“It’s a generational shift,” said T.H. Jiang, a philosophy lecturer in an elite U.S. university and a former humanities student at Peking University in the early 2000s. “Now, Chinese students are studying Medieval theology, the ancient Middle East, and ancient Near Eastern studies,” he told me. Jiang believed part of the intellectual curiosity came from a renewed confidence. “[Chinese students] started to think, ‘Oh, those other cultures are accessible to us. And because China is also a great civilization, why don’t we study other civilizations too?’”
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