How China Learned to Love the Classics

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 2src24, 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 2src15 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 2src16, 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 2src19, 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 2src21, 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 2src19, 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.