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Macau Ricci Newsletter 12
No. 12 － January 2009
2008 Symposium
The opening of our 2008 Symposium “In the Light and Shadow of an Emperor: Tomás Pereira, S.J. (1645-1708), the Kangxi Emperor and the Jesuit Mission in China” was held in the morning of November 27. Our guests, including Dr. José Lai, Bishop of Macau, Dr. Pedro Moitinha de Almeida, the Portuguese Ambassador to China, Prof. Paul Rule, and Prof. Henrique Leitão, were present to join our Provincial Fr. Louis Gendron, Fr. Artur Wardega and Fr. Luís Sequeira. Upon the welcome address by Fr. Wardega, Prof. Paul Rule gave a keynote speech. Around 80 participants attended the ceremony and the first two sections after which a group photo was taken at the entrance of the Inspirational Building at I.F.T.
All invited speakers have presented good papers followed by commentaries from discussants and exchanges with the audience.
At the evening of the second day, our Institute organized an “Evening of Chamber Music” at the St. Joseph Seminary Church, directed by Dr. Joyce Lindorff, coordinated by Dr. César Guillén-Nuñez, and performanced with harpsichord by Dr. Lindorff, and violin/viol by Prof. Tina Chancey, with vocal ensemble from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and English readings of the diary of Tomás Pereira by Prof. Chad W. Leslie. The audience was delighted and satisfied with the program.
In the afternoon of the last day of the symposium, a final panel was chaired by Prof. Myasnikov, with Prof. Ku Weiying, Prof. Zhang Xiping, Prof. Paul Rule, Prof. Rui Magone, Prof. Antonella Romano and Dra. Tereza Sena, all of whom addressed their final commentaries. Prof. Henrique Leitão addressed a remarkable final keynote speech. At the end, Fr. A. Wardega addressed the conclusion speech thanking all the scholars and speakers of the 2008 Symposium for their valuable contributions.
Evaluation Meeting of 2008 Macau and Lisbon Symposia
On December 12, Prof. António Saldanha from Portugal who joined a team from our Institute, held a meeting for the evaluation and discussion of both Symposia 2008 in Lisbon and in Macau. Our team was composed by Fr. Artur Wardega, Fr. Luís Sequeira, Fr. Yves Camus, Mr. Jerónimo Hung, Dr. César Guíllen-Nuñez and Dra. Tereza Sena.
Prof. Saldanha gave thanks for all the support and collaboration of both sides. Then he gave a brief report of the Symposium in Lisbon, where, according to his words, the academic goal was achieved. Good reaction from the scientific circles was noted as well as appreciation of the scope of internationally known scholars who participated in the symposium.
Forums
After the summer interval our Institute held another Forum on September 17. This time we invited Prof. Mao Sihui from Macao Polytechnic Institute as the speaker. The topic was “Beyond Zhang Yimou's Generation: Nostalgia, Humanism and Survival of the Silent Majority in Chinese Cinema since 1997”. The Forum was chaired by Mr. Chris Choi, MRIAcademic Assistant, who did a brief introduction of Prof. Mao. The talk focused on the skills of contemporary Chinese film directors and modern techniques well illustreated by captures of movies showed by Prof. Mao.
On October 9 the MRI celebrated the birthday of Father Matteo Ricci S.J. with an address given by Fr. Gianni Criveller PIME, with the topic entitled “The Background of Matteo Ricci: The shaping of his intellectual and scientific endowment.” He made a power-point presentation of more than 130 slides with detailed scenario of Fr. Matteo Ricci’s religious and scientifically formation received in Italy and his enculturation experienced in Jesuit College in Goa, India.
On November 5, our Institute held the monthly Forum with the topic as “Reading pleasures: on translating poetry”, with participation of three speakers: Prof. Bonnie S. McDougall, Prof. Yao Jingming and Dr. Ng Mei Kwan. The main theme focused on the poems of Dr. Ng Mei Kwan and Prof. Leung Ping-kwan from Hong Kong Baptist University, with commentaries of Prof. McDougall based on translations of these poems from Chinese into English. Prof. Yao Jingming, who translates Portuguese poetry into his own Chinese mother tongue, focused on one less known poet, Eugénio de Andrade.
The last forum of 2008, entitled “The Kangxi Emperor and the struggle between the French and Portuguese Jesuits, 1688-1708”, was held on December 16. We were pleased to have invited Prof. Ronnie Hsia Po-chia as the speaker for this event. Prof. António Saldanha was also invited to co-chair the Forum together with Fr. Luís Sequeira.
