Part 2: Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations

The Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents the 2016 Reischauer Lecture with speaker Odd Arne Westad (Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government).

Part Two focus: China and Korea in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Speaker: Odd Arne Westad is the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard University, where he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. He is an expert on contemporary international history and on the eastern Asian region.

Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Westad was School Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, he directed LSE IDEAS, a leading center for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy.

Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for "The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times." The book, which has been translated into fifteen languages, also won a number of other awards. Westad served as general editor for the three-volume "Cambridge History of the Cold War," and is the author of the "Penguin History of the World" (now in its 6th edition). His most recent book, "Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750," won the Asia Society’s book award for 2013.

Discussant: Ezra F. Vogel, Harvard University

Moderator: Michael A. Szonyi, Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Professor of Chinese History

[philippemaricaille]

Ultra BORING! from minute 1 to the very last (of the 3 conferences)...
A lot of Western propaganda (China is imperialist, expansionist, ideologist, dogmatist etc.)
packed in small historical anecdotes, like a series of 'post-it' rearranged to serve the main geopolitical objective.
(With a Norwegian accent trying to sounds like a Scottish one but resembling more to an outback Tasmanian bushman.)
Here after a lexicon I prepared to the attention of (just in case) eventual viewers:
"Osque" means ASK
"Soy" means SIDE
"Oi" means EIGHT
"Lost" means LAST
"Tweet" means TREAT
"Hawaï" means AWAY
"Keynes" means CASE
"Won't" means WANT
etc.

The level is low for being a cocktail of free thoughts one should not pay attention of, and ought to prefer Wikipedia's readings. For example, WESTAD depicted China under the Ming (to be verified) as turned more on the East side toward Korea, Japan, than onto the West. But there is no tangible arguments to support that as long as the Silk Road was flourishing etc.
Other examples showed that he don't master his subject like for the demographic question about the Shandong (even if he shakes his head), it was his colleague that knew (in the Part 1) the exact temporal marks for this to answer the question from the audience.
WESTAG have been too super-light to reply the public concerning the difference between neo-Confucianism and the traditional version of this philosophy: the new one would being simpler, practical, but the offset were a lack of deep understanding of such themes like "environment".

To me, this corresponds to bar-room politics, NOT academic.
(The reason it has only 1455 views after 4 years online.)

By the way: I disagree that a Japanologist (Reischauer) that worked for the US army intelligence service -- born in 1910, died in 1990 -- that has never learnt Chinese or lived their, would have anything relevant/helpful regarding our current days understanding of China… On top of that, here is Wikipedia copy-and-pasted":
According to late 20th-century Japanese historian Takashi Fujitani, the memo revealed a "condescension toward Japanese people" and a "purely instrumentalist and manipulative stance." In the abstract to his article, "The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers, " Fujitani wrote: ''Already at this early date in the war, Reischauer proposed retention of the Japanese emperor as head of a postwar “puppet regime” that would serve U.S. interests in East Asia. He also argued that Japanese Americans had until then been a “sheer liability” and that the United States could turn them into an “asset” by enlisting them in the U.S. military. He reasoned that Japanese American soldiers would be useful for propaganda purposes – that is, to demonstrate to the world and particularly the “yellow and brown peoples” that the United States was not a racist nation."