Newsletter No. 19 (Dec 1998)

Introduction of new EACS officer

Election results at the EACS General Assembly in Edinburgh

“How come that the papers I like the most are not in my own field?” During the Edinburgh conference this rhetorical question was raised by a well-established sinologist. She hastened to ensure the bystanders that the papers in the sessions of her own field were in fact all very relevant. So the issue was not frustration over poor quality, but rather positive surprise of realising that in spite of people’s various disciplines, preferences, approaches and ideas, members of the EACS first of all share a basic and profound interest in the diversified region and political entity which we call China. Other conferences specialising in, for instance, anthropological, sociological or political themes rather than regions, are of course essential for developing theories and expanding knowledge within one’s own fields of interest. But here China scholars sometimes experience a certain disinterest in China, partly due to widespread notions of China being too difficult to grasp, too difficult to work in, and maybe even too “burdened” with literary tradition to fit into studies of so-called “developing countries”. Very recently a director of a respected research institution told me that having focused my research on the region of China, my qualifications were rather narrow! This is an interesting point of view, since the same comment would hardly have been raised had I specialised in, for instance, American history. And then we are back to the EACS conference: Because one of the strengths of the EACS conference is precisely that it offers a rare opportunity to share one’s interest in China with scholars working with topics ranging from criminal procedure in early Han, to love songs in present-day China. To be sure, even as a China addict there are papers which are incomprehensible unless you are specialised in the field, but to me the EACS conferences provide a chance to learn about aspects of China I did not even know existed! And, from time to time in Edinburgh, I was inspired, provoked and enlightened by papers in panels
which I attended more or less because I did not know what else to attend – European scholars at work….

Who would deny that the social aspects of the EACS conference are almost as important as the presentations of papers? The variety of the research topics coloured the off-conference debates in Scottish pubs and restaurants – European scholars at play…. And although Clinton inevitably popped up amidst Chinese literature and European research politics, it is a relief every second year to be allowed to freely talk about China from early to late, for four full days.

Whenever scholars at a conference restrain from engaging in discussions about the organisational aspects of the event, it is a sign of near-perfect organisation. In Edinburgh everything went so smoothly, that it sufficed to conclude that the organisational work (directed by Prof. Bonnie McDougall) could serve as a model for the following EACS conferences. The innovative idea of having a keynote address at the beginning of the conference (by Prof. Wang Mingming) and a presentation of the chairman’s visions at the end (by Prof. Rudolf Wagner), contributed to the high level of academic standard at the conference. In my opinion, it also called for further encouragement of more senior and established China scholars to present their work at the conference. Another personal suggestion for improvement is to encourage more people to organise – for example interdisciplinary – panels around a topic. And then, of course, it would be nice if the weather next time was a bit warmer….

Prepared for the Board Meeting of the EACS, 9 September, 1998.

Presented to the 12^th EACS Conference, Edinburgh, 12 September, 1998

Dear Colleagues,

a series of mishaps led to my office booking a flight for me to Edinburgh on Thursday morning while I was in Tokyo. When I discovered the mistake, the total cost of penalty and a new ticket would have been over DM 2000. I therefore have to apologize for not being able to attend this Board meeting. Following the suggestion of our General Secretary I will therefore begin what may become a new routine, a written report by the President.

We are meeting here in the beautiful city of Edinburgh for the second time. Bonnie McDougall has shouldered the burden of organizing this year’s biannual conference, and we all owe her our gratitude for her work and for the fine hospitality she has shown to us last year and this.

A number of us will be leaving the board after serving here for many years. I think the Board has done much to instil more life and vigour into the EACS, and in the name of this Association I would like you for this important service to the profession. My special thanks go to Harald Boeckman, the General Secretary, to Brunhild Staiger, the Treasurer, and to Marja Kaikkonen for her editing the Newsletter. Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere and Roderick Whitfield have been friendly enough to serve as referees for the Library Travel Grant.

1. Membership

After a rapid growth and a very visible and sizeable rejuvenation in the membership during the last five years, membership has now reached 675. The simplified procedures for membership application, the availability of the forms in the Newsletters and on our website have both helped. I think a further simplification would be in place. I suggest the Board may decide to waive the two references altogether and decide to have the President and Secretary General as the collective signatories so as to avoid a change in the constitution.

A further obstacle of membership development is payment of dues across currency borders. With the coming of the Euro in January 1999 as a non-cash payment unit, things should become much easier, and sizeably cheaper.

