To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Meyer on His New Popular History of the Warring States
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from my uh nearly empty, soon-to-be-on the market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at cinecapodcast.com. I know there are a ton of Substacks out there, and they start to add up because there's so many good ones, but I think this one delivers serious value and I do need your help to keep doing this work. So please subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations. A confession to begin with. I'm recording this just a few hours after President Trump touched down in Beijing to kick off a summit meeting with President Xi Jinping, but I am not talking at all about that today.
In fact, the book that I want to talk about is set in a period that ended in 221 BCE, a comfortable 2,247 years before our usual cynical fair. So before I introduce my guest, let me try to justify what, at first glance, looks like a a violent break with format here. So anyone who thinks and writes about a society faces a question that is really rarely posed, but is always there present in the background. How far back do you really need to go?
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