[Symposium Event] ‘Like spring drizzle falling without a sound’: Xi Jinping and the Political Aesthetics of Empire

Event Details

  • Start: 12 February 2022 9:30 am
  • End: 12 February 2022 11:00 am
  • Categories:

Join us on February 12th 2022 for the second session of the Centre for Chinese Research’s 2021-2022 symposium, Seeing Like an Empire: Chinese Political Thought and Practice in Changing Times.

Professor Vivienne Shue will discuss certain notable features in the ‘political aesthetics’ of Chinese Communist Party rule under Xi Jinping today, placing these into longer and fuller historical perspective. Recalling successive transformations in the communications technologies available to political leaders pursuing propaganda work over the past 100 years, her analysis will highlight the almost unceasingly strenuous effort of the party to radiate its own positive spirit, outward, over the people— to sustain a keen sensation of dynamic social energy and purpose. This palpable sensation of energetic purpose, distilled initially within the core of the party itself, is meant to permeate the hearts and minds of people in all corners of the realm — generating (through a process akin to sympathetic resonance) a vibrantly charged hum of popular recognition, assent, and appreciation for the party’s leadership and direction. This distinctive model of political legitimation, she argues, borrows its inspiration from concepts and practices of political authority first articulated within the cosmological frames of very early Chinese thought; later refined and augmented over centuries of imperial governing practice; all quite intentionally being revived under Xi Jinping today.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Vivienne Shue is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary China Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. Before moving to Oxford to head a new research program there in 2002, she taught Chinese politics to undergraduates and graduates at Cornell University and Yale for more than 25 years. She has written widely on topics in 20th and 21st century Chinese politics, political economy, society and history; with special interests in local government, changing institutions and practices of the party-state, techniques of political legitimation, and patterns of state-society interaction. Best known for The Reach of the State, more recent publications include To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power (with Patricia Thornton), published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, and “Party-state, nation, empire: rethinking the grammar of Chinese Governance”, in the Journal of Chinese Governance, 2018.

Commenter Bio
Dr. Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor in history at the University of British Columbia. His research and teaching center on Chinese and Inner Asian political culture and thought in global historical contexts. Specializing in areas where cultural history meets comparative philosophy, he works on a wide array of previously unknown, untapped, and understudied sources in different languages—literary Sinitic (classical Chinese), Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Latin, and Greek, to name a few. Ultimately, his scholarly passion lies in writing new kinds of global intellectual histories that foreground the theoretical contributions of both “canonical” and “everyday” thinkers of different traditions.
His current book manuscript, “The ‘Chinese’ Rhetorical Curriculum and a Transcultural History of Political Thought, ca. 1250–1650,” provides a new narrative of the history of early modern political thought by examining the rhetorical curriculum that flourished in East Eurasia.
Moderator Bio
Dr. Timothy Cheek is a Professor with the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Department of History, and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research and Department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party

Date, Time and Location

This event will be happening via Zoom webinar on Saturday, February 12th 2022 at 9:30 am Pacific/12:30 pm Eastern/5:30 GMT.

Register by: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Esce2srjkuH9LIIhUexxYot58PxIzb_E7k or https://bit.ly/3uBxL0L