Anne Cheng, CDF: "Why is «civilisation» such a key word in today’s China?"

Abstract:

While we would tend to think of the debates about “civilisation” as belonging to the late 19th century colonial worldviews and as totally outdated in our present day and age, why is the word so intriguingly and obsessively recurrent in the Chinese official discourse today? Beyond the post-colonial accounts that China has to settle with Japan, we shall discuss China's growing insistence that it should be deemed a civilisation rather than a nation-state in the Western sense, and the reasons thereof.