Macau Ricci Newsletter 6

No. 6 － January 2006

Quod erat faciendum, hodie est. This old roman diction is put as an  epigraph on these pages to recognize our long absence in contact with you, caused not at all by a fa niente of the Institute, but on the contrary, by a broadening of our activities and academic endeavor due to new challenges and opportunities opened up to us these past years. Coming back to the second half of 2005 we might note the following achievements as reported here below.

Forums

The Institute held its monthly lectures on the topics related to Macau and to Greater China. On July 20th Roderick O’Brien, who is an Australian lawyer and was teaching for almost six years in various Chinese Universities, delivered a talk on Changes in Legal Education in China. He has pointed out on such diverse Chinese legal phenomena as the expansion of teaching of law to around 300 schools, the merger of soviet-style specialist colleges and the development of more comprehensive universities, the emergence of Legal Aid in Chinese universities, the change in traditional teaching methods and notably the introduction of clinical legal education, the Unified Justice Examination and its influence on teaching, the teachers of Law and professional practice, the teaching of legal ethics, the electives and credit points, the proliferation of institutes within universities, the proliferation of legal websites and other related topics. The transcript of his talk is available at www.riccimac.org/eng/mriforum/16.htm.

For our November Forum we invited Pierre Haski who has been the Beijing-based China correspondent of the French daily Liberation and is author of The diary of Ma Yan , a tale of rural poverty and the right to education, which has been translated into 17 languages.  At this time he introduced to us his latest book Le Sang de la Chine (China's Blood), an investigation into the blood trade in Henan, which has led to the contamination of hundreds of thousands of poor farmers with HIV/Aids. This book is the product of several years of travelling in the "aids villages" of Henan province, sometimes at night to avoid the surveillance of vigilantes, of contacts with doctors and activists who helped fight the attempt to cover up and bring the plight of these people to light. The book was published this year and recently received the "International Media prize" in Geneva.

The last Forum of the year was dedicated to the local gaming industry and to its disturbing influence on family life and the psychological well-being of the citizens of Macau. Three invited speakers informed us of their research and interviews conducted with individuals and groups considered to be key informants in the community. Textual data were analysed qualitatively for the six dimensions of temporality, belief systems, behaviour, social, relational and future orientation to explore the impact of the gaming industry on family life. Several themes indicated that the gaming industry exerts both a direct and an indirect negative influence on the psychological well-being and growth of the family. The speakers included Dr Gertina van Schalkwyk, psychologist and researcher on various issues related to human development and now Assistant Professor at the University of Macau in the psychology program. Another of the speakers was Emilie Tran, researcher on contemporary China political and social issues, who was then completing her Ph.D on the transformation of elite and power in post-Mao China, at the Graduate School of Social Sciences in Paris. The third speaker was Dr. Kay Chang, a California Licensed Clinical Psychologist and currently Assistant Professor at the University of Macau in the psychology program and a part-time private clinical practitioner in Hong Kong.

神州交流― Chinese Cross Currents (CCC)

Two theme issues have been released during summer and autumn. The first one on Education and Society with a smiling Chinese boy playing with his own made toy cell phone on the cover brings some optimistic glimpse of contrasted and sometimes sad reality. The issue gathers a good number of contributions on that subject and goes from twenty years of educational reform in China  to new contemporary initiatives, particularly in the private sector, between liberals and conservative educationalists challenged by official “moral education” that are present in this humanistic return to tradition. In contrast, an example of educational reform underwent in post-Soviet Russia is given, and another one of the “Critical Pedagogy” as a Challenge of Neo-liberalism” in the USA. Beside that the reader can find in this issue usual sections like Features, here dedicated to the memory of late Pope John Paul II and a varied scope of book reviews.

The second and the last issue of this year bears a spiritual and very Confucian title, “Living in Harmony”, presented by Eric Sautedé, chief editor of the CCC. As he writes in his Editorial, “The concept of sustainable development was launched in the early eighteens and therefore was widely discussed in China today and much need new perspectives in terms of public policies which might prefigure profound changes in public governance”. The issue opens with a wide overview of the history of the environment, portraying the changes in China’s landscape during the past three and half thousand years, written by Prof.  Mark Elvin from ANU in Canberra. His Chinese colleague, Zheng Yishen a research fellow from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences goes forward in his essay and deepens the question of ten years transformation of China economic growth and its implications to the protection of the environment. The four other contribution on that topic reflect on China environmental fiscal reform, on the theory of grassland desertification, on China Forests and its environmental movement – all written by Chinese experts in that matter. The book reviews section much with the main theme of the issue.

