The New Yorker:

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

By Chang Che

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 palatial Yanqi Lake international convention center. The venue, reportedly part of an almost six-billion-dollar construction project, had previously hosted the apec summit. Whitmarsh was ushered into a side room with distinguished guests, among them Lina Mendoni, the Greek minister of culture. The presiding politician was one of Xi Jinping’s closest confidants: China’s propaganda chief, Li Shulei. Li shook hands with Whitmarsh and exchanged platitudes with the other guests. It wasn’t until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he’d signed up for: “a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,” as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China’s ministries of culture.

Inside a conference hall roughly the size of a football field sat hundreds of people—ambassadors, politicians, and scholars. At the podium, Li read out a letter from Xi, which described ancient Greece and China as two civilizations that have shaped humanity’s development from opposite sides of Eurasia. Xi went on to encourage their cultural exchange and announced the establishment of a Chinese School of Classical Studies in Athens.

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