Visions of a New Global Order - A View from China

“Visions of a New Global Order - A View from China” Professor Wang Hui (Tsinghua University) in dialogue with Marina Rudyak (Heidelberg University)
Professor Wang Hui
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University
Marina Rudyak
Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University
25. Januar 2022
The “Community of shared future for mankind” (Renlei mingyun gongtongti 人类命运共同体) has been promulgated by Chinese policy intellectuals as a new concept of global governance and as an alternative to the “old” (Western-dominated) type of international relations, which they consider to echo a Cold War mentality and a confrontational zero-sum game. In Europe and the U.S., the term has received a mixed reception: while some have interpreted it as China’s commitment to multilateralism - especially during Donald Trump’s tenure - others see the promulgation of the term, especially in UN organizations, as an attempt to undermine the liberal international order. In dialogue with Marina Rudyak (Institute of Chinese Studies), China’s leading intellectual historian Wang Hui 汪晖, Changjiang Scholar and Professor at Tsinghua University, will reflect on Chinese perspectives of what is wrong with the old order (or disorder) as well as on questions that have arisen in response, both in Europa and the United States. As power relations are shifting, what are the alternatives for international relations in the 21st century - and is a “shared future” possible?
Wang Hui is professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at one of China’s elite universities, Tsinghua University in Beijing. His research focuses on Chinese literature and intellectual history. Between 1996 and 2007, he was executive editor of the influential magazine Dushu 读书 (literally “book reading”), founded as a monthly in 1979, during the Democracy Movement, with the famous slogan “No Forbidden Zone in Reading.” It was under Wang and Huang that Dushu emerged as a socially critical journal; uncongenial to some, but nevertheless posing questions that indubitably had a wider resonance. Wang Hui who has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, Göttingen, Heidelberg and many other universities in the world, has been named by U.S. magazine Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world.