The civilization of China’s pre-Qin era resembled that of Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire: both were characterized by a landscape of numerous autonomous political entities coexisting and competing with each other. In the 19th century, European theorists argued extensively that this tradition of multipolarity and competition was the very reason why Europe achieved global predominance. By contrast, China’s post-Qin political tradition of ‘grand unification’ was deemed the root cause of the ‘stagnation’ of Chinese civilization. The mutual destruction wrought by European powers in the two World Wars dealt a heavy blow to this narrative, yet it did not uproot it. As humanity enters the AI era, to what extent will the divergent order-building principles of these two civilizations shape their respective trajectories in the future?
Zhang Yongle teaches at the School of Law, Peking University, where he also serves as deputy director of the Institute of Area Studies and director of the Institute of National Legal Strategy. He received a bachelor’s degree in law from Peking University in 2002 and a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA in 2008. As a highly interdisciplinary scholar, his research fields include Chinese constitutional and political history, diplomatic history and history of international law, political philosophy, and Graeco-Roman historiography. He is the author of Shifting Boundaries: A Global History of the Monroe Doctrine (Brill, 2025) and six monographs published in Chinese, and co-editor of The Constitution of Ancient China (Princeton, 2018). He was a visiting fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Institut d'études avancées de Nantes.
Ivan Krastev is the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the IWM and chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia. He will modeate this event.
