Jul 30, 2026 · 1 hr 54 min · 12 segments
At King's College Cambridge, Patrick Zhong sits down with Professor Alan Macfarlane, one of the world's leading anthropologists, for a conversation spanning eight thousand years of Chinese…
Alan MacfarlaneGuest
Patrick ZhongHost
and also the physical world, the city landscapes, the animals that you're encountering and so on.
Basically, you can see it if you point a camera at something, like music and food and drink and so on.
then you get deeper to philosophies and religion, which is in many ways the most interesting part of it, how people think.
When I was talking about the things that the West really needs to know about China, I point out that you have to realize that logic in the West is different from logic in China.
And China thinks in yin-yang circular and both-hand methods, and you have to understand that.
the major political system the West is based on confrontational small nation states and our history for the last 2000 years has been either of an empire like Rome sweeping across or breaking into bits during the feudal period and so you had these warring states as it were we've lived in a warring states period for a long longer than China even.
And so our system was based on battle, on fighting, on confrontation, on if you were more powerful you took the other country and you later on took the other parts of the world in our imperial system.
It starts in the Yellow River with the Han as a rice-growing, plant-growing, quite peaceful sort of peasants.
And they spread not by force of arms, but by intermarriages, by population, by success in farming and so on.
And so you can sort of see a map of China moving from there through the Yangtze and then all over China and then becoming unified.
So that if you look to see, apart from the Qing dynasty's expansion to the West, China has not won its territories by force of arms.
Our streets are violent, America's particularly violent, guns and so on and so forth.
and also the physical world, the city landscapes, the animals that you're encountering and so on.
Basically, you can see it if you point a camera at something, like music and food and drink and so on.
then you get deeper to philosophies and religion, which is in many ways the most interesting part of it, how people think.
When I was talking about the things that the West really needs to know about China, I point out that you have to realize that logic in the West is different from logic in China.
And China thinks in yin-yang circular and both-hand methods, and you have to understand that.
the major political system the West is based on confrontational small nation states and our history for the last 2000 years has been either of an empire like Rome sweeping across or breaking into bits during the feudal period and so you had these warring states as it were we've lived in a warring states period for a long longer than China even.
And so our system was based on battle, on fighting, on confrontation, on if you were more powerful you took the other country and you later on took the other parts of the world in our imperial system.
It starts in the Yellow River with the Han as a rice-growing, plant-growing, quite peaceful sort of peasants.
And they spread not by force of arms, but by intermarriages, by population, by success in farming and so on.
And so you can sort of see a map of China moving from there through the Yangtze and then all over China and then becoming unified.
So that if you look to see, apart from the Qing dynasty's expansion to the West, China has not won its territories by force of arms.
Our streets are violent, America's particularly violent, guns and so on and so forth.
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