bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

sponsorType

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

quizIds

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

paywallTypes

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Alex Lo

I felt like the farcical weapons specialist Q, in Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s famous James Bond spoof From Beijing with Love, after a reader wrote to me recently. In the scene, Q and Chow’s 007 haven’t met in a long time.
007: What have you been doing?
Q: Conducting cutting-edge research at a psychiatric institution.
007: What kind of research?
Q: Can’t say. I was being experimented on.
When friendly reader Peter Lee told me his son Trevor, who is pursuing a PhD in classics in the United States, presented a paper at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in which my columns were heavily referenced, I was flattered – until I read his paper. I wasn’t so much studied as being rounded on!
I deserve it. I do sometimes make references to Chinese and Western classics, just to show off. But at heart, I am a philistine, not a scholar, and hardly worth the time of day for a professional classicist.
“In these articles, Lo has turned the Western classics against their supposed inheritors in America and the United Kingdom,” Trevor wrote. “To maintain its own cultural integrity, China, Hong Kong included, needs to do the opposite by preserving the canon of both the Western and Chinese classics.”
It’s true I think people should study the classics, whether from East or West, at some point, though I hardly think that’s a controversial position, except apparently in many leading Western universities in which the classics are considered the intellectual version of Western imperialism.
Trevor references a book by respected classicist Shadi Bartsch with an intriguing title, Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism.
I have just finished reading it, and realise why Trevor was interested in me. On a much smaller scale, he was doing to me with my “obviously unsophisticated interpretations of the Western classics” – what did you expect, Trevor, from an old hack like me? – what Bartsch was doing to an entire army of mainland public intellectuals who have, she argues, weaponised their studies of the Western classics, mostly the Greek philosophers and historians, against the contemporary West and its decadence.
Boy, those two have got our numbers!
Bartsch makes a number of observations that are perhaps relevant to a non-Chinese audience, though they may be well known or even obvious to many Chinese-language readers.
After all, we are talking about an extremely niche subject: the changing ways, over a century and a half, in which Chinese intellectuals appropriated and lionised, and then criticised and weaponised, the Western classics in defining their own stances with the West.
There are sinologists and classicists, but their paths rarely ever meet as they do in Bartsch’s book. From the reformers in the last years of the Qing dynasty and the May Fourth Movement down to Mao Zedong, Confucianism and the Chinese classics were rejected. Western ideas, from the Greek classics to Marxism, were borrowed as guiding light. But after the Tiananmen crackdown, many intellectuals – and the communist state – returned to the Chinese classics and re-embraced Confucianism, whatever the ism now means.
They have also reappropriated the Western classics, this time not to learn from them, but to use them for ideological purposes, chiefly to attack the West and the values and ideals, especially democracy, they espouse.
Most of us who have lived and worked in Hong Kong and the mainland know about these literary-ideological movements, but they are probably little known outside China.
Of particular interest is that the Chinese have had their version of “the Thucydides trap” long before Graham Allison, namely, the decline and fall of ancient Athens as a democracy had as much to do with its hubris and overreach as the war with Sparta. That’s a pretty pertinent warning to the fate of American democracy today.
But, as Bartsch says, if we can all have “fun and games” with the classics and make them relevant, that’s the most important thing.


Trump’s ‘anxious’ tariff comments put China in control, analysts say

‘Disgrace’: Beijing’s top office overseeing Hong Kong slams US tariffs, sanctions

First 100 days of Trump’s second term as US president

Trade war could upend Chinese firms’ US gas contracts, plans: S&P Global

US-China relations

How Western classics are now weaponised against the West

Students gather outside the library building in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Photo: Shutterstock

Is the ‘China threat’ the last thing keeping Trump’s US and the rest of the West together?

Illustration: Pearl Law

Kaja Kallas (left) and the G7 foreign ministers pose for a photo on the second day of a Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting on March 13 in Canada. Photo: Kyodo

China risks US reaction by intervening in Panama Canal ports sale, former senior diplomat says

Daniel Kritenbrink, former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Photo: Nathan Tsui

US Air Force nominee wants total drones approach to counter mainland China

US Air Force secretary nominee Troy Meink appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington. Handout

Trump’s defence chief says US, Manila must stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ to deter China threat

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr (left) with US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in Manila on Friday. Photo: AFP

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth (left) and Philippine Army Chief of Staff Romeo Brawner Jnr inspect honour guards during their arrival at Camp Aguinaldo, in Manila, Philippines on March 28. Photo: Reuters

Philippines Defence Minister Gilberto Teodoro Jnr. Photo: Reuters

US-China war ‘inevitable’? Why it’s time to set Thucydides aside and talk about Pericles

Pericles’ fortifications played a decisive role in Athens’ downfall. Photo: AFP

Opinion

Since the Tiananmen crackdown, a generation of mainland public intellectuals and scholars have turned classical study on its head


Since the Tiananmen crackdown, a generation of mainland public intellectuals and scholars have turned classical study on its head.


My Take

China

United States

Greece

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

My Take | How Western classics are now weaponised against the West

Since the Tiananmen crackdown, a generation of mainland public intellectuals and scholars have turned classical study on its head