New Lecture Series Plants Seeds of Enlightenment

Mar 22-2023   

On March 16, ‘PKU Chengze – NIO seeds Lecture Hall’ held its first event, in which Prof. Yao Yang gave a lecture on the Chinese economy amid the shifting global situations. The Lecture Hall is jointly hosted by the NSD and the public welfare division of NIO, a leading new energy automaker.

Prof. Yao said that the Lecture Hall aims to share PKU’s abundant resources in humanities and social sciences with the public. As a top think-tank, the NSD has the intrinsic responsibility to promote public discussions and enlightenment. Through the Lecture Hall, a series of lectures will be delivered by PKU professors and renowned scholars to unlock beneficial perspectives on history, sociology, philosophy and other fields.

In his lecture, Prof. Yao, who is Dean of the NSD, Dean of BiMBA Business School, Executive Dean of Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, and Director of China Center for Economic Research (CCER), shed light on how to understand China’s rise, how to deal with the US’s anxiety, whether the world is decoupling from China, and how to gauge the growth potential of the Chinese economy.

Through its practices, China has proved that other proper and rational state governance models viably exist in parallel to liberal democracy, said Prof. Yao. The stress faced by the US stems from the country’s domestic issues and conflicts as well as the severe challenges for it to hold firm to global hegemony. The US and even the whole world are confronted with the choices of whether to launch a new Cold War or build a new world order in which countries of divergent political systems can co-exist peacefully, he said.