Early China Series: Conceptualizing Crisis

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In-Person

Date: March13,2026

Location: Columbia University, New York, United States

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“Conceptualizing Crisis in Early China” Crisis is often spoken of as if its meaning were self-evident, yet what counts as a crisis and what counts as a response has never been singular. In early China, transmitted texts and recovered manuscripts reveal a striking variety of vocabularies for disruption, vocabularies that resist neat translation into modern categories. From the mythic story of Great Yu’s flood control, remembered as the archetype of ecological calamity, to bamboo slips that imagined disorder through illness and culinary balance, and finally to the Lüshi Chunqiu’s vision of the body politic as an organic system, these sources display a diversity of perspectives that together trace a distinctive trajectory of crisis-thinking. They suggest that crisis was never a single rupture to be overcome, but a recurring condition demanding unceasing vigilance and sustained attention.

Participants & Organizers

Tang Center for Early China(Host, Organizer)

<a href="https://tangcenter-columbia.org/" class="small text-muted">https://tangcenter-columbia.org/</a>

The Tang Center for Early China is dedicated to the advancement of the understanding of the richness and importance of early Chinese civilization as a part of a broader common human heritage. It is committed to doing so through both solid scholarship and broad public outreach. The Tang Center is interested in supporting the study of newly discovered paleographic and textual material as well as artifacts. The Tang Center is especially interested in promoting the role of archaeology as a path to understand the past and it offers a critical window for introducing new archaeological discoveries in China to Western audiences.