China Seminar | 19 August 1999

The Chinese Millennium

Daniel W. Y. Kwok

At the last meeting of the seminar, it was announced that the first five meetings of the 25th year of the China Seminar will be spent probing the Chinese millennium with Professor Daniel Kwok doing the presentation and offering, in essence, a short course on Chinese history of the last one thousand years.

A thousand years ago, China’s Song dynasty began a reordering of the various elements of the cultural process which produced one of the most dazzling and successful civilizations in world history. Yet, at the end of this millennium, most commentators ask the question of “What went wrong?” Herein lies the reason for our exercise.