Dear SACP Members and Friends,
Here are some details regarding an upcoming hybrid event that may be of interest (and flyer attached).
Join Joseph Harroff (American University), Tao Jiang (Rutgers University), Sarah Flavel (Bath Spa University, UK & SACP President) and Viren Murthy (University Wisconsin-Madison) as they discuss the recent translation of Zhao Tingyang’s creative reconstruction of a Zhou conception of the world political for critically theorizing contemporary global predicaments.
Together they will discuss and respond to All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order – arguably one of the most highly influential political-theoretical treatises in contemporary China. This work has received significant attention across the Chinese intellectual scene.
Zhao’s work has been criticised both for what might look like an endorsement of a new form of Chinese-led global imperialism (through soft-power) as well as for its arguable lack of realism about whether such coordination between humans at the global level is possible. But read more sympathetically however, some of Zhao’s ideas could provide resources and perhaps new hope for rethinking the fate or our future political and environmental security, not as nations but as humans and even as an earth – as Tianxia: ‘all under the skies/heavens’.
