Berggruen Institute China 2024 Annual Report
2024 saw the introduction of the Berggruen Essay Prize, designed to inspire young thinkers and foster innovative thinking. Inviting submissions in both Chinese and English, the inaugural competition, themed The Planetary, aimed to generate new ideas to frame global polycrises and inspire innovative solutions.
The establishment of the Berggruen Institute Europe has expanded the Institute’s global presence, and 2024 saw collaborations being enhanced across the three regions. We continued to partner with the Antikythera team from the Los Angeles Center to organize interdisciplinary workshops in Shanghai and Beijing, exploring planetary computation and future scenarios. We also worked with the Europe Center on their “Global Thinkers in Residence Program,” which welcomes non-Western intellectuals to Europe for deep exchanges with European thinkers on matters of global significance. The inaugural resident of this program was Professor WANG Hui from Tsinghua University.
The Institute’s promotion of planetary thinking over recent years culminated in the first Planetary Summit, convened in Venice in November. The China Center introduced the notion of gongsheng (co-becoming) in the planetary philosophical context and its contemporary implications, with insights from Japanese primatologist and ecologist YAMAGIWA Juichi.
In addition to exploring new directions in collaboration with other intellectual hubs, the Center has also enjoyed notable progress in its self-driven initiatives.
Our flagship Tianxia project led by Professor Roger T. Ames, concluded successfully. Over the past five years, the initiative brought together experts on tianxia and global governance, producing Chinese and English anthologies that explore conceptual frameworks and minimal ethical principles for reshaping global governance beyond the nation-state centered framework.
Under the theme of Ancient Wisdom and Planetary Governance, we launched the “Family Philosophy and Global Governance” project. Drawing on the foundational notion of family in Chinese philosophy, this initiative examines the potential of the concept of family and its associated institutions and methods of thinking in addressing contemporary challenges like gender, aging, and intergenerational justice.
The Gongsheng project, has also made significant strides, with the publication of the anthology Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of Co-becoming by Palgrave Macmillan in January.
Under the theme Creative Futures, the Center co-curated “The Larva of Time,” an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at New York University Shanghai. This project explored the temporal dimensions of artistic creation and scientific discovery, examining phenomena like microbial residues and ecological time scales. This marked the Center’s first collective collaboration with curators, artists, and scientists.
Please read our annual report about other projects we do and we welcome collaborations.