I suggest the Board may decide to define the annual fee at 20 Euro. This would be an increase in fees, but the activity of the EACS has greatly increased and it will be necessary to provide some modest assistance to those of the board with heavy administrative duties such as the Treasurer so that some of the work may be done by paid students. Otherwise it will be difficult to find scholars willing to assume these duties.

I suggest furthermore that the Board may decide to establish a ten-year membership fee option at 200 Euro. A lifelong membership option with a one-time payment might seem an alternative, but inflation problems and long-term planning in an Association such as ours do not seem to make this optimal.

I would furthermore suggest that the next board explore together with the transition to the Euro the option of an automatic membership fee payment through a credit card. This would dramatically reduce the annual troubles of both members and officers with the payment of dues.

The membership of the EACS represents a very sizeable part of all active sinologists in Europe. The percentages of active sinologists who are members of the EACS varies greatly from country to country. Perhaps the Treasurer can provide the statistics for the different countries. A comparison with the membership numbers of the national organizations for example in France and Britain will show that the EACS has by far not tapped its full potential.

Perhaps the most effective way of broadening the membership base would be a segmental approach, depending on membership distribution in the different countries. There might be a focus on more senior scholars in one country where this group is not well represented, a focus on junior, generally post-doc scholars in countries where they have their own organization which would facilitate contact, and a focus on having at least one or two members in each institution of a country where membership is concentrated in a few places. The main responsibility for this work would be with the members of the Board from the respective countries. The next Board might want to continue work in this direction by providing Board members with the numbers and name lists, and making membership development a regular topic of the Board meetings.

I would suggest that the Board may decide to directly address the sinological Institutions and collections in Europe to become non-voting members. This would ensure that they have the Newsletter in their libraries which itself has become an important information resource on conferences, data bases, new publications, jobs, and the like.

The relationship between EACS and the European Association of Sinological Librarians should be improved. I have written a letter [appended in this issue of the Newsletter, ed.] to EASL asking them to consider holding their meetings in conjunction with the EACS conferences, and to consider co-sponsoring the Sinological Serials in European Libraries Project. I think the next EACS Conference should make such an effort more attractive by offering to insert EASL panels into the general programme or, if EASL should decide for another venue, to offer segments on items such as resource development, digitalization, interactive cataloguing which would offer occasion for an exchange between EASL and EACS members. Technically, EASL members are still collectively member of the EACS but this collective and modest fee has never been paid and perhaps a new arrangement might be found.

2. Cooperation with other Organizations

EACS is a mem
ber of a number of international scholarly bodies, but there is little actual contact. Prof. Stokhof , the Director of IIAS in Leiden, has informally suggested to move towards the formation of a European Association of Asian Studies along the North American model. The International Conference of Asian Scholars (ICAS) in Leiden was, among other things, an attempt to test the viability of such a concept. The Asia Committee of the European Science Foundation also seems to have been inspired by such a concept.

Having talked with many scholars attending the ICAS conference, and having been directly involved as a referee, participant, and speaker, I have the feeling that most European scholars were very happy about the chance to meet colleagues from their own fields in North America. There were a number of cross-over “Asian” panels, but it seems that, much as in the AAS meetings, most scholars in Chinese or Indian Studies would find more in common with Sinologists and Indologists even in other specialties than their own than with each with scholars working on another Asian culture. In terms of methodology scholars tend to rather read studies in European or American fields akin to theirs than about a country adjacent to their area of interest.

Asia is, of course, a cultural and geographical construct with no reality of its own. In strictly scholarly terms I personally would not see a good justification for such an overarching association.

On the other hand all of the different fields in Asian studies have some common problems. Many of them are situated in small institutions with less than three professors, with small budgets and libraries, and relatively low numbers of students. While the general research activity in these fields might be above average, they have a hard stand in the competition for attention and resources with large fields such as sociology, political science, history, or the modern European languages. This is true on the regional, national, and European level as well, where they are often regarded as fragrant little orchids with not practical value and no competence to deal with the Asian turmoil of the day. I could therefore imagine that a case could be made for the need of such an Association if it could be proven that it would be able to change something in this regard, namely to be a collective lobbying body.

The bulk of the applications for the ICAS meeting was in the field of Chinese Studies. While this attests to the liveliness of our field, it also meant that a disproportionately large part of the proposals (over 60% if I recall) had to be rejected to make it a meeting that could still be legitimately called one of “Asian scholars.” At the same time there was a certain competition between the ICAS and the EACS conferences. Many scholars will not want to attend two meetings in a short time, and many also do not have a desk overflowing with so much first class research that they have two original contributions ready within three months. While this has certainly reduced the number of submissions of papers for Edinburgh, I do hope this will not be to the detriment of this conference. From the applications for the EACS conference that I have seen, the general professional level has continued to improve over previous years. If another meeting of the ICAS type should be planned in Europe at a time of an EACS conference, I would suggest that negotiations should be made with the organizer so that the time span between the two conferences is large enough.

