The Chinese New Leviathan: Cultural Subjectivity and Statecraft Today

The 2026 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference
March 20–21, 2026
New York City

Co-sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY

Conference Registration

Registration for the conference is now open. Click here to register!

Keynote Speaker: Wang Hui (汪晖)

Renowned as a critical theorist and one of China’s leading intellectual historians, Wang Hui (Tsinghua University) will speak on the nexus of state, nation, and empire in modern Chinese history, and its implications for our understanding of modernity as such.

Conference Program (PDF)

Conference Description

Following the fruitful discussion that took place during our “China Keywords” conference in March 2025, our 2026 annual conference will focus on “The Chinese New Leviathan: Cultural Subjectivity and Statecraft Today.” The conference is part of TPPI’s five-year China Initiative, which aims to foster a critical and mutually regarding discussion of social and political theory between China and the West, well beyond the circles of China specialists. This outreach effort across political boundaries continues a tradition established by the journal Telos, which played a pivotal role in fostering a reciprocal encounter between intellectuals in the Anglosphere and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Essays from the “China Keywords” conference will appear in two special issues of the journal, beginning with Telos 213 (Winter 2025).

As one of the most potent and complex keywords in modern China, nationalism demands our rigorous theoretical engagement. It functions as a source of state legitimacy, a tool of social mobilization, and a site of intense public debate. From official state proclamations of rejuvenation to the pulse of online crowds, nationalism flows through China’s internal politics and its global stance. Its conceptualization has provided the intellectual context for the development of modern Chinese power, and it therefore needs to be understood both on endogenous terms and from a global philosophical perspective.

At our 2026 annual conference, presenters will move beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the multifaceted nature of Chinese nationalism, placing Chinese political thought in dialogue with Western critical theory and exploring points of convergence, divergence, and mutual illumination. Our original call for papers placed the possibility of such dialogue in the context of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan (1942) and Huimin Jin’s discussion of the ontology of self and subject in Telos 213 (Winter 2025). While some speakers and participants will be China specialists, we also warmly encourage non-specialists to join our conversation, and we welcome views from every political and ideological perspective. Indeed, the clash of radically divergent, often unconventional ideas is one of the hallmarks of our conferences.

Conference Location

The conference will be held at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at 25 West 43rd St., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036. The Calandra Institute is located in midtown Manhattan and is close to major subways stops. It is three blocks from Grand Central Station, two blocks from the Bryant Park subway stop, and three blocks from the Seventh Avenue/42nd Street subway stops. For more information about the Calandra Institute, visit their website at calandrainstitute.org.

Telos Insights on Substack

We invite you to join the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute as we migrate all our content—text, video, and audio—to Telos Insights on Substack, a premiere platform for serious readers. In the future, Telos Insights will be the primary way to access our work.

Signing up for a Substack account is easy. You can do so here. If you enjoy reading on your tablet or phone, you can also download the Substack app, which works well and looks great. Once you sign up for Substack and subscribe to Telos Insights, you can adjust your settings to be alerted regularly to new TPPI posts, as well as opt in to alerts from the many other excellent organizations and individual writers sharing content on the platform. Please note that during the first weeks after you follow us on Substack, as a courtesy you will receive notices about our new content from both Substack and Telos Press, but in time notifications will come through Substack alone.

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You can join Substack here; the page for Telos Insights is here; you can become a member of TPPI here; and you can subscribe to Telos Insights directly here. We hope that you will follow our efforts and join our conversations.

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