Conceptualising China in Modern Europe (21 May)

"Conceptualising China in Modern Europe": a lecture by Professor Dr. Yixu Lu (University of Sydney / JSPS Fellow at the University of Tokyo)

"Understanding China is a challenge, not least because we tend to become involved in contradictory past understandings. From the early 18th to the middle 19th century there is a curious oscillation in Western ideas of China from the strongly positive to the equally negative. Thus, for Leibniz, on the threshold of the Enlightenment, China was defined positively as what Europe was not, whereas for Herder and Hegel China is immune to progress. Ferdinand von Richthofen displaces the myth of stagnation and sets the pendulum swinging towards a China full of the promise of an industrialised future.

"This lecture traces China’s changing image from a model of statecraft to a senile and corrupt culture in the 18th and 19th century and argues that this change is a result of sanctifying the idea of “progress” as the telos of human history in modern Europe."

Tuesday, May 21, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

University of Tokyo, Komaba, Building 18, 4th floor, Collaboration Room 3
​
More details at: https://conceptualisingchina.wordpress.com/