Date:28Apr 2022
Principles and Laws in World Politics: Classical Chinese Perspectives on Global Conflict (World Scientific Publishing 2021)
with the author – Walter Lee
28 APR 2022 (THUR) 21:00–22:15 (HK TIME)
Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, global conflicts have been satisfactorily resolved neither by communism nor liberalism. Military intervention, however justified, has destabilised many societies, leaving justice undone. This book invites debates on the post-liberal imagination of “emancipated Leviathan”: an almighty political authority which exercises awe and force to restore order, as well as enshrines globally-negotiated values of common conscience and reinvented cosmopolitanism. Human well-being will truly become reality when we synergise pre-modern and pre-liberal ways of thinking, worldviews, ethics, and aesthetic styles by means of cross-civilisational, cross-disciplinary fundamental research, and let an emancipated Leviathan exercises principles and laws of virtue derived from the study. The starting point of such intellectual innovation is China. This book explores the application of classical Chinese resources to the innovation of thoughts in contemporary Chinese international relations (IR). It examines whether “Knowledge Archaeology of Chinese International Relations” (KACIR), coined by the author, responds sensibly to today’s issues of international ethics and global justice. The book contends that emancipative hermeneutics holds the key to the Chinese soft power puzzle. A bottom-up, non-nationalistic, and non-ethnocentric approach to the Chinese civilisation will reinvent intellectual pluralism and cosmopolitan elements in the Chinese tradition that interact constructively with and ultimately transcend the liberal Western model.
AUTHOR: Walter Lee, Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University
DISCUSSANT: Daniel A Bell, Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University (Qingdao)
CHAIR: Zhu Han, Research Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
This webinar is organized by the Centre for Comparative and Public Law, HKU and was held via Zoom Meeting.
