Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism

This book in an entirely new field provides a provocative look at Chinese politics and ideology through contemporary Chinese readings of ancient Greek classical texts. At the same time, it restores value to the much-maligned "dead white men" of Western antiquity by showing, paradoxically enough, how much they matter to another culture.
In chapters that discuss Plato, Aristotle, the Jesuits, Confucius, and even Xi Jinping, Bartsch analyzes the dramatic shift in Chinese interpretations of the Western classics before and after Tiananmen Square. Concepts familiar to the Western philosophical and political tradition—such as rationality, citizenship, and democracy—are emptied of their original meaning, appropriated, or turned on their heads in nationalist readings of the great Greek thinkers.
Plato Goes to China shows how Chinese intellectuals have recast the Greek classics to support the country's political agenda, diagnose the perceived failings of the West, and assert the superiority of China's own Confucian tradition.