Fairbank conference on studying modern China

I just returned from the Fairbank conference at Harvard: "Studying Modern China: Past, Present, and Future".

Despite yesterday's weather, and the piles of snow still on Cambridge's streets, the sessions were packed -- standing room only. It's possible the CGIS building didn't have a bigger lecture room, but I felt for such a high-profile academic field (or group of fields) open to the public, this event should have taken place in a room that had twice the capacity.

There were a lot of luminaries on the program and in the audience. I recognized Ross Terrill, Merle Goldman, and a few others. Unfortunately, I couldn't see all of the very intriguing-sounding sessions over the three-day conference, just two this morning: panels on Chinese Domestic Politics and China's International Relations. I have to admit that I didn't hear anything particularly earth-shattering in either of them. As Alastair Iain Johnston noted about current scholarship on international relations theory as it involves Chinese foreign policy, there are a limited number of full-time academics that specialize in this field, and one tends to see the same names over and over again. I've already read many of them, as well as the relevant issues they deal with. I only felt the need to take one page of notes combined from the two sessions.

Interestingly, two issues which were only mentioned in passing were the impact of propaganda on domestic Chinese politics and foreign policy, and the Internet's social impact among urban Chinese. True, there are only a limited number of issues that can be mentioned in two-90 minute sessions, but in my view (admittedly greatly biased in favor of my own academic interests) these topics should have been addressed in depth. Maybe they were at a later session?