Chang Che

“The United States has hundreds of sinologists. We don't typically ask what strategic calculation drives American scholars to spend their careers studying the 100 schools of thought from the Warring States period, right, right, or or studying Tang poetry. We tend to assume that intellectual curiosity is self explanatory, that that falling in love with the civilization's texts, its foundational works, its ideas, That's that's something that happens to people and doesn't require a geopolitical alibi.”

“It performs a very particular double operation. It claims difference and distinctiveness internationally, insisting, you know, on the irreducible uniqueness of one's own civilization against others while simultaneously enforcing unity and homogeneity domestically using civilizational identity to, you know, delegitimize internal dissent to to marginalize minority voices or alternative traditions.”

“I mean, I think this is really uncharitable, but I'm gonna say this because, like, my parents thought this way. Right? They were just thought, like, you could get you know, you could do well on the SAT potentially by just knowing some root words. Like, they just thought that it was, like, you might give you some advantage. They they made me do Latin, and at the time, I didn't question it. Tiger yeah. Just this is just the tiger mom approach.”

“Xi writes to the Greek scholars in early twenty twenty three. 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. But what it leaves out, right, it it's not China and the West. It's it's not China and Europe. It's China and Greece.”

“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. So so Strauss thinks that the modern West has sort of like lost faith in itself. And not just Liu Xiaofeng, a lot of scholars who come out of the 1989, Tiananmen 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 the civilized world failed.”

“I think it's first of all, I think it's just a reminder that the discourses are very porous between China and The US. 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. And, you know, guess what they're doing over the winter breaks? They're going back to China. And and that's not a that's that's not just a physical movement. Like that's a constant exchange of ideas.”

“If you are a Chinese scholar and you're studying at, let's say Yale. And you go into like a par 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. But if you're an American scholar and you're a beta and you ask who Du Fu or Sima Chen is, that's completely fine. Like, that's not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. So there's a cultural asymmetry and just, like, the global expectations.”

“So, like, basically, for for for, like, a disillusioned PhD, classics PhD who is 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 ten 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.”