that I will include in the show notes. You guys can judge for yourselves to see how the story has evolved. Thanks so much for being here.

[B]

Yeah, thanks.

[A]

Yeah. Let's move on to the section that I call Paying It Forward where I just ask you to name check a younger colleague, somebody who's, you know, I mean, how did they get than you? I mean, you were just telling me that in Charlottesville you were still in college.

[B]

And I was like, ah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say I don't have anyone younger, but I have people that I want to sort of name check.

[A]

Okay. Yeah, please do.

[B]

Helpful to me to understand China and this kind of current moment. So one is Dong Xianjiang, I've already mentioned him. He's a professor at Fordham who's probably the foremost expert on this kind of classics revival. So a lot of you should have him on because, I mean, he knows a lot. And his current, his current work has to do with various debates about whether Confucianism is more primed towards authoritarianism or constitutional democracy. So there's sort of a debate in the community about whether Confucian principles can justify authoritarian style government, which is sort of generally common to.

[A]

That's just the American project, you see. It's a state project to hijack the operating system of Confucianism of the Chinese civilization and to repurpose it to undermine the Chinese Communist Party. Don't you see that I'm gonna write an article about that?

[B]

Right? No. Yeah, so he's got a lot of interesting work on that and he's very. He sees it with a very critical eye. Like he sort of describes the landscape and sort of. And he's really good on that. The other is Simon Luo at Nanyang Technology University of Singapore. He writes about contemporary sort of intellectual history and Chinese contemporary thought for sort of major public sort of political theory journals. And it's, it's really remarkable to see because it's, you know, so I did a political theory. I did a master's in political theory at Oxford. And at the time, you know, it was hard to kind of bring Chinese intellectuals and debates into these journals. Yeah, because these journals were very much about Rawls and Nozick and all these kind of, you know, Machiavelli, like all the sort of traditional, like Locke, you know, Hobbes and now, you know, you get to see, you know, there are also this kind of trend of Chinese international students who are sort of coming up through the academy and going into universities and being able to bring their Chinese knowledge into these. Into these debates. And so he's doing some really interesting work about. With the new left scholar Wang Hui.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And sort of using his theory of revitalizing the party. Right. And sort of bringing that into contemporary, you know, questions. Contemporary Western questions about, you know, the party and how to revitalize, you know, representation and. And all these things. So it's quite. It was really interesting to read. So, yeah. Simon Lo and Dongxianjiang.

[A]

Fantastic.

[B]

Both. Both professors.

[A]

All right. Those are excellent. Excellent recommend, Excellent paint forward. Name checks. What about recommendations? You got a book that you've read recently? Something completely unrelated to the classic Swords of China or anything at all?

[B]

I'm hooked on A House of Dragons. I really. I'm a little bit late to that, but I'm kind of. Yeah, I'm into that.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have you seen A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms yet?

[B]

I haven't.

[A]

Okay. Is that.

[B]

Is that a lot better?

[A]

I think, yeah. I mean, I get so confused by all these people whose names all sound basically the same.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they're complicated relations to one another and. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I feel like A Knight of the Seven Kings has this very sort of simple, just stripped down storyline. It feels just really emotionally very honest.

[B]

Oh, House of Dragons is not. Yeah, I was a little bit. Well, I mean, also, it's good.

[A]

I mean, it's better than Game of Thrones was in the last season anyway. But.

[B]

Right, right. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I always have time. You know, they'll put anything in that world and I'll watch it, so I'm a sucker for it.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I think that is just a guilty pleasure of mine. Like, it was really good.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, House of Dragons on hbo. Right. So check that out. My recommendation is for the masterful trombonist Matt Roberts here in Beijing and his Ah Kyu Orchestra. That's a R K, E, S T, R A. They are a jazz ensemble that plays very frequently here in. In the capital. It features, among others, the talented David Moser, who, you know from the show on keyboards, plus an upright bass player, a killer drummer, and an amazing sax player and a really, really, really great guitar player, too. They have like four or five albums. You can get them all on Spotify. The latest is called or no Opinion. Really really cool kind of trombone and sax harmonies using super interesting intervals and they are very experimental with odd times and really difficult rhythms. They're all really, really good soloists. It's a blast to watch them. I saw him last night. David tells me that there are kids who we used to see at the jazz clubs in Beijing, you know, 15, 20 years ago, who are now all grown up and have become terrifyingly talented musicians. So I'm going to be exploring now that I'm back, I'm going to be exploring the jazz scene here now that it's available to me. So yeah, check them out. The Ah Q Orchestra led by Matt Roberts, trombonist, longtime Beijing resident. Between him and David Moser, they gotta have like 60 years in China between them. It's truly amazing. Well Chong, thanks once again. That was just such a blast. Really fun to talk to you.

[B]

Thanks. It was fun.

[A]

Look forward to your next piece and having you back on. Yep, you've been listening to the Cynical Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Gula. Support the show through [e-mail] where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin, Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Go Badger. Huge thanks to my guest Tom Cho. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week. Take care. Wherever you go, whatever they get into, from chill time to everyday adventures. Protect your dog from parasites with Credelio Guattro.

[B]

For full safety information, side effects and warnings, visit credelioquattrolabel.com consult your vet or call 1-888-545-5973. Ask your vet for Cordelio Cuatro and visit quattro dog.com.