Sorry for fewer posts this week.  I have been frantically grading and getting myself ready to fly off to Beijing tomorrow.  I will be attending a conference, "The International Symposium on Confucianism in the Postmodern Era," at the Beijing Language and Culture University.  The conference has a web page here.

   My paper is entitled, "The Impossibility of Confucian Nationalism," and the abstract runs like this:

Under current global conditions,
Confucianism, in its revived contemporary form, cannot serve the nationalist
purposes of the Chinese state. The
problem is twofold: a) postmodern economic and cultural circumstances
fundamentally weaken all transcendent nationalist narratives, even as those
same circumstances fuel the demand for universalizing collective identities; b)
Confucianism, as derived from the pre-Qin texts of The Analects and Mencius, is, at its core, a philosophy of
immanence, not transcendence, and thus will always produce its own immanent
critique of any transcendental interpretation of itself.

This
paper will attempt to support the above assertions in three analytic steps: a
brief description of the postmodern condition; a discussion of nationalism and
postmodernity in general; and, finally, a consideration of how Confucianism
will likely fail to support a transcendent nationalist project under
contemporary conditions of postmodernity.

    I think my argument will push against some official thinking, and I suspect there will be some "officials" there (it is sponsored by the Ministry of Education), so I am looking forward to a spirited exchange of views. 

    I will also be visiting a former student of mine (stretching back to 1988-89 when I taught at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University center in Nanjing), who is now a professor at Beijing University.  He has asked that I come to his class and talk with his students about trade politics in the US (a topic from one of my earlier lives).   It will be good to meet and learn from young, bright Chinese students.

     I am also going to stop by China Daily and talk to the editors of the Beijing Weekend section.  You’ve probably noticed that that gig has cooled off of late.  Perhaps I can learn how to make ancient Chinese philosophy more appealing to the CD readership.

    And I will see some other former students, Ephs, who have worked their ways into interesting and important positions in Beijing: one who works for a large Chinese company expanding into private higher education ventures, and one who works in the US Embassy on trade negotiations with China.

   It should be a great trip.  Not sure how much blogging will get done.  I had good luck last time getting onto Typepad in China.  Let’s hope it works as well this time.  If it does, my next post will be from Beijing.

    Zai jian!