Symposium

This year our International Symposium on “History and Memory: Present Reflections on the Past to Build our Future” (December 1st–3rd ) gathered on the Mon Ha hill of Macau some fifty speakers, discussants and chair persons coming from the four continents and ten countries, include Israel, South Africa and Spain. There was a good scope of brilliant speakers and outstanding papers related to the past and its chronicles, which need good preservation to be able to foster the future in which everyone could find a place. The key-note address of Professor Tu Weiming focused on Confucius and Rujia new Chinese cultural studies gave us the background for our debates. The papers illustrated different stages of interaction and gaps between History and Memory, they dealt with epistemological issues, questions of method, on selected and constructing memories, on preservation of memory and the teaching of history, as well as on “duty of memory”: for whom and for what end? These topics found an adequate reply in the papers and were illustrated by three evenings of free public showing at the Macau Cineteatro of three documentary films introduced by their filmmakers and never screened before in Macau. There were: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg, by Frédéric Rossif and Philippe Meyer commented on by Philippe Meyer, Morning Sun by Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé and R. Gordon, commented on byCarma Hinton and S-21, by Rithy Panh, commented on by Sylvie Rollet. The symposium brought a large scope of important questions to the panel, answered some of them and realized that there is still an important distortion between historical facts and human, institutional memory that need the constant care and attention of scholars. Our yearly academic gathering was well attended by the local public and in its final appreciation turned out to be a success. You can find all presented papers in our MRI Studies 5 publication, available on our website: http://www.riccimac.org/eng/mris/5.htm.

Researcher’s activities

In the second half of the year Yves Camus has attended two conferences; the first one on August 16th till 18th at the Holy Spirit Seminary of Hong Kong – “Philarchesophia 3” and the second one held at Fudan University of Shanghai dedicated to the “Religious Education at the University Level”, where he presented a paper on “Spiritual Quest and Spiritual Formation – Clearing up misunderstandings resulting from misleading terminology”, published later in CCC 4.1., pp. 90-102. While having in mind a project of publication of the Spiritual Quest Series he met two professors; Zhang Qingxiong and Liu Ping and had a fruitful exchange of views with them. Later on at the end of August he conducted in Beijing two editorials meetings on August 30th and from November 27th till 29th. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that on September 24th the Shanghai Municipal Library opened and held an Exhibition on the Grand Ricci Dictionary, to which Yves Camus has dedicated many years of his busy research life.

César Guillen-Nuñez was mostly busy with the research and writing of his book and scholarly articles. His main preoccupation was a research for his forthcoming book Macao’s Church of St. Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China, co-sponsored by Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau and the Macau Ricci Institute, a book to be published in Hong Kong by Hong Kong University Press in 2008. The book will inaugurate a collection of books under the common name MRI Series on Art and Architecture. The second book of that collection will be dedicated to the Art of the China Trade in Macau, which is currently being researched and drafted. He was also writing for Dicionário de História de Macau, articles on China Trade and Contemporary Art in Macau, to be published by the University of Macau in 2008. His very latest publication in Spanish El Frontispicio de la Iglesia de San Pablo, Macau: Una Fachada-Retablo?” can be found in  El Museo de Pontevedra, No. LIX, Pontevedra in Galicia, Spain, 2005, pp. 219-239.

He also contributed to CCC quarterly by writing a book review of Elisabetta Corsi’s  La Fábrica de las Ilusiones: Los Jesuitas y la Difusión de la Perspectiva Lineal en China, 1698-1766, (El Colegio de México, Mexico, 2004), CCC 2.3, July-September, 2005, pp. 184-188.

The Center of Macau History Studies, as well as Jesuit Missionaries in China, are two fields which have received the attentive care by Tereza Sena. As a historian of Macau and of Jesuit Missions in China, she dedicated herself to the preparation of an essential historical data and to the collection of recent academic events related to the Jesuit Jubilee Year 2005-2006 a worldwide commemoration of the 450th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Society of Jesus, Saint Ignatius of Loyola ( 1491-1556) and of the 500th anniversary of the birth of both Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552) and Blessed Pierre Favre (1506-1546). During the celebration period, the materials will be systematically uploaded on our MRI website: www.riccimac.org/eng/spevents/index.htm  Meanwhile, she was conducting research on Macau’s Cemeteries, especially on the Cemetery of S. Miguel Arcanjo, a joint project of the Centre for Catholic Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong and of the Macau Ricci Institute.  She also cooperated with the Chinese University on the project of St. Michael’s  Catholic Cemetery of Hong Kong and has conducted research on the Portuguese writer, Wenceslau de Moraes (1854-1929),  who spent part of his life in Japan,  and on the poet Camilo Pessanha (1867-1926), as well as on the well-known historian of Macau, Fr. Manuel Teixeira (1912-2003).

At the beginning of July and after almost one year of absence from the Institute, due to the Jesuit special formation year called tertianship he undertook partly in Boston, USA and in Shaanxi, China, Artur Wardega came back to us and immediately returned to his interrupted translation into French of a novel 笠山农场 Lishan nongchang ( A Farm on the Li Mountain, La Ferme du Mont Li) written by Taiwanese Hakka writer, 钟理和 Zhong Lihe (1915-1960). He finished this task on August 11th and then at the end of the month he left for Paris and Brussels where first he has revised the French manuscript with the help of Mme Marie-Thérèse Deckoninck-Gauthier and where he was contacting publishing houses both in France and Belgium. On September 30th he went for two weeks to Xi’an for his research studies. On October 25 he gave two lectures at the Department of Religions of the Macau Inter-University Institute on St Paul entitled “Paul, the Founder of Christianity? or “the Founder of the Church?” On November 27 he went for three days trip to Beijing where he accompanied Yves Camus during his editorial meetings on contracts and copyrights.

Visits

On December 19th a freshly nominated provincial of the Chinese Province of the Society of Jesus, Father Louis Gendron, S.J., paid his very first visit to the MRI.