Shadi Bartsch: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Right now, there are no top Chinese economists in China who are recognized as top economists by the rest of the world. How far off is the year where you think a significant portion of top classics scholars will be Chinese working in China? Is that right around the corner, or is that decades away? It’s already happening. There are a lot of good Chinese classicists who work and teach in China. They are separate from this group I’m talking about. There’s a group of intellectuals who are more public-facing. They even publish in Chinese newspapers, like the Peking Daily News, about things like Plato or Aristotle. They are mostly interested in having a conversation with the government and with the people of China, and with saying things that will show both that they are educated and that they’re able to read Western texts in a way that makes sense for the Chinese beliefs around the world. Then, there are a group of dedicated classicists who are mostly classics professors in universities, and there’s a little bit of overlap between these groups. The second group is a number of serious classics professors who read the language as well, who are publishing articles that are read in the US. I think this field will continue to grow as curiosity about the past of the West grows. I don’t know if the divide between the “let’s read classics to bolster our sense of Chinese identity” versus the “let’s read classics to understand classics” groups — I don’t know if that divide is going to grow, disappear, or stay the way it is now. Now, we close with a few questions about you. You were a kind of classics prodigy. Your undergraduate thesis was published as a well-reviewed academic book. How did you manage that?…

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