Chang Che writes:

In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was “the strangest and most momentous” event of his academic career.

By eight o’clock the next morning, Whitmarsh was north of Beijing at the palatial Yanqi Lake international convention center. The venue, reportedly part of an almost six-billion-dollar construction project, had previously hosted the APEC summit. Whitmarsh was ushered into a side room with distinguished guests, among them Lina Mendoni, the Greek minister of culture. The presiding politician was one of Xi Jinping’s closest confidants: China’s propaganda chief, Li Shulei. Li shook hands with Whitmarsh and exchanged platitudes with the other guests. It wasn’t until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he’d signed up for: “a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,” as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China’s ministries of culture.

Inside a conference hall roughly the size of a football field sat hundreds of people—ambassadors, politicians, and scholars. At the podium, Li read out a letter from Xi, which described ancient Greece and China as two civilizations that have shaped humanity’s development from opposite sides of Eurasia. Xi went on to encourage their cultural exchange and announced the establishment of a Chinese School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Whitmarsh, who, with other Western-trained scholars, had led a group called the Postclassicisms Collective, realized that he had prepared the wrong speech. In the years since Donald Trump entered politics, emboldening fascists and white supremacists who held rallies deploying Roman imagery, Whitmarsh and the others had come to repudiate a traditional view of their field that he summed up as the “passing of a baton, down through the ages from like-minded person to like-minded person.” When it came time for Whitmarsh to speak, he argued that ancient texts didn’t spring from some timeless ur-culture, and that they should not be treated as such. “ ‘Classical Greece,’ ” he said to the Chinese and Greek dignitaries, is “an invention of the classical Greeks themselves.”

When we met for drinks two months later, Whitmarsh wondered whether he might have accidentally offered a warning for China: “Maybe it was the right speech after all,” he told me.

The World Conference of Classics had all the signs of a typical political spectacle, intended to cultivate appreciation for Chinese culture abroad. Yet Li and other scholars—many of whom can recall a time when their own intellectual traditions were denounced by Mao Zedong as “feudal dross”—also expressed admiration for the Western classics. One keynote at the conference was delivered by Liu Xiaofeng, one of the most prolific translators of ancient Greek thought into Chinese, and the gathering’s official theme was about “mutual learning.” The enthusiasm, in China, for Western classics also comes from below. In the years before Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas, nearly three hundred thousand Chinese enrolled at U.S. universities each year. Thousands learned ancient Greek and Latin. Many returning Chinese scholars brought their Western training and methodologies back to the Chinese academy, prompting university officials to find ways to categorize—and make use of—their skills.

Even as foreign textbooks are banned and news broadcasts portray Western societies as gun-toting hellscapes, Chinese universities are hiring Greco-Roman classicists. One Beijing university recently completed a new translation of Plato. Another university established a research center, led by an Oxford professor, that puts ancient Chinese texts in conversation with other classical textual traditions, including Greek and Latin. The reason for the classics fervor varies depending on whom you ask, but most scholars agree that Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics. In recent years, Xi has made “cultural confidence” a cornerstone of national policy, referring to pride in Chinese traditions and values. Across China, archeological museums and exhibitions are multiplying, and neglected villages are being refurbished into stage-set “ancient” towns. At universities, the study of ancient Chinese texts has historically been scattered across disciplines; now, under government direction, universities are trying to gather that scholarship in new classics departments where, one theory goes, ancient truths can be nurtured and passed down. In 2024, Renmin University, in Beijing, became the first university in China to offer an undergraduate major in Chinese classical studies. Last March, Sichuan University opened a classics department, aiming to educate students to be “conversant in both Chinese and Western learning.” “When China looks at the world, they want to be like Greece,” Martin Kern, a Princeton Sinologist and keynote speaker at the World Conference of Classics, told me. “Greece is for Europe what China is for East Asia. You guys have Socrates. We have Confucius.”

By now, it is almost a cliché to say that the Western classics are in crisis. During the past half dozen years, around ten universities and colleges have closed their classics departments or programs, with some folded into larger humanities units. Western classicists look to the classics revival in China with a mix of awe, envy, and hesitation: a geopolitical rival could very well value their discipline more than their home institutions. [Continue reading…]