Ithaca College

Free and open to the public

Thursday, March 30, 2017
104 Park Center (Business School)
7:00 P.M.

Confucianism has a lot to teach us about global order. During its transition from the Zhou to Qin dynasties (770 B.C.E. to 221 B.C.E), China faced issues of national identity and international relations much like the issues early modern Europeans were to face centuries later. In response, early Confucians developed a model of global political order known as “tian xia.” In this talk, I will argue that an updated version of this model is not only possible, but in fact is superior to both nation-state and cosmopolitan models of governance.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Tongdong Bai is the Dongfang Chair Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University in China, and a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University in 2016-17. His books include A New Mission of an Old State: The Comparative and Contemporary Relevance of Classical Confucian Political Philosophy (Peking University Press, 2009) and China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012).

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