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CEAS Symposia, Colloquia, and Conferences, 2007-2008 For more information about the following activities, please contact the organizer, or CEAS associate director Lydia Chen. Abstracts and schedules will be posted soon. Growing Pains Conference, November 2007 (Photo by Neeley Main)
Hong Kong SAR's First Decade: Retrospect and Prospect symposium (November 2007) brought together legislators, policy analysts, and business and civic leaders to present their views on Hong Kong's economic development, shifting political parameters, prospects for democratization, and cooperation with China's mainland government. The event provided a platform for thoughtful and heated assessment of Hong Kong’s first decade as a Special Administrative Region of China. Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation conference (November 2007) went beyond the headlines trumpeting China's spectacular growth and discussed the difficult questions facing China, about whether and how such a rapidly transforming nation will be able to manage the tensions that accompany growth at such a pace. Issues from growing income disparity to environmental damage and widening gaps between rural and urban China are forces that are tearing at the social fabric of China. Are these the signs of a system in crisis or, as the event title suggests, the necessary pains associated with growth? China’s Harmonious Society colloquium series (winter 2008), co-sponsored by Shorenstein APARC’s China program, is a public lecture series on current issues in Chinese society that present challenges for the central government as it strives for a harmonious society. Morphosyntactic Changes in Middle Chinese Symposium (March 14-15, 2008) Leading scholars from China, Europe and North America have been invited to share their current understanding on theoretical issues in grammaticalization and lexicalization in the history of Chinese language. Middle Chinese constitutes a special period when, on the one hand, Old Chinese changed into a more analytic language where meanings became mostly represented by words and particles, thus diverging markedly from other Sino-Tibetan languages; on the other hand, several prominent morphological markers in Modern Chinese without Sino-Tibetan correspondences started to emerge in Middle Chinese vernacular texts leading to a more synthetic Modern Chinese. The invited scholars will report on their findings with respect to the contexts and conditions in Middle Chinese that might have been responsible for the development of many of the constraints in Modern Chinese syntax. New Currents in Studies on the Japanese Empire colloquium series (spring 2008) is a public lecture series introducing current trends and new documents that have become available in multi-language archives in Northeast Asia which shed light on Japanese imperialism and inform comparative colonialism studies. Critical Han Studies symposium and workshop (April 25-27, 2008) brings together scholars, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students to look critically at the status of “Han,” representing the largest ethnic group in China and the world, in view of linguistic, cultural, political, and historical inconsistencies in the conceptualization of this category as a coherent community. Same-Sex Desire and Union in China conference (May 16-17 2008) brings together scholars across disciplines, periods, and geography to discuss same-sex relationships in China from historical and contemporary perspectives. Questions of identity and social role have changed over time, as have the political, social, economic, and demographic context of sexual relations. In the era of globalization, queer politics and culture have become an increasingly visible dimension of civil society in greater China.
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