How China Learned to Love the Classics
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. In 2023, Shadi Bartsch, a classicist at the University of Chicago, covered the cresting interest among Chinese intellectuals, in ancient Greek and Roman texts, in “Plato Goes to China.” From late Qing reformers inspired by Athenian citizenship to nationalists who draw on Plato to bolster China’s political ideology, Bartsch shows how supple ancient texts are in the hands of interpreters. Yet she also acknowledged the upsides of a foreign government’s support for her field. “There is real interest in the question of whether China is going to become the main protector of the western classics,” she told me over e-mail.
When I heard that China was hosting a lavish event with esteemed foreign classicists, I was curious: Who had orchestrated this? The story, according to several scholars I spoke to, begins in 2021, when Chinese and Greek education officials started setting up research centers—one in China and one in Greece—aimed at deepening understanding of the two ancient civilizations. In February, 2023, as Greek administrators prepared to celebrate the opening of a center in Athens, they received an unusual suggestion from the local Chinese Embassy: write a letter to Xi Jinping. One administrator told me that he was baffled, but that the embassy staff seemed confident that something would come of it.
The inaugural ceremony for the so-called Center of Greek and Chinese Ancient Civilizations was attended by Sun Chunlan, a Chinese Vice-Premier at the time. Sun brought with her a reply letter from Xi Jinping congratulating the Greek scholars on the center’s opening. In the following weeks, Chinese media visited the center to report on how its then president had been honored by Xi’s reply. “Glittering at each other, from each end of the Eurasian continent,” Xi had written, China and Greece should work together to promote mutual learning. The letter codified the idea that the modern West—defined by liberalism, constitutionalism, and multi-party democracy—could be separated, conceptually, from the ancient West, as represented by Greece and Rome. In China’s civilization-building cause, the former was an ideological adversary; the latter could become an ally.
With Xi’s approval, momentum built quickly. One of the Chinese ministries involved in the joint centers helped organize the World Conference of Classics. They tapped China’s top academic institutions—Peking University, Renmin University, and Tsinghua University, among others—to draw up guest lists, and the universities relied in part on Western-educated faculty to send out the invitations. One of the invited professors, Jonathan Ready, of the University of Michigan, recalled feeling as taken aback as Whitmarsh. He had also flown business class, and had been squired to the front of the assembly for reasons he could not explain. “It was the most lavish conference I have ever, and will ever, go to,” he told me.
Ready had been invited by a former student named He Yanxiao, whom he had taught at Indiana University, and who eventually went on to a postdoc at Tsinghua University. In December, 2024, I met up with Yanxiao for dinner in Beijing. A lanky bespectacled man in his early thirties, Yanxiao recalled that his interest in classics began during his freshman year of high school, when he encountered a Chinese translation of the Odyssey. Like a true Marxist, he told me, he was searching for references to slavery, but he kept getting distracted by the tale. “I just found it so beautiful,” he said. He resolved to teach himself ancient Greek. Few resources existed for Chinese to study Greek at the time, but a new pair of introductory textbooks had been published recently by Liu Xiaofeng, the prolific translator.
Liu was then a philosophy professor at Sun Yat-sen University in southern China, where he taught ancient Greek and Latin. He has since produced or edited several hundred translated works and interpretations. He is best known in the West, however, for his popular writings on the philosopher Leo Strauss, in the early two-thousands, which sparked what the Chinese media dubbed “Strauss fever.” In the years following Deng Xiaoping’s turn toward a capitalist economy, some Chinese intellectuals felt a kind of spiritual malaise; Deng’s reforms had failed to provide moral direction for a vast and proud former empire. Liu began to understand China’s aimlessness in the language of Strauss, who famously argued that Western civilization had strayed from its ideals of “Jerusalem and Athens.” (“How could I be so close to this person?” Liu once wrote.) Liu proposed that the aim of Chinese intellectuals should be to “rebuild the spirit of Chinese traditional civilization,” by studying the ancient texts of the West. It was no accident, Liu wrote, that Western superpowers once schooled their future leaders in ancient Greek and Latin. China, Liu concluded, needed a classics department.
Until recently, Liu was a noisy member of the Chinese intelligentsia, with little influence in politics. But, with Xi Jinping’s endorsement of the classics, Liu’s Straussian ideas have percolated into the upper echelons of the Party. In 2024, three of Liu’s protégés entered a newly established classics research office at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think tank with close ties to policymakers, multiple Chinese classicists told me. They became integral players in the organization of the World Conference of Classics.
