Spring 2008 news

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Conference: “The Cold War in Asia”
Guangzhou, November 1–2, 2007

The Fairbank Center, together with the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester and the School of Humanities of Zhongshan University, PRC, co-sponsored an international workshop, “The Cold War in Asia: Beyond Geopolitics and Diplomacy,” held in Guangzhou on November 1–2, 2007. The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard also provided financial support for the conference.

Keynote addresses were given by Shiraishi Takashi, President of the Institute of Developing Economies at the Japan External Trade Organization, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Professor Emeritus at Yale. Their public session had something of the air of a rock-concert, with an audience of several hundred, including autograph-seekers. Prof. Wallerstein’s speech challenged the very premises of the conference, asking if it is ever possible to go “beyond geopolitics.” This question provided the focus for discussions over the two days.

Participants, ranging from senior scholars to graduate students, came from twenty-one institutions in six countries on four continents. Twenty-two papers were presented in seven panels. The quality of the papers was uniformly high; some of the most innovative papers included studies situating Burmese cartographic representation and the politics of Japanese labor in the larger Cold War context. A panel on the globalization of Maoism featured papers on Latin America and Sweden. Also included was a report on fieldwork in a community of “Cold War orphans,” the Chinese community of Kokang in northern Burma. Four PRC historians presented papers tracing the growth of international relations policies in the PRC.

Answering Prof. Wallerstein’s challenge, the participants agreed that while it may be impossible to ignore geopolitics when studying the Cold War in Asia, it is important to go further than the study of geopolitics alone. The organizers hope to publish a selection of the papers and are also exploring future collaboration among the participants at this conference and those engaged in Cold War history projects at Osaka University, the National University of Singapore, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Conference: “Autonomy in Tibet”
November 28 and 29, 2007

In 2002, Harvard University began hosting a series of conferences to promote substantive discussion among Tibetan and Chinese scholars on issues critical to modern Tibet. These gatherings were designed to promote the exchange of constructive opinions and dialogue on contemporary issues, facilitating face-to-face exchanges in a positive, academic environment, and allowing for discussions on such wide ranging issues as the environment, education, literature, culture, and Tibet’s rural and urban economies.

On November 28 and 29, 2007, the sixth conference in this series, “Autonomy in Tibet,” was held in Room S250, CGIS South Building. Funded by the East Asian Legal Studies Program at the Harvard Law School, the Harvard University Asia Center, the Isdell Foundation, and the Fairbank Center, and organized by Dr. Lobsang Sangay, research associate at the Harvard Law School, this meeting focused scholarly attention on the issue of autonomy and its divergent social, cultural, and economic perspectives.

The November conference was the subject of an article in the January 9, 2008, issue of Time Magazine written by Thomas Laird, author of The Story of Tibet: Converstations with His Holliness the Dalai Lama, who wrote:

Since 2002, a little-known academic ritual has taken place each year at Harvard University. Academics of every stripe, from historians to constitutional lawyers, gather to discuss Tibet’s past, present and future. Uniquely, these intellectual debates have brought together Chinese and exiled Tibetan scholars. In the real world, the simplest facts about Tibet are so divisive that dialogue is impossible. Chinese speak of the 1950 peaceful liberation of the Chinese province of Tibet, and of its subsequent modernization; Tibetans speak of the invasion of an independent nation, and the suppression of its religious and cultural traditions. The polite rules established at Harvard, however, at least allow the two sides to exchange views. In fact, a senior Chinese scholar attending the first Harvard event met with the Dalai Lama’s envoy. That secret meeting birthed the official Sino-Tibetan dialogue between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and the Chinese government, which still takes place annually in Beijing.

[The Fairbank Center is grateful to Mr. Laird and to the editors of Time Magazine for their kind permission to reproduce the above excerpt.]


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