TinkINChina webpage and network

Another promising website for us to familiarize ourselves with--ThinkINChina (http://www.thinkinchina.asia/).

I found it when trolling for something quickly by Yan Xuetong--who turns out to have given a talk at their regular sessions (apparently held at Bridge Café in Beijing). Seems mostly a record of talks with associated handy short reading lists (full text) in English. Group includes Matt Frechen, bright young American political scientist I know who is a full-time faculty member at Qinghua.  From their "About" info:

ThinkIN China is an intellectual community that was created in Beijing in September 2010 by a group of young researchers who live and work in China.

TIC was born at Bridge Café – a popular café’ in the heart of Beijing’s academic crossroad – out of the genuine desire to build an informal platform where Chinese and foreign academics of all ages can discuss and help each other by exchanging ideas and information.

TIC turns this platform into a living community by organizing monthly public discussions with renowned Chinese scholars, academic workshops in the best Chinese universities and social events that help young students and researchers to get easily involved into Beijing’s academic environment.

TIC can be seen like a town square, like a Greek ‘agora’, an open space where people meet and ideas flow. It is a young, curious and passionate network that believes in knowledge based on direct experience, a community that wants to think about China, from within China.

 you can watch and share the video also on youtube

Mapping the Intellectual Public Sphere in China

This is the first step in our mapping of intellectual life in China today to help us see the moving parts of the intellectual public sphere in which the scholars and intellectuals we select operate. In order to know who they read and who might read them, we need to know the major media outlets and the structure and operation of the Chinese public sphere, which I insist on calling a "directed public sphere".

Our goals are: first to help us "see the playing field" in order to pick significant and relevant intellectuals. Second, we will publish some versions of this "map" as part of our findings--to be helpful to other scholars.

I. Base Line Survey We build on the initial survey Yu Zhansui 于展绥 did for me in 2005 when he was a graduate student at UBC. His work provides a 2005 "base line" for our mapping effort. His lists are annotated and all but #2 are have both Chinese and English--a style I think we should maintain on our blog. I am putting four documents he produced into our shared Dropbox under the sub-folder "Institutions of Contemporary Chinese Thought" (this folder will also contain other relevant docs to do with this topic):

1. Yu Zhansui--Fifty Most Influential Intellectuals in Contemporary China

2. Yu Zhansui--中国有重要影响的思想文化网站简介 (on websites; Chinese annotations only)

3. Yu Zhansui--Some Influential Academic Presses & Media in China

4. Yu Zhansui--Some Most Influential Journals in Contemporary China

We will want to develop a 2015 version of these. Two initial observations from the 2005 lists.  First, we are dealing with many of the same names ten years later--Wang Hui, Gang Yan, Ge Zhaoguang (though Zhansui's gloss of Kang Xiaoguang--4th on his list--interestingly makes no mention of New Confucianism). Second, Zhansui's shortest list is likely to be our longest--websites and electronic media. As he notes, in 2005 web presence was largely electronic archives of print journals and a limited number of electronic bulletin boards. The Internet world is massively different today.

II. DACHS and "50 Public Intellectuals" from 2004  Also from 2005 is Nicholas Volland's annotated web archive of the 50 public intellectuals profiles in 南方人物周刊 on Sept. 8, 2004. The PDF of the web page is in Dropbox, but to use the many handy hotlinks use the url: http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/boa/digital_resources/dachs/special_collections/fipi_en.html
Many DACHS archive links require you to register, but this one does not.

