Lecture:  

MISFRAMING/MISPLACING IN THE SINO-WESTERN CIVILIZATIONAL DISCOURSE --WTO NEGOTIATIONS AND BEYOND

中西思想交流中的“问题误置”：从世贸谈判说起

Speaker:  Prof. Qin Hui (秦晖), Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Professor Emeritus at Tsinghua University, Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong 

Time:  March 19, 12:00-2:30 pm, Tuesday

Place:  Skylight room, 9th Floor, Graduate Center-CUNY, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016 (Diagonally opposite to the Empire State Building, 帝国大厦东北对面，第五大道/34街交汇处，9楼Skylight 会议厅 )

Lecture Language:  Chinese, with English translation

Contact:   Prof. Ming Xia, GC-CUNY (MXia@gc.cuny.edu); Mr. David Wei Rong, Bouden House (Dvdrong@gmail.com)

Sponsored by the Doctoral Faculty of Political Science, GC-CUNY
Co-sponsored by: Bouden House (New York-based Publisher: www.boudenhouse.com), The China Truth Institute

about  Qin Hui 

Qin Hui (b. 1953) is a leading historian and public intellectual in China, having spent much of his career at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing.  His early academic focus was on rural history and the peasantry, but over the past two decades, he has published widely on any number of topics relating to themes of social justice, traditional Chinese culture, globalization, and much more.  He writes as a fiercely independent liberal, with a mordant wit seldom appreciated by Chinese officialdom.  His 2015 book, Leaving Imperial Rule Behind (《走出帝制》), which recounts the failure of China’s first experiment in constitutional rule, was banned by authorities weeks prior to its formal publication date (volumes were already on the shelves).  In recent years, as Xi Jinping has sought to reimpose discipline on academic intellectual life, many China-related topics that had once been hotly debated have become taboo, and Qin has focused on the world outside of China, in part to avoid criticism and to be able to continue to publish.  As an intellectual, Qin Hui is something of a contrarian, frequently arguing that the categories and labels we employ to understand the world are misleading if not completely wrong.  In his view, for example, the philosophy of the Chinese imperial state was not Confucianism, but a combination of Legalism and Daoism; Confucianism was mere camouflage.  Elsewhere, he argues that the heritage of Cold War politics has completely obscured the true history of socialism, confusing it with communism (which Qin identifies with various forms of historical tyranny). 		--From David Ownby, Professor of History at the University of Montreal 