On November 7, 2015, a conference entitled “The Modern East Asian Path – from the Chaos of War to Peace”, the fourth panel of the Beijing Forum (Constructing a Road for Peace: Historical Responsibility and Multiple Memory) was held in the Moonlight Hall of the Yingjie Exchange Center at Peking University (PKU). The conference was made up of two parts: the first part focused on politics and war while the second part emphasized culture and education. Each part had three speeches addressed by leading speakers and a Q&A session.
The first part was hosted by Chen Yung-fa, an expert in Chinese modern history from Taiwan University. Mao Haijian, professor from the University of Macau, gave the first speech, introducing the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and underscoring the significance of looking at a historical event in a larger and wider scope to find out its complexity.
Esherick Joseph, Professor at the UC San Diego, specializes in Chinese modern history, and he shared his view on China in 1943, putting forward the triumphs and troubles of the year and pointing out the destiny and doubt of KMT at that time.
Hans van de Ven, Professor from the History Department of Cambridge University, talked about Japan’s surrender in 1945, which was then followed by a free discussion on East Asian history and politics.
Hosted by William C. Kirby, Yeh Wen-hsin from UC Berkeley, Liu Yigao from the Department of History at PKU, and Lee James from HKUST gave presentations of on their own projects in the second part.
Lee’s research was titled “Changes in the Social Origins of China’s Educated Elite, 1865-2014”. The school admission data covered the period from the late Qing Dynasty to recent years. Lee found that elites standing out in exams in different decades had diverse backgrounds.
During the conference, scholars and professors expressed their ideas freely and reached the consensus that there were diverse histories and memories in East Asia and the development of peace should requires more research of history.
Written By: Yu Wufei
Edited By: Wei Yuchen