Nick's annotated web archive is a fine example of the broader DACHS project: The Digital Archive for Chinese Studies run by the China Seminar at University of Heidelberg. We should familiarize ourselves with it and consider if we want to do anything similar or (as in the case of CIW's "Thinking China") if it would be better simply to arrange to contribute. Hanno Lecher appears to be in charge; Barbara Mitller is active on the site. Find out about DACHS at: http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/boa/digital_resources/dachs/about_en.html

III. Background Reading: The World According to Tim For a narrative orientation of at least major themes, people, and institutions in China's intellectual world 1975-2015, I am putting two chapters from my The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History in the Dropbox folder: Ch. 5 "Reviving Reform: Correcting Revolutionary Errors (1976-1995)" and Ch. 6 "Rejuvenation: Securing the Chinese Dream (1996-2014)". If I have succeeded, this should be a relatively painless way to get what reading a dozen monographs and articles will. If not, at least it warns the team of how I am approaching our topic. There's plenty more to read and we've begun a bibliography of relevant secondary studies in the major languages.

New Frontiers

Here's something we should be aware of:  http://www.harvard-yenching.org/new-frontiers-asian-scholarship. Reviews of recently published books and articles in Asian languages.

Gan Chunsong (干春松)

I realized I stumbled accross this scholar a little while ago and was wondering if it would be of any interest to anyone, especially regarding Confucians with national audience.

Gan has a Ph.D in philosophy and is a professor at 北京大学儒学研究院. As such he is also acquainted with Li Zhonghua (李中华). Also, Gan is an editorial board member on the infamous 原道 magazine, directed by Chen Ming (陈明）. He is usually considered to be part of the same generation that includes Kang Xiaoguang.

Here is the book I read a few years back : https://www.dropbox.com/s/toxeltzzn5avg8o/%E5%88%B6%E5%BA%A6%E5%8C%96%E5%84%92%E5%AE%B6%E5%8F%8A%E5%85%B6%E8%A7%A3%E4%BD%93%2B%E5%B9%B2%E6%98%A5%E6%9D%BE%E7%9D%80.pdf

Otherwise, go to my folder and find : 制度化儒家及其解体. 

Ge Zhaoguang

new ge zhaoguang book

Josh's comment:

Ge Zhaoguang may just be the most brilliant Chinese of his generation,
and this work is nicely situated in what he's been doing for years at
his Institute for Advanced Studies at Fudan: placing China in Asia.
Because he's got money, he's brought scholars who work with Kanji texts
from Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.--and other scholars from around the
world. He's also a really nice guy. On both front (smart, nice), way
better to work worth than, say, Wang Hui. Ben Elman is close to him. I'd
love to involve him somehow in our work.

Josh

Axel Schneider's blog on changing status of history in China today

Axel's blog is called "History, Ethics, and Faith in China"  http://history-in-china.net/about-2/about/

The description begins:

"This is a blog about the changing status of history in China today.

"After a century of the dominance of “scientific” history as a modern academic discipline, the decline of both, historical materialism and the modernization paradigm, as well as the rise of market-oriented forms of historical representation (historical short stories, TV soaps, popular historiography) have left many disoriented, which is why Chinese historians and intellectuals start to question notions of objective knowledge about progressive history. The transition from pre-modern to these now increasingly discredited modern notions of time and history has thus become a focus of interest."

I like his defense of "faith" in his title of the blog.

Clearly in its early stages of constructions. Most of the sections of the blog are "under construction", but WEBLINKS have some useful links and the only activity I found was on the right column of the"homepage"--"Recent Posts".  All in Chinese and all pretty academic.  Still, worth keeping an eye on for our project.

history labs technology

Hey guys:

once we get the history labs up and running, we will need a better platform than Skype--especially, one that will allow us to integrate audio with text and text management.  essentially, we will want to be able to hear one another (visuals of our ugly mugs is perhaps less important), but see at least a Chinese text, and perhaps even a translation we are working on.

we could probably improvise something, but given that we have money, it might make more sense to actually buy/rent a service.

gotomeeting is one such service I had heard of.  here's the review of it, which is positive but not glowing.  similar products with better reviews are listed in the upper right hand corner of the review.

http://web-conferencing-services.toptenreviews.com/gotomeeting-review.html

click on its demonstration, which will give you an (overly rosy) view of what these things do.

among other things, these services allow us to record the session, which would be very useful for group members who could not attend, or for our own propaganda (we could youtube the sessions).

we'll have to test out various things.