About this Event
The language of ‘civilisation’ has returned to the centre of global politics. Despite its centrality to contemporary projects of nationalism, racism, and the far right, civilisation remains relatively understudied in racism research as a proxy category that operates in ways related to, but also different from, other categories like culture. Focusing on the case of Chinese civilisationism and its discontent, this talk suggests that civilisational discourse produces different technologies and logics of governing racialised difference in different political contexts. Whereas in some context ‘civilisation’ functions as a transnational code for ethno-religious purity and exclusion, in other cases the language is tasked with a different kind of political work – one of symbolic diversity and hierarchical inclusion – in service of ethno-territorial consolidation. By reading state-aligned intellectual discourse on civilisation, I show how a historically continuous and culturally absorptive Chinese civilisation is constituted as a pre-political foundation for contemporary ethno-territorial order, rendering assimilation and unequal incorporation necessary for the preservation of civilisational unity. This project frames questions of minority self-governance as both a geopolitical threat of foreign interference and an epistemic problem of building ‘autonomous knowledge system’ and indigenous theories, thereby appropriating decolonial discourse to legitimate ongoing violence. However, Han ethnonationalist currents periodically resurface online, challenging the official multiethnic conception of the Chinese minzu/wenming. Rather than understanding Han ethnonationalism in digital culture as the opposite of state-sponsored civilisational nationalism, I argue that these excesses reveal and grow out of the tensions already embedded within it.
Bio: Chenchen Zhang is Associate Professor in International Relations at Durham University. Chenchen’s book , was published by Oxford University Press in June 2026. The book examines how ideas of ‘the West’ and articulations of China-West difference are produced and mobilized in contemporary China, with a focus on reactionary political discourse in Chinese cyberspace. Chenchen situates the Chinese case study within a wider critique of the global far right and postcolonial nationalisms.
Event venue & nearby stays
IAS Common Ground, G11, South Wing, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
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