Chinese leaders talk a big talk on the world stage, but its interior world is more subtle. Our speaker, David Ownby, lays out the landscape of China’s marketplace of ideas, introducing us to public intellectuals who talk past the Communist Party to advance alternative agendas. He will discuss the “republic of letters” in China that exists alongside Party-State propaganda organs. Genuine debates take place over important issues within academic halls and philosophical magazines – what is democracy? What is reform? What should Sino-American relations look like? – suggesting that China is more diverse and fluid than we tend to assume from reading the People’s Daily.
About our speaker: David Ownby is a professor of history of religion in modern and contemporary China at the University of Montreal, where he researches social movements and the history of intellectual thought. Currently, with colleagues from York University and UBC, he has launched a new research program on contemporary intellectual life in China. The project explores the complex relations between the growing freedom of expression for intellectuals, the cultural search for an identity that will be both modern and Chinese, and the pressing need for Chinese political authorities to find a new ideological legitimacy. You can read some of David’s translation of contemporary Chinese philosophical essays, at his blog Reading the China Dream.