Featured Events
Tianxia Workshop
Culture, International Relations, and World History:
Rethinking Chinese Perceptions of World Order
May 6-11, 2011
Hartley Conference Center, Stanford University
The workshop will gather together a small group of distinguished scholars to engage
in sustained conversations on the theoretical implications and practical values of
the traditional Chinese vision of world order, or tianxia (all under heaven). This
vision anchors a universal authority in the moral, ritualistic, and aesthetic framework
of a secular high culture, while providing social and moral criteria for assessing fair,
humanitarian governance and proper social relations. Varied discourses indebted to
tianxia have resurfaced in modern China in quest of moral and cultural ways of relating
to and articulating an international society. We believe that the Chinese vision may
prove productive in exploring possibilities of world culture and literature in the
tension-ridden yet interconnected world. In this workshop, we will examine the ways
in which Chinese thinkers and writers have envisioned China’s place in and as world
history and its new responsibility in the interstate world system.
The workshop is co-sponsored by the Confucius Institute, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures,
the Center for East Asian Studies, and the School of Humanities and Sciences. Major
funding is provided by Stanford’s Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities.
Please contact Carmen
Suen for more information.
