On April 3, 2023, Professor Liu Jinghua of IEC made an academic report entitled " The Civilizations Rising in the Medieval World and Their Characteristics " in Xingwen Building, Tianjin Normal University. The lecture was chaired by Professor Gu Yanfang, Deputy Dean of the Institute of European Civilization. Faculty and students of IEC and the School of History and Culture attended the lecture.

Professor Liu Jinghua is currently the President of the China's Research Society of the Ancient and Medieval History of World, and the chief expert of the project of the National Social Science Fund, "Research on Comparison, Interaction and Mutual Learning among Major Civilizations in World History".

Professor Liu Jinghua cut into the theme from the rise of the most influential civilizations in world history, pointing out that the formation of two of the four cultural circles (Christian culture circle and Islamic culture circle) is directly related to the civilization that rose in the Middle Ages. he then summarized the development process of the second wave of civilizations that emerged in the Middle Ages (500-1000 AD), especially the Germanic civilization, the Slavic civilization and the Arab-Islamic civilization.

Based on the comparison between Ancient and Middle Ages civilizations, Prof. Liu Jinghua highlighted the nomadic nature of the major civilizations that rose in the Middle Ages, which is manifested in the following characteristics: they were all civilizations of conquerors, which developed through mobile expansion and conquest; they were all religious civilizations and adhered to monotheism; their systems all had traces of nomadic life. As for the environmental factors of the rise and growth of the Middle Ages civilizations, Professor Liu Jinghua believed that although these were primary civilizations, they also benefited from their antecedence civilization or neighbouring civilizations of the same generation, and showed different characteristics due to the differences in the range of movement. They were very different from the subjective and objective conditions of taking advantage of the opportunities of history, and the relationship between religion and society. Only the medieval European civilization stood out in agrarian civilizations with its intrinsic mechanisms and the "meta-rules".