Civilizationist Discourse’s Double Job

This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece "How China Learned to Love the Classics" generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual curiosity of scholars like He Yanxiao, who fell in love with the Odyssey as a Chinese high school student and went on to earn a Chicago PhD, to what might be the more deliberate strategic ambitions of figures like Politburo member Li Shulei and the shadow of philosopher Liu Xiaofeng's Straussianism. We also compare Chang's warmly enchanted 2022 China Project piece on Austrian classicist Leopold Lieb to the politically sharper New Yorker piece four years later — and ask what that shift in tone tells us about what's actually changed. This is an episode about civilizational discourse, soft power, and the strange fate of scholarship when the state decides it finds your obscure passion useful.

00:32 – Kaiser introduces the episode from Beijing and reflects on the asymmetry in how the West covers Chinese intellectual curiosity

04:08 – Civilizationist discourse: Spengler, Huntington, and The Civilization Trap

10:56 – Introducing Chang Che and the evolution from his 2022 China Project piece to the New Yorker

15:38 – How Chang first got drawn into the subject: Latin classes, Charlottesville, and young Chinese classicists returning from American PhDs

21:38 – What changed in four years: the state moves from background to foreground

25:28 – Inside the institutional push: what China's "classics departments" actually look like, and who controls the definition of "classics"

31:13 – Xi Jinping's letter to Greek scholars and the move, perhaps, to sever ancient Greece from the modern West

39:57 – Liu Xiaofeng, Leo Strauss, and why Strauss fever gripped Chinese intellectuals after 1989

47:03 – The Padilla Peralta "incident" and the strange porousness between American and Chinese discourse communities on the classics

52:13 – Chenchen Zhang's framework: civilizationist discourse claims difference internationally while enforcing homogeneity domestically

57:30 – He Yanxiao, K-pop, and the idea of "Chinatown classics"

01:07:13 – Where will China's classics revival be in ten years?

Paying It Forward: Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) and Simon Luo (Nanyang Technological University)

Recommendations: Chang recommends House of the Dragon; Kaiser recommends the Ah-Q Arkestra, led by trombonist Matt Roberts, whose latest album Méiyǒu yìjiàn is on Spotify.

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