The notion of “co-becoming” — gongsheng in Chinese or kyōsei in Japanese (共生 in both written Chinese and Japanese kanji) — offers a valuable opportunity to enrich and transform our worldview, fostering broader planetary thinking. Gongsheng and kyōsei refer to a conception of the world as consisting of mutually embedded, coexistent, and co-generating entities. The rich meanings behind the concept can be traced back through Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as folk belief systems and practices in many East Asian countries.

The contemporary notion of “co-becoming” has been widely deployed in East Asian societies, including Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, and across political, social, economic, and commercial spheres in these societies. Challenging and enriching the mainstream modern notion of the individual as an independent, self-contained, and autonomous agent, the notion gives us a “planetary” framework with which we can rethink our self-perceptions, our relationship with “others,” and to the environment, and allows us to formulate a guide for actions to address planetary scale challenges.

Since its launch in August 2021, the Berggruen Institute China Center’s project, “Co-becoming: A Planetary View Inspired by East Asian Philosophies,” has hosted four workshops exploring these themes in depth. Insights from these discussions led to the publication of Gongsheng Across Contexts: A Philosophy of Co-Becoming (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2024). A second volume in the series, titled Co-Becoming as Method, is planned for release by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2025.