China and the West

Reise von Jürgen Habermas vom 15.-29 April 2001 in China.
During his visit, he delivered seven lectures at universities and research institutes in Beijing and Shanghai. Their topics range from human rights, practical rationaliy, models of democracy, and globalization. In addition, he also participated at several symposia with Chinese intellectuals.

Gloria Davies : When Jürgen Habermas visited China in 2001, he entered a highly contentious intellectual environment. Habermas became, as it were, a key witness who could be used to attest to the veracity of different claims issued in his name by various Chinese intellectuals. This is strikingly illustrated by the care which which Xu Xouyu, Cao Weidong and others noted the times and venues of events at which they allegedly heard Habermas make particular statements. Their contending claims over what Habermas said or what he stood for, based on the supposed veracity of transcripts of personal conversations or group discussions they had with Habermas, bear little resemblance to scholarly communication. Rather, these publicized disagreements carry distinct traces of the discredited Maoist discours in which political accusations and insinuations were once conducted with deadly seriousness, enlisting verbatim quotations or reported statements as 'evidence' of an individual's innocence or guilt. In the numerous Sinophone accounts of Habermas's visit to China, emphasis is given to Habermas's view of human rights as an ongoing negotiation of individual and collective rights. Yet, ironically, in their supposed common valorization of Habermas's communicative rationality, some intellectuals have clearly attacked each other in highly personal terms.