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 A Harvard Conference  on 11/30-12/1, 2012

http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/event/cppp

Out of curiosity, I went to the opening panel session of this conference which is certainly a gathering of the who’s who in China studies in the US. Given my upbringing and yearly stay in China since 1979 I did not learn anything particularly new (except for one point to be mentioned below). But I was impressed by the depth of understanding of these scholars about China. There wasn’t anything they said that I could disagree with. The discussion was very open, frank, and objective. I am not familiar with the microblog climate on the Chinese  Internet. But certainly I cannot imagine such panel discussions taking place in China without sanctions or shutdown.

The particular point made by one of the panelists which was new and insightful to me is this:

The Chinese language and writing is pictorial rather than phonetic. As a result, comparatively speaking, Chinese language and grammar have far fewer rules than other languages, say English which are full of rules about spelling, tense, gender, et al. People learn the Chinese language word by word pragmatically and sentences are assembled together rather than via spelling and grammatical rules. Since language is the first thing learned by a child, Chinese tends to have different perhaps unconscious concept about RULES than westerners. For example, LAWS (i.e., rules of behavior) are less developed in Chinese society. China tends to be ruled by men than ruled by law. There are other manifestations due to this difference in concept. Not everyone will agree with this observation. But it is worthy of consideration in my opinion.

(Note added after posting 12/1/2012: Another observation by the panelists which again may be subject to debate is " the relative weakening of central government power from Mao->Deng->Jiang-Hu over the years compare to regional power". Of course the case of Bo XiLai is used as a case in point.)

In the afternoon, there was another interesting technical but theoretical talk at Boston University about reaching consensus in social networks. The main interesting points in the work is that the algorithm is decentralized using only neighborhood information and can overcome delays in transmission. So I left Harvard (Cambridge) and travelled to Boston to listen to that speech.

By the time I returned home in Lexington at 6:30 pm I had a rewarding, interesting,  but tiring  11-hour day which at my age is no small accomplishment. But such are the intellectual riches of the greater Boston area. One is glad to be alive