Yanxiao devoted himself to mastering the Confucian classics, and he eventually looked to study abroad, transferring, as a college junior, to Indiana University. There, Yanxiao began to realize how particular Liu’s approach to antiquity was. Classics historiography, which Yanxiao was learning at Indiana, makes you “function like a detective.” “You want to see how history is narrated, so you collect all kinds of evidence,” he told me. For Liu, by contrast, the study of the classics seemed almost subservient to a process of cultural empowerment. In a 2015 article, ten foreign-educated Chinese scholars were interviewed on how to institutionalize classics in China. Among the points they seemed to agree on was their wish to distance themselves from Liu’s approach. “Westerners do not speak of ‘usefulness,’ ” Zhang Wei, of Fudan University, said. In the fall of 2016, Yanxiao entered the Ph.D. program in ancient history at the University of Chicago. Soon after, classics became increasingly embroiled in America’s culture wars. White nationalists at Charlottesville marched hoisting Roman flags, and far-right internet personalities adopted Roman pseudonyms. A field beset by declining enrollments faced a reckoning over its role—complicity, even—in the ideologies of Western superiority that animated white supremacists. These tensions came to the fore in 2019, during an annual meeting, in San Diego, of the Society for Classical Studies. (It happened to be Yanxiao’s first time at the conference.) At a panel titled “The Future of Classics,” a Princeton historian of Rome named Dan-el Padilla Peralta presented data showcasing the underrepresentation of Black and minority authors in top classics journals. During the Q. & A., an independent scholar named Mary Frances Williams stood up to challenge the panelists. “Maybe we should start defending our discipline,” she said. The classics, after all, were the foundation of Western ideals like liberty, democracy, and freedom. Williams went on to say to Padilla Peralta, “You may have got your job because you’re Black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.” He replied that he wanted nothing to do with the vision of classics that Williams had outlined. “I hope the field dies,” he said. “And that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
For many classicists, the “incident,” as they now call it, made clear that a selective vision of the field had undermined the authority of scholars from marginal communities. “Our field was, like, What are we doing?” Christopher Waldo, an Asian American classicist at the University of Washington, recalled. “There’s not just one thing that Greco-Roman antiquity signifies.” That year, Waldo created the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, which promotes the study of how Asian and Asian American cultures have interpreted antiquity. Other affinity groups, including Trans in Classics and CripAntiquity, started congregating around the same time. Padilla Peralta described the aims of like-minded scholars as “de-centering Greece and Rome as the primary or main locus of intellectual innovation.”
For some Chinese scholars, who turned to the Greco-Roman classics for the perceived wisdom and cultural capital it conferred, the focus on marginalized voices in antiquity was grating. In 2021, an anonymous Chinese doctoral student in the United States published an article that circulated widely among Chinese classics students, bemoaning the “absurd reality of American academia.” The author blamed Padilla Peralta for stoking a culture of denunciations, using terms that evoked the Cultural Revolution. A commenter on the article made the link more succinctly: “Down with Confucius, burn the Pantheon—different formula, familiar flavor.”
Yanxiao told me that, in his first few years at the University of Chicago, he had not thought of himself as Asian. “I used to think we were all academics huddled in the ivory tower working toward one intellectual pursuit,” he told me. Yanxiao broke from that view in 2019, when he spent a year as an exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, he began reading academic work on K-pop. Scholars such as the ethnomusicologist Michael Fuhr saw K-pop as a reversal of long-standing narratives, especially in pop music, that accentuated the flow of culture from West to East. It was an alluring idea for Yanxiao, who was raised in an environment shaped by the reception, and rejection, of Western ideas. K-pop scholarship, Yanxiao said, “shocked him” into embracing his Asian identity.
In the enlarged vision of the classics slowly taking shape in the American academy, Yanxiao has found an intellectual foothold. He studies interactions between the eastern half of the Roman Empire and East Asia, and sheds light on how popular art forms were often misunderstood by their ancient critics. In the fall of 2024, he flew to Princeton, where he delivered a lecture on Roman pantomime, a dance form that once dominated theatres across the Mediterranean. Comparing élite Roman accounts that dismissed pantomime as a vulgar import from the East with the way K-pop had been received by some Anglophone critics, Yanxiao reframed pantomime as a transformative hybrid of “East” and “West”—between the Empire’s eastern provinces and Rome—rather than a corrupt derivative. Padilla Peralta, who attended the lecture, called the paper “spectacular.” Yanxiao had proved, Padilla Peralta told me, that people of diverse backgrounds, and the “interventions” they brought to the field, led to a “richening of the historical fabric, not to its impoverishment.”
When the pandemic broke out, in 2020, Yanxiao returned to China to write his dissertation. He hardly recognized the country. Electronic payment methods had become almost universal. Futuristic cafés and boba parlors dotted major cities. The progress didn’t seem to extend to the academy, however. In the fall of 2023, Yanxiao joined Tsinghua University, where his research confused professors who were accustomed to more conventional disciplinary lines. “People at Tsinghua wondered whether my interest in K-pop was a sign that I was intellectually unserious,” Yanxiao told me.
Yanxiao worked to bridge China’s more conservative academy with the post-classicist current in the West. After the Society for Classical Studies published a special issue on race and racism following George Floyd’s murder, he conducted an interview with one of the issue’s editors for the Shanghai Review of Books. In 2020, the University of California, Berkeley, renamed its classics department “Ancient Greek and Roman Studies.” Yanxiao interviewed the Berkeley professor James Porter about the reasons behind the change. Porter, who, with Tim Whitmarsh, was a member of the Postclassicisms Collective, suggested to Yanxiao that, as Chinese scholars develop their own classics field, they need not repeat the West’s problems. They could start with “post-classicism” and “work backwards,” he said.
