Topic: The Religious Origins of the New Cold War Discourse
Speaker: Dr Peng YIN, Assistant Professor of Ethics, Boston University
Date & Time: 9 Nov 2023, 4 - 5.30pm
Venue: QR514, PolyU
Online platform: Zoom
Abstract: The competition between China and the U.S. occupies the daily news. At the risk of a Thucydides Trap, some have asserted that we have entered into a new Cold War. In this lecture, I trace this discourse as a permutation of evolutionary and incompatible views of China. The evolutionary view harbors an optimism that China will inevitably be more like the West—liberal and democratic—once Chinese citizens become middle class. The incompatible view coaches the tension in increasingly religious terms: the antagonism between atheist and authoritarian China versus Christian and democratic America. These views originated in three Western imageries of China (as Idealized Panacea in Leibniz, Bygone Same in Hegel, and Incompatible Other in Huntington) sustained by the problematic treatment of Chinese religions. To disabuse us of the thesis of inevitable clash requires us to diagnose the religious underpinnings of the new Cold War discourse.
Speaker's Biography: Peng Yin, Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University where he serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His forthcoming book, Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics, explores the potential for mutual recognition across religious differences. He is at work on a larger book tracing the origins and dissents of political authority in Chinese religions.
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