Vol. 24, No. 8	October 30, 1998

China Scholars Examine Parallel Cultural Outgrowths of Chairman Mao's Communist Regime and Ming and Qing Dynasties

Conference at Columbia Takes Place Nov. 6-7

By A. Dunlap-Smith

Was Chairman Mao in fact China's last emperor? The cultural parallels between the rise and decline of his communist regime and that of the Ming and Qing (pronounced ch-ing) dynasties suggest he was, according to David Wang, professor of Chinese and chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) department.

This and other questions related to the origins of modern China will be explored at Columbia on November 6-7 by Wang and some 20 of the world's leading experts on Chinese literature, language and history in a symposium entitled From the Late Ming to the Late Qing: Dynastic Decline and Cultural Innovation. It is the first in a series of three symposia; the second and third will be held in Taiwan and China, respectively.

"This is an effort to re-appreciate the late Ming [1573-1644] and the late Qing [1848-1919] dynasties during which times the Chinese began to think about and see the world in a lot of very daring ways," Wang said. "What these periods of imperial dynastic decline share with the Cultural Revolution is great upheaval and tumult; the difference is that despite the circumstances the communists maintained a stifling hold on the arts, whereas artistic innovation flourished during the late Ming and the late Qing-and that is where 'the modern' in China really began."

Among the scholars to attend are Patrick Hanan of Harvard, Wang Hui of the National Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Princeton's Wai-yee Li, Columbia's C.T. Hsia and Kang-i Sun Chang of Yale.

It is sponsored by EALAC and several foundations, among them the Fred Fang-yu Wang Endowment, a recent gift to Columbia's East Asian department made to promote the awareness of Chinese literature in the West.

Fred Wang (no relation to professor David Wang) was graduated in the '50s from Teachers College. He went on to teach Chinese language and literature at Yale and Seton Hall universities. A collector of Chinese books and paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties, Wang was also a calligrapher who distinguished his work by introducing western concepts of abstraction into Chinese calligraphy.

The endowment was created by his son, Shao-fang Wang, in memoriam. Wang died last year.

The second symposium in the series is scheduled for July of next year and will be held in Taipei, Taiwan; it is entitled Literary and Artistic Innovations in the Late Ming and the Late Qing. The third and final symposium is From the End-of-the-Century to the New Era: The Modern Significance of the Late Ming and the Late Qing Studies. Appropriately, it will take place in Beijing in 2000.