Kauderstuff
Well it's nice to be back blogging, in my rather lackadaisical fashion. In fact I'm in Australia now: at the HRC in Canberra on a Fellowship. And since leaving Baltimore we (Lisa and I) were in China, first at a conference on the canons at Beijing and then holidaying in Shanghai. The China trip was amazing as usual. I'd vowed not to go back there since my previous academic trips had been so frustrating and weird, but I gave in this time partly so that Lisa who had never visited the PRC could see it. The difficulties in China are twofold: first barely anyone speaks English well enough for us to sustain a useful or at least satisfying academic conversation and then, second, the rules and conventions there are so different from those in the West, and can involve simple and obvious repression and censorship, that again real dialogue and exchange becomes impossible and, more than that, one can feel implicated in oppression, expecially when some of these events are organised by Chinese academics who are cynically and opportunistically using them for their own career advancement. This kind of response, of course, doesn't allow for the usefulness of encounters with Westerners for at least some Chinese. And this time that was more apparent. To begin with: the conference was organised by Tao Dongfeng, for whom I have a great deal of respect, and then the usual kind of events happened: we were drawn aside by Chinese participants who wanted to make sure that we were aware of the limits, injustices and censorships under which they worked. These meetings are, for me, the real point of the trip and I think this time we met and talked to people for whom our conversations mattered—I certainly learnt a lot. And there were real indications that the scene is opening up: there was a feminist protest at the conferences domination by men, which was not only absolutely justified but was also paid attention to by Tao, and then there was a real debate about the political charge of disrepectful popular culture within the repressive State, even if Tao had finally, at least formally and rhetorically, to concede. The politics of this are difficult since, Tao was arguing that youth culture, which mocks the civilisational canons, is the sign of a resistance which cant take stronger, more political forms and this argument was closed down upon by the man he called his 'boss' (that is, his mentor and teacher) on grounds that could have been simply culturally traditionalist. For him, this kind of popular culture does not deserve serious academic attention, since that in itself ratifies it. Is this a political line (in the sense of being an expression of the Party's point of view), or rather simply a kind of Chinese Arnoldianism? I dont know.
And the other thing that made this conference worthwhile was where it was. We were taken to a resort East of Beijing, beyond the city limits, owned by Capital Normal and Beijing Normal Universities jointly. It was perched above a hydro-lake, miles from the nearest shops or town. A few peasants fished the lake or looked after chickens there, that was it. The landscape had some of the classical features of Taoist landscape, if not so dramatically as the landscapes around Guilin for instance. But still: the very essence of peace.