Early China Series: Conceptualizing Crisis in Early China
From The Observatory
Date
March 13, 2026
Location
Faculty House, Columbia University
Area
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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.Key Speaker: Shirley Chan
Participants
Tang Canter for Early China
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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.