In the Western academy, the study of antiquity has moved toward a more fractious, intercultural vision of the past. Yanxiao feels that Chinese classics must make similar accommodations, incorporating different perspectives on culture and class, to remain globally relevant. Straussianism, Yanxiao feared, would “isolate Chinese classics” from his fellow-practitioners in the United States and Europe.
In this mission, Yanxiao has found allies, like Jinyu Liu, a professor of Roman history at Emory University, in Atlanta. Around 2014, Liu began bringing American classicists on lecture tours through Chinese universities. She hosts exchanges between Chinese and American classicists, and has created an online, peer-reviewed database with Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, that works on Chinese translations of Greek and Latin texts. “We’re revolutionizing the way Chinese learn Greek and Latin,” Liu said. In 2017, Martin Kern, the Princeton professor, co-founded the International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures, at Renmin University, with an early China scholar named Xu Jianwei. They invite scholars of various antiquities—Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Israel, India, Japan, Egypt, and the Arab world—to present findings in their respective fields. “You realize many of the problems you encounter also exist in other classical traditions,” Xu told me. During one session in August, 2024, Xu discussed a theory as to why educators in ancient China preferred oral recitation as a way to teach: winters in the north were so frigid that basic tools like ink and brushes would freeze. Xu recalled the excitement of some of his interlocutors, including the Western classicist Glenn Most. “He said ‘I never thought of that!’ ” Xu told me with a smile. Questions about the weather’s impact on philological practice, Most thought, could be asked of ancient Greece as well.
Yanxiao had mixed feelings about the World Conference of Classics. A part of him felt immense pride when Xi Jinping’s letter was being read out. “This really niche thing I’ve been pursuing since high school got such mainstream attention,” Yanxiao told me. “So many foreign scholars realized that China was investing heavily in classics—something they couldn’t imagine in their own countries.” To be a classicist in Xi’s China was to operate with a halo usually reserved for scientists and engineers. For Yanxiao and other classics scholars, this will translate into more job openings, conferences, and opportunities to publish and lecture. But everything he had learned in America made him chafe at the conference’s emphasis on timeless wisdom. As Whitmarsh put it in the Times Literary Supplement last January, in an article recounting his experience at the conference, “We were enjoined to celebrate diversity and respect between nations—or at least two of them—but not within them.”
Last year, I accompanied Yanxiao to the annual Society for Classical Studies conference, held at a Marriott in downtown Philadelphia. Paper titles included “Queer Spaces in Pompeii?,” “Ecofeminist Narratives in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” and “Ocean Vuong, Allusion, and the Limits of Interpretation.” Defenders of the new classics—with its incorporation of race, gender, pop culture, and comparative frameworks—see it as a more faithful representation of antiquity itself. “When you study the classics,” Whitmarsh told me, coherence is an illusion. “It’s more like a disorganized mash that we try to piece together.”
Yanxiao had prepared a talk on the Xiongnu Empire, a formidable power that occupied some lands north of Han Dynasty China. As he stepped up to the lectern, the monitors flashed an image of the first slide: it was a scene from the movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” Yanxiao began to recount the story of Eleanor Young, played by the actress Michelle Yeoh, who arrives at a grand London hotel with her family in the nineteen-nineties. She is turned away by the hotel staff, who, unaware that she is the new owner, claim they are “fully booked” and suggest she try “Chinatown.” On the next slide, Yanxiao shared a list of rejections he’d received from classics journals, along with the reviewer’s comments. “If I have Chinese material or say something about my ethnicity, the reviewers suggest that the research should belong in Sinology journals,” he said. “That’s what I call Chinatown Classics.”
Returning to the core of his talk, Yanxiao likened the Xiongnu’s impact on the West to that of the Mongols, who, a millennium later, would alter the cultural topology of Eurasia. To grasp this piece of Roman history, Yanxiao argued, one had to study the Xiongnu—and to understand the Xiongnu, one had to read Chinese.
On the last day of the conference, I had coffee with Yanxiao at the Marriott lobby. The conversation turned to the future, and I asked him which country he saw himself settling in. Applying for jobs in China was difficult, Yanxiao told me, because his research still bewilders some scholars, who thought he’d been “brainwashed by American gender-and-identity politics.” Still, he had come to appreciate the convenience and comfort of life in China—its high-speed rail, e-payments, and ultra-fast delivery systems.
Outside the hotel, the snow had turned into sleet. Yanxiao had just returned from a stroll through the Philly streets, where the cityscape made him feel alienated, he told me. The typical American city was not as comforting to him as a typical Chinese one. At the Marriott, though, a sunny, more sociable side of Yanxiao seemed to come out. Friends waved him over, and younger Chinese scholars sought his attention. Among classicists, Yanxiao told me, he “felt totally at home.” ♦