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Transcultura has had many successful conferences in Europe and India in recent years. Now it is the turn of China to host a Transcultura conference. China has been involved in Transcultura for over 15 years and has made significant contributions in the areas of philosophy, anthropology and sociology.

The Transcultura Conference in Beijing, organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, will highlight and discuss major political problems of our times from a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing upon philosophical, sociological, anthropological and historical as well as cultural-political approaches.

The general theme of the conference is Order and Disorder, under which there are three topics: war and peace; humans and rights; social justice and harmony. The key words "order and disorder" come from the Chinese concepts "zhi and luan" considered the conditions or values to assess or evaluate a society. A society is said to be a good one when it is characterized by a good order in which people live in harmony, enjoy the happy lives that they want, and choose to keep this social order rather than breaking it. In other words, a social order could be said to be a good one if all the people, or at least the majority of the people, would rather be conservative instead of revolutionary. It could be seen that the notion of order\disorder is essentially different from that of modernity, progress and development. And the fundamental ideas such as justice, goodness, rightness, etc. and the understandings of history, society, politics, etc. could be differently reinterpreted and redefined.

The relationship between the concepts of chaos and disorder in Chinese thought is noteworthy. Chaos means the state without order before it is ordered to become the cosmos, but the Chinese word "luan" means not only chaos but also the condition of a society falling into a disordered situation or an uncontrolled state.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences looks forward to a stimulating debate on the key concepts of Order and Disorder in keeping with the Transcultura methodology of reciprocal knowledge and its explorations into different cultures of knowledge.

11 December 2006