神州交流 ― Chinese Cross Currents (CCC)
In the first issue of the Chinese Cross Currents of the second half of 2008 (July, 5.3) its Editor Yves Camus pointed out that in the globalized world, it seems that no national community, can really elude the control of structural hidden forces. Employed by competing private bodies with the help of media manipulation, what science and technology have achieved runs the great risk of submitting to these forces which would also affect the development of democracy in modern societies. Joseph L. Barona explains how these structural forces are at work in the health industry as well as in the national defense expenditure of his country. On a broader horizon, Michel Chossudovsky, shows that "Famines in the age of globalization are the result of policy. […] Famine is not the consequence of a scarcity of food but in fact quite the opposite: global food surpluses are used to destabilize agricultural production in developing countries." Two articles by A. V. de Saldanha and César Guillén-Nuñez celebrated the 300th anniversary of the death of Fr. Tomás Pereira, S.J. aiming to provide a scholarly contribution to the study of the Christian China’s Mission in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as an inspiring reflection to the present day Westerner’s relations with China.
The World section of the second issue of the CCC (October 2008, 5.4) focused on the challenges that Turkey is presently facing, without any clear solution yet. In the first article, Peter Starr analyzed the internal tensions that history has generated in this nation: equally attracted by the values which in early times have been introduced into Europe through Turkey, this modern nation remains deeply indebted to Islamic traditions, more recently inherited from its neighbourhood. In a second article, Erkan Erdogdu presented in detail the difficult relations Turkey has had for many years in its approach to European Union membership. Thierry Meynard, took up the problem of the academic disciplines, as is well-known, “Western Learning” long ago began to be known in China, and later on in Japan. But only recently, it seems, some “Eastern” reconfiguration of imported—so to say—academic disciplines began to appear in discussions between Chinese scholars. This issue also remembered the demised Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose “call still deserves to be listened to” according to editor Yves Camus, by a renewed reading of Solzhenitsyn‘s address "A World Split Apart" given at Harvard in 1978; and eulogy of Professor Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler, the eminent Polish sinologist who resumed and developed Chinese studies in his country.
Staff Activities
On July 21-28, Fr. Artur Wardega was invited to attend and to present paper at the International Conference on Literary Theory Paradigm and Transformation, co-organized by Nanjing University and Harbin University. The Conference was held at the Harbin Normal University and in the city of Mohe, Da Xing’anling, Heilongjiang.
He then went to Hangzhou-China for an Academic Research Project (July 28-August 8), in conjunction with the Chinese Department of French University d’Artois, Arras-France, with whom our Institute has cooperation agreement to work on the publication project on Chinese literature with the Chinese writers in Hangzhou.
On August 3-16, 2008, Mr. Dave Cheung went to Taipei to attend a short training at the Kuangchi Program Service arranged by Fr. Jerry Martinson. Mr. Cheung was benefited with certain skills and knowledges on video production and acquired new information on handling professional digital video equipments and multimedia softwares, etc.
Visits
On July 11 around 50 students and scholars, led by Mr. Antonio Manuel Carrillo Lopez, came from United States to visit our Institute. All of them were passing by Macau and later on would fly to Sydney-Australia to participate the World Youth Days, a gathering of Catholic young people from around the world.
On July 15, Fr. Robin Sahaya Seelan, S.J. from Arul Kadal (College of Theology), Chennai, India, whose research field is philosophy and religion, came to visit our Institute’s Library. He made a visit again in September.
On July 16, Fr. Sony Thazhathel, Fr. Jacob Kumminiyil Thomas and Fr. John Chinnapan (all from India) paid a visit to our Institute, a group of Jesuits who went to Shangchuan Island on the previous weekend where Fr. Wardega did a power point presentation of our Institute.
On July 23rd July, Mr. Michal Makocki, Vice-Consul for Economic Affairs of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, came to visit our Institute.
On October 6, three scholars, including Mr. Chen Xin Wang from China, Mr. Cheng Xiu Guo from Vietnam and Mr. Carlos Simbajon from the Philippines came to visit our library.
On October 13, Dr. Bernard Hours and Dr. Monique Selim from Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, paid a visit to our Institute.
On October 21, Prof. Jozef Marian Galik from the Institute of Oriental and African Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, came to visit our Institute together with Prof. Zhu Shoutong from University of Macau.
Publications
The latest work of Dr. César Guillén-Nuñez entitled “Macao’s Church of Saint Paul – A glimmer of the baroque in China” has been finally published by the Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, in conjunction with the Cultural Institute of the Macau SAR. He was congratulated by all staff and colleagues at the Institute.
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