The Foundation of Co-Becoming: A Close Look at Qi

The philosophical idea “co-becoming” (gongsheng) in Chinese thought holds that things in the universe come into being through their relations with one another, rather than existing as separate, self-contained entities.

This way of seeing the world depends on the concept q

i, a term particularly familiar to Californians, but still rich with unexplored depth. In this talk, I will introduce qi in its Confucian and Daoist registers and explain how the concept gives rise to a world characterized by global interconnectivity.

Dr. Ya Zuo is Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural and
intellectual historian of middle and late imperial China, and her work is highly interdisciplinary. She is fascinated by ideas and how they circulate in the human world. Her interdisciplinary interests afford her a broad and inclusive perspective for exploring ideas and knowledge in premodern China. Dr. Zuo’s first book, Shen Gua’s Empiricism, is the first book-length study in English of Shen Gua, the best known Renaissance man in medieval China and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook (Mengxi bitan).