Transcript | Is China Trying to Sever Plato from NATO? Chang Che on Beijing's Embrace of the Greco-Roman Classics
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
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.
Trancript:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica 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 Kuo, 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 me at sinicapod@gmail.com.
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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 an 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, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, (Cicero [hard k] if you’re a Latin purist, and Thucydides. And my first instinct, I will confess, was 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, 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 careers 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 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, that history was not some single progressive story, but a series of 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 “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 a fervor that tends to be inversely proportional to any actual familiarity with what the Greeks and Romans produced.
Last month, I published an essay on my Substack, and fair warning, it comes in at a daunting, I think like 14,000 words, so maybe set aside in the 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 civilizationist 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 Chenchen Zhang, 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, Chenchen 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, baizuo 白左, 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 Chenchen 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 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 Yanqi 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 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 a character who is central to the piece that we’re going to be focusing on, for whom that genuine intellectual interest is very organic. It precedes, I think, the state’s involvement. And the story of what happens when authentic scholarly curiosity meets state cooptation, 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 that this is not Chang’s first time at this particular rodeo. I mean, back in, what was it, January ‘22? 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 you pronounce his name?
Chang Che: Yeah, Leopold Lieb.
Kaiser: Yeah, Leopold Lieb, who has spent like 30 years in Beijing now, right?
Chang: I think so, yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah, teaching Latin and Greek and in the process becoming, really by his own account, more Chinese than he is Austrian. Its emotional key 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 Chang 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 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 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 Xiaofeng, found his way to 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, but reading the actual Odyssey, as a Chinese high school student. He taught himself ancient Greek, got a Ph.D. 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, Chang, welcome back to Sinica. It’s genuinely wonderful to have you, and welcome to my home.
Chang: Thanks for having me, Kaiser. It’s been a long time.
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. And you’re living in Tokyo these days, huh?
Chang: Tokyo. That’s right.
Kaiser: Oh, man. I envy you. It’s a great city.
Chang: You’re welcome to come.
Kaiser: I think I may take you up on that. It’s not too far away.
So, like I said, welcome back. So you were on, I think we talked last time about the Shanghai lockdowns back in ‘22 in April. It feels like a long-ass time ago.
Chang: That’s true.
Kaiser: Yeah. So I want to start by asking you something that’s partly personal. How did you first get pulled into the subject of the Chinese interest in the Greco-Roman world? You know, that old piece for The China Project, it reads like somebody who’d already been kind of living with this material for a while. Where did it begin for you?
Chang: 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 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. So, that was around the time of, you know, Charlottesville, these sort of really key American moments that turned classics imagery.
There were people on the right people on the right side of the political spectrum who were donning certain Roman imagery. The fact that classics was such an important part of politics or something that I was aware of in the U.S. 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 was around 2020. That was kind of like the height of decoupling.
You know, there was a lot of news stories about Chinese banning foreign textbooks and all these kind of stories about the businesses feeling tepid about working in China. And Donald Trump was calling coronavirus the Kung Fu virus.
Kaiser: Kung Flu.
Chang: Yeah, the Kung Flu. Exactly. 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 Yanxiao, who had just studied, finished their PhD, came back, and they were welcomed with open arms in the university.
They were getting a lot of interest. They were telling me how there were lectures. There were so many Chinese people coming and listening. And they were like, oh, my God, you know, this is so different from in the U.S. You know, when I taught Homer in the U.S., like no one showed up to my classes. And in China, it was the complete opposite.
Kaiser: Where were you running into these people? I mean, were they like just at the bars you were hanging out at or?
Chang: It wasn’t the bar, but I think just talking to people… 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 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 humanists, right? And the classicists were the ones who seemed most welcome in China, which really piqued my interest.
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah.
Chang: 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.
Kaiser: So, this is how you discover Lieb, yeah? Presumably through one of these people?
Chang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I saw that he was mentioned, I think, somewhere online. I was sort of looking into this topic and looking at, 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 and was like, “Hey, you know, I know that you’re teaching Latin at Renda. Can I just come and watch you?”
