The University of Sydney
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Seminar: Does Zhongguo 中國 mean the Middle Kingdom?
4.00-5.30pm, Monday, 3 September 2018
SLC Common Room, Room 536, Brennan MacCallum (A18), University of Sydney
RSVP: sean.moores@sydney.edu.au
The quest for the original texts supposedly related to Buddhist teachings is assumed to be the chief motivation for Chinese monks to take the long and perilous pilgrimage to the land of origin of their faith in the early centuries of the first millennium. Among the many disputed issues to be found in these monks’ written testimonies is one that points towards what might be called shared or competing geographies (whether imagined or real) between China and India.
In early Chinese Buddhist sources, India emerges as the very centre of civilisation and attraction, with the result that China’s traditional centrality is shifted to the periphery, creating the so-called “borderland complex” and giving rise to a disquieting uncertainty about what was meant by Zhongguo in numerous occurrences: should it be taken to designate the “Middle Kingdom” of Chinese self- representations, or Madhyadeśa, the “Central Country” in the north of present day India?
At a time like the present day when China’s official discourse is entirely geared towards the Chinese rise to power and recovery of its imperial centrality in Asia, it seems more important than ever to remind ourselves of the interesting times when Chinese centrality became emphatically challenged by the Chinese themselves in a rather unique experience of self-de-centering by reference to another universality.
Public lecture: From China as the World to China in the World
4.30-6:00pm, Wednesday, 5 September 2018
Education Lecture Theatre 351, Education Building (A35), University of Sydney
Registration
The advent of the universality of human rights is generally seen as a pure product of the Enlightenment in Europe, which itself represented the “triumph of Reason”; whereas Chinese universality is inseparable from a certain idea of civilisation, with a centre shining upon surrounding regions, and upon which the reality of imperial power superimposed itself.
The geographical embodiment of this shining force is what is commonly called the sinicised world, which includes the entire East Asian region surrounding China itself: Korea, Japan, Vietnam – cultures which have been influenced by China to different extents and at different moments in history. Conversely, each time China itself was encroached upon, invaded or occupied by “barbarians”, it was always assumed that the latter would end up being transformed and adopt Chinese civilisation.
Imperial China thus depicted itself not only as the centre of the world but also as a sort of “civilisation-world”, and it was not until the second half of the 19th century, under attack from Western powers, that it had to consider itself as being a nation amongst others. It is the same universality of “China as the world” which, after having been jeopardised by colonial powers (including Japan) at the end of the 19th century, is once again becoming a type of nostalgic self-representation and a unifying factor in the predominant ideology of a “Greater China”, and which is now being opposed as a kind of “Chinese universality” against the universality of human rights.
About the Speaker
Anne Cheng holds the Chair of Chinese Intellectual History at the Collège de France in Paris. She was trained in European and Chinese intellectual history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, at Oxford and Cambridge, and at Fudan University in Shanghai. After an academic career as a research fellow at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), then as a Professor at INALCO (National Institute for Oriental languages and Civilizations), she was elected to the Collège de France in 2008.
Her main publications include a complete French translation of the Confucian Analects, a Study of Han Confucianism and a History of Chinese Thought which has won several awards and has been translated into numerous languages. She has also authored a great number of articles and chief-edited several collective volumes on Chinese philosophy and Chinese thought, past and present. Since 2010, she has been directing a bilingual series of works written in classical Chinese and translated into French at Belles Lettres in Paris.