“China and the World: Historical Interactions” Talk Series 04: The Religious Origins of the New Cold War Discourse

The competition between China and the U.S. occupies the daily news. At the risk of a Thucydides Trap, some have asserted that we have entered into a new Cold War. In this lecture, I trace this discourse as a permutation of evolutionary and incompatible views of China. The evolutionary view harbors an optimism that China will inevitably be more like the West—liberal and democratic—once Chinese citizens become middle class. The incompatible view coaches the tension in increasingly religious terms: the antagonism between atheist and authoritarian China versus Christian and democratic America. These views originated in three Western imageries of China (as Idealized Panacea in Leibniz, Bygone Same in Hegel, and Incompatible Other in Huntington) sustained by the problematic treatment of Chinese religions. To disabuse us of the thesis of inevitable clash requires us to diagnose the religious underpinnings of the new Cold War discourse.