Book Launch - Becoming China: Great Learning or Apocalyptic Risk
Jeanne Marie-Gescher (SOAS, University of London)
Date: Wednesday 08 November 2017, 6pm-8pm
Venue: SOAS, University of London, Senate House Alumni Lecture Theatre (SALT), 1st floor, The Paul Webley Wing (Senate House), North Block, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX
Programme
6pm-7pm: Talk from the author Jeanne-Marie Gescher
7pm-8pm: Reception
Abstract
China’s future matters. But as Xi Jinping pursues the dream of a new order at home and abroad, the West is struggling to understand the nature of what is proving to be a bigger idea with wider implications for the world. Is China now a civilisational advance, drawing on millennia of political thought and a hundred years of trial and error? Or is it perpetuating, and now exporting, a unique civilisational error that has repeatedly collapsed its past and drove some of its greatest minds to two 20th century revolutions?
For the wider world, the questions have acquired practical importance. As China proves that innovation is not a monopoly of the West, is it going to lead the world into a new era of Taiping heavenly peace and widespread Xiaokang moderate prosperity, connected by belts, roads, polar rings and Chinese online everything? Or, as the Party-State tightens its controls, and its tech giants battle to lead an artificially intelligent world, is the idea of Truth as Practice – truth as a determined creation of the future rather than any searing revelations of the past – going to raise not only the risk of yet another dynastic collapse but of the ultimate 21st century fear, that of a human world lost to a single top down mind?
Exploring these questions through the history that led to the present-day state, Jeanne-Marie, author of Becoming China: The Story Behind the State (Bloomsbury, 2017) will suggest that we have much to discover about ourselves.
Biography
Jeanne-Marie is a British barrister, who has lived, worked and thought critically in China for over 25 years, where she founded one of the earliest advisory firms in Beijing, complete with its own virtual think tank. Honorary Legal Advisor to successive British Ambassadors to the PRC from 1989 to 2015, advisor to businesses, governments, NGOs and ordinary individuals with important questions, she is a SOAS alumna and a SOAS China Institute Senior Fellow. Some years ago, she set out to understand how China became the state that it is today: the result is Becoming China, The Story Behind the State (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Registration
All welcome but registration is required. Please register here by Wednesday 1st November 2017:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/china-institute/events/08nov2017-becoming-china-great-learning-or-apocalyptic-risk.html
Upcoming SCI Events
https://www.soas.ac.uk/china-institute/events/
Best wishes,
Li-Sa Whittington
Executive Officer, SOAS China Institute
SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
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