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Professor Jonathan Spence to give 60th anniversary BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures
By Cindy Carter, published May 23, 3a.m.
Historian and translator extraordinaire Jonathan Spence will give the prestigious 60th anniversary BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures.
The series of four lectures, entitled Chinese Vistas, will be broadcast weekly at 9.00am on Radio 4, beginning on 3 June 2008. (Nice date for a lecture series on China, don't you think?)
See this press release for more info and links.
Comments
I just listened to the first one, and I was a bit disappointed, to be honest. Maybe that's inevitable, given the limitations of the form. A lot of hot issues reared their heads - religious freedom, moral vacuum, relationship with the past - but there didn't seem to be much substance to the discussion of any of them. I might have missed something, as I was listening while working, but I hope they improve. I'm looking forward to the last one, particularly.
Incidentally, I never knew Spence was English! Always assumed he was American.
Phil, June 7, 10:53p.m.
Ditto on the feeling of disappointment.
Yes, it was great to hear for the very first time the voice of a favorite author (I especially enjoyed his "Kang Hsi"), and his talk re: Confucianism was interesting in that it gave me an overview of how the Analects has been used/abused over the centuries.
But I was struck by two things during the Q&A:
Spence finds it hard to stay "on message." There were some good questions, but several times he answered only one of those posed by a listener, and more often than not voiced his own opinion rather about China -- rather than doing as asked, i.e., responding from the point of view of what the Analects say.
Even this much-respected sinologue tiptoes around issues considered touchy by the powers-that-be in China.
Over the last 20 years I have seen Westerners gradually move from a position of absolute ignorance about the PRC, to a better informed but (sometimes hyper-) critical position, and of late, one of almost deference to Chinese as the (sole) interpreters of their culture.
Are we now to accept the standard position of most Chinese, and certainly the government, that ONLY Chinese nationals possess the qualifications to speak in an informed and critical way about their society and culture? That seems a real pity to me, and in that sense, the way Spence -- a scholar respected in the West and in China -- answers the questions following his lecture make me feel disappointed in his unwillingness to voice opinions that might put him at odds with mainstream Chinese thinking.
Bruce Humes, June 9, 9:29p.m.
The man is a painfully pompous and boring speaker, anyone would have been better than him.
FOARP, June 12, 6:11a.m.
Lecture 2 Much better than lecture 1, I reckon, for being much less ambitious. He just does a nice historical outline of the relationship between the UK and China. It'd be fine for a first undergraduate lecture, but it's a bit dull for a major public lecture, isn't it? Just on the questions now, and he's dodging them mightily. I'm starting to agree with FOARP. A lot of the questioners are talking about the Chinese community in Britain, and it seems pretty clear that Spence doesn't have much to say about this. The whole placing of the lecture in Liverpool, with a strong Chinese community, is thus wasted. Bleh.
Phil, June 19, 3:39a.m.