East Asian Humanities Workshop: Ban Wang Book Talk on China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision

Professor Ban Wang will give a talk on his new book, China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (2022, Duke University Press). Professor Wang is William Haas Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

The talk will be followed by Q&A and discussion. Our discussant, Dr. Simon Luo, Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at Stanford, will begin the discussion. Dinner will be provided for attendees after the talk.

China in the World is available to read online for free through Stanford Libraries.

Book abstract: 

In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning “all under heaven,” has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China’s worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country’s pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world. (Link to the book's abstract from Duke University Press).