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How China Learned to Love the Classics | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 3,751 words · saved by 1 readers

The Chinese Communist Party has embraced the study of Greek and Latin—as, in some ways, an antidote to the modern West.

In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was “the strangest and most momentous” event of his academic career. By eight o’clock the next morning, Whitmarsh was north of Beijing at the…

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