Leading experts as well as several prominent Chinese dissident intellectuals, including scholar, journalist, and author Roderick MacFarquhar, will meet at Claremont McKenna College on Thursday, March 6 and Friday, March 7 for China and Human Rights: A Symposium, a two-day event exploring a country caught in a crisis of identity as it is pulled between capitalist and communist ideologies.
Is China a rising power or a global threat? Is its vast economic expansion compatible with democracy or at odds with it? What effect is 21st century technological and industrial ambition having on a nation that still maintains a totalitarian political regime? Many possible answers to these questions andperhaps even more importantwhat this bodes for the rest of the world, will be discussed by some of today's foremost experts and prominent Chinese dissidentsamong them Qing, artist Gao ErTai, and keynote speakers Orville Schell and Roderick MacFarquhar.
The symposium, occurring during the much-anticipated buildup to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, affords a chance to understand the tensions within Chinese society just a few months before the world's scrutiny is upon them.
To offer a dialogue that fully engages the topic, however, organizers have striven to include those living the reality of life under China's authoritarian regime. Several prominent dissident intellectuals will participate, including: Kang Zhengguo, author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China; Gao ErTai, writer-painter-art critic and author of, In Search of My Homeland; Wang Chaohua, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and author of, One China, Many Paths; journalist and activist Dai Qing, whose books include, The River Dragon Has Come; and Han Dongfang, a leader of the Tiananmen uprising and its current labor movement.
For each, the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 was a turning point. Branded a subversive, Gao ErTai fled the country while Kang Zhengguo eventually left and became a senior lecturer at Yale University. For Wang Chaohua, the government crackdown forced her into hiding while Dai Qing, known for her outspoken challenge to government decisionsespecially the Three Gorges Dam Projectled to her being denounced and jailed.
"They teach us about the life and death reality that people there face everyday," explained Robert Faggen, director of The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, one of the College's institutes responsible for the event. "Without their voices, this symposium would be incomplete."
The symposium begins Thursday afternoon with a session on economics and human rights followed that evening by a keynote address from Schell, former dean of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, whose many books on the region include Mandate of Heaven, Virtual Tibet, and co-authorship of, The Tiananmen Papers and The China Reader: The Reform Era. The title of his address is, The Global Environmental Consequences of China's Right' to Development.
On Friday, the symposium's focus will expand to include sessions on intellectual life, politics and society as well as the impact the Beijing Olympics mayor may nothave on China's relations with the world. There will also be discussion of China's impact on the global environment and on Darfur. That evening's address will be presented by MacFarquhar, the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard and director of Harvard's John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His books include, Mao's Last Revolution, The Forbidden City, and The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao. The title of his address is, Political Reform in China: Past, PresentFuture?
Among the symposium's array of experts are Gloria Davies, associate professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University; Lindsay Waters, executive director for Humanities, Harvard University Press; Theodore Huters, professor of Asian languages and cultures, UCLA; as well as Theresa Harris, director of the International Justice Project at the World Organization for Human Rights, and many others. No country, as many of these participants have written, is poised more readily to dominate the 21st century than China. And no country today is also experiencing such a reluctant transformation.
The following week, students will have a rare opportunity to learn firsthand about the Chinese dissident experience from Kang Zhengguo, who has agreed to meet with them prior to a March 11 lecture (at 6:45 p.m.) at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on campus. The public is welcome to attend that lecture.
China and Human Rights: A Symposium is made possible by the sponsorship of several CMC institutes, including The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human rights, the Keck Center for Internatiaonal and Strategic Studies, the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, and the Kravis Leadership Institute.
For many years, conditions in China have been eclipsed by the world's attention focusing instead upon the dramatic fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent upheavals that have afflicted its various former satellites over the last two decades.
But, as the Gould Center's Faggen reminds, China still poses a crucial challenge to human rights and the pursuit of self-expression"especially artistic expression," says Faggen, also the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at CMC, "which many, particularly in the United States, take for granted."
The human rights symposium is the latest of many events focusing on China's place in the world. In the fall, the Gould Center inaugurated the series "Voices from China" with a visit from the poet Bei Dao, a leading figure in China's pro-democracy movement. Next year, the Gould Center will host Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian as a part of this series.