Abstract
This is the question that will be the subject of my new lecture at the Collège de France. It has been prompted by the year 2020, so unexpected and unprecedented in the history of our world, which in the space of a few weeks has found itself plunged into a generalized health and - hence - economic crisis, enough to overturn and radically question our idea of civilization, i.e. that which is specific to our modern world, driven by capitalist-type economic models and by so-called "advanced" industrialization and technologies. Civilization (rarely has the word been so overused as it is today) is supposed to characterize a world of which the world's major powers see themselves as full-fledged constituents, in more or less explicit opposition to the "savagery" or "barbarism" of the "others".
In this picture, it seems self-evident that China is an integral part of civilization, all the more so as it projects itself as a great civilization, or even as one of the few in the history of mankind to have "endured continuously for five thousand years" (at least, that's the vulgate we find everywhere in the media). As a result, neither the "Chinese civilization" nor the "Chinese civilization" itself has ever been examined in the same way as the "Indian civilization", i.e. as a myth. The parallel with India is once again illuminating, in that the two "giants of Asia", as we like to call them, are regarded as multi-millennia-old civilizations as much as modern states, which compare favorably with the much more recent civilizations of Europe and , a fortiori, North America. However, the pandemic that has spread around the world this year from the heart of the aptly named "Middle Country", and the reactions it has provoked in its leaders and those of other major powers, should lead us to question the meaning of the notion of "civilization" as applied to our modern world, and in particular the durability and nature of the unique civilization that China alone is supposed to constitute.
