The East is a Promotion, Peking University, Comparing China and the West Conference, Summer 2013

The East is a Promotion, Peking University, Comparing China and the West Conference, Summer 2013

Thorsten Pattberg: Talk at Peking University, Comparing China and the West Conference, Summer 2013

[Talk] "The East is a career," reads the quote by Benjamin Disraeli in the preamble of Edward Said's 1978 masterpiece Orientalism. Since Deng Xiaoping's opening-up policy, millions of European entrepreneurs, scholars and adventurers have swarmed eastward and flocked into China. They got their careers, now they want a promotion. Here's how…

[Key Words] Confucian Way of New Europe, Lofty Pragmatism, Love for Learning, Return of the Shengren, Translation History, China in World History

Thorsten Pattberg on Lofty pragmatism, secularization, Brussels, Chinese technocrats, Harmonious Society, Wenming, Three-Tier School System, Filial Piety Xiao, New Humanism, Untranslatable Words, and the China Family System

“Everyone knows that we couldn't possibly have experienced both histories at the same time. Europe experienced only half of the human story. The Europeans can revisit documents, but nothing can remedy their lack of experience when it comes to China’s history.”

“Let me conclude with two things that I see when I look at China: creativity and potential. China experienced different histories and invented original concepts -  like wenming, daxue, shengren, junzi, and so on - that we don’t have in the west, and the Chinese do things here differently than we do, say, in Berlin or London.” [Visit The East-West Dichotomy] [Visit Big Think]