It’s as easy as ever to touch down in China without learning about the philosophers who have exercised an outsized influence on the country’s storied history. But even as modern thinkers here have adopted once foreign values, many are also looking back to the classics for inspiration on how to understand and solve the problems facing Chinese society today.

For today’s podcast, we’ve asked Sam Crane—the mind behind the Chinese philosophy blog The Useless Tree and author of the upcoming book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life—to give us a whirlwind tour of the foundational thinkers whose ideas still suffuse China today. To cap things off, we take a look at how Confucian and Daoist thought might apply to issues facing both China and the U.S.

Have a question you’d like to hear discussed in a future episode? Record it and send it to chinahangup@gmail.com.

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