This year’s Reith Lectures are entitled Chinese Vistas which evokes the importance of history and culture. China now has a major and growing stake in the world and Professor Spence is adamant that in order to understand China’s current role we need a rich and nuanced history. And who better to do that than the intellectual who has published more than a dozen books on a wide range of themes in Chinese history, Professor Spence?

It is quite hard to summarise such a diverse and rich series of lectures. One of the over-riding things we took away was a sense of China’s internationalism. Through time China has engaged with other societies in ways that transform both China and those societies it touches. We see this today with the Confucian Institutes in Lecture 1, the long and not always peaceful connections with Britain and the USA in Lectures 2 and 3 respectively, and the ways in which people’s bodies became political symbols in China’s rivalry with other superpowers in Lecture 4. It is important for all of us to see these multiple contacts as enriching for all and that conflict need not always be negative given that in the long term it may bring good.

We also found politics to be a key theme. This was sometimes the ‘big’ politics of international conflict through the Opium Wars and the cold war, right up to the controversy over China’s human rights record and the Olympics. At other times it was the national politics of China’s own integration, most notably the Communists’ attempts to literally engender a ‘body politic’ through discipline and exercise. Also how the Chinese state sought to suppress Confucianism, but it is now being revived as an indigenous philosophy worthy of a resurgent nationalism. But politics also runs through in more subtle ways around the shared identities of Chinese in the diaspora and those from ‘home’. Or the ways in which language becomes a site of conflict and harmony.

Content last updated: 27/05/2008