Plato Goes to China

The surprising story of how Greek classics are being pressed into use in contemporary China to support the regime's political agenda
As improbable as it may sound, an illuminating way to understand today's China and how it views the West is to look at the astonishing ways Chinese intellectuals are interpreting—or is it misinterpreting?—the Greek classics. In Plato Goes to China, Shadi Bartsch offers a provocative look at Chinese politics and ideology by exploring Chinese readings of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and other ancient writers. She shows how Chinese thinkers have dramatically recast the Greek classics to support China's political agenda, diagnose the ills of the West, and assert the superiority of China's own Confucian classical tradition.
In a lively account that ranges from the Jesuits to Xi Jinping, Bartsch traces how the fortunes of the Greek classics have changed in China since the seventeenth century. Before the Tiananmen Square…