3. Projects

The EACS runs two CCK funded projects, the Library Travel Grant, and SSELP. The application for an extension of the Library Travel Grant has not been successful, but enough funds are left for a quite a few more travels. SSELP has been extended for another year. We owe much gratitude to the Foundation for its generous and continuous support of European Chinese Studies. I insert here the Report on the SSELP project.

I. Development and State of SSELP

II. Further Development

III. Enhancing acceptance and use

IV. Long term perspective

V. Statistics

The project was begun in January 1996 with financing of the CCK Foundation in response to an application by the EACS. Its purpose was to create a data pool of the holdings of sinological periodicals in European collections to facilitate research and shorten access times for important items. After two years, financing has been extended for another year. As a guest of the Sinological Institute of the University of Heidelberg, the project benefitted from the experience and support of the Institute in using ALLEGRO-C as the technical basis for the database. As with any pilot project, many new features and especially import routines had to be developed by the SSELP staff itself and by other specialists. Since summer 1998, SSELP has a public access catalogue on the World Wide Web (http://sun.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/eacs/sselp). This catalogue is to be updated by adding complete, new sets of databases that had to be changed from their original format into the SSELP format and data structure. Cooperation by sinological libraries has been good and is improving, but is hampered by lack of staff. Acceptance of the on-line public-access catalogue has increased rapidly among users.

So far two blocks of data are contained in the web catalogue: Set one consists of the data of a fist attempt at a Union Catalogue, European Database of Chinese Serials (EDoCS) with 526 institutes, a fair part of them German Institutes with very small relevant holdings, but also a few major collections, and a second set accumulated by SSELP including 17 institutes from France, Great Britain, Russia, and Germany (please see 5. Statistics). The data of the Far Eastern Library in Stockholm provided by Lars Fredrikson, of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, of the Institut for Far Eastern Languages in Lund; of the Royal Library of Copenhagen; and the data set of Cambridge University Library containing 8 local institutions, have all been received and transformed for importation into the SSELP base. They will be available by mid-October 1998 together with the updates of the original holdings.

When a broad base is thus fixed, the SSELP work will be done into this catalogue directly (which is not the case at the moment for safety reasons) and every change will appear on the web catalogue instantly. Institutes can already enter new records directly through the “New Record Entry” pages via the SSELP homepage. Early in November they will also be able to retrieve a title already in the database and add new information to it (such as updating or adding information on local holdings) through another routine that is under development with the ALLEGRO-team in Braunschweig; finally, SSELP and the Allegro-team are cooperating to develop a routine that will allow institutes to download their own holdings from the SSELP database which should greatly reduce the costs in creating and maintaining a local periodicals catalogue. This routine should be in place by early January 1999. By the end of 1998 SSELP will have a completely functional database available via the web that mainly will need editing and updating work.

In enhancing completeness, acceptance, and use of this useful tool the cooperation of the librarians of sinological collections is crucial. EASL members have greatly contributed to the development of the database, and it is hoped that EASL might officially e
ndorse the project at its 1998 meeting.

To ease access to the database, libraries with net access might want to put an active SSELP icon onto their homepages that would allow users to enter the database with a mouse-click. Librarians are also encouraged to make the database known to researchers in their libraries. Efforts will be made to make the database available for a transitional period on disks for institutes without net access.

SSELP will increase its efforts to secure the cooperation of libraries that have not been able to contribute until now. Libraries just beginning to digitalize their serial catalogues are encouraged to adapt the format of SSELP which would allow them to download, free of charge, entries for a very large part of their serials, saving much time and effort in the process. Here visits from SSELP staff to those libraries to introduce them into the systems and handling of the catalogue might be welcome. At the same time such visits could help in forging a good working relationship.

The EACS administers a European Library Travel Grant by the CCK. This allows European sinologists to get financial support for research visits to a select group of European collections. The SSELP database helps in spotting needed materials and planning such library visits.

IV. Long term perspective

The CCK grant is meant as initial financing. It will end after this additional year. By that time a basic structure of the database will be in place and the base will have around 14000 titles with holding statements from nearly all major European collections. By that time a routine should be tested and approved that allows cooperating libraries to manually, and if possible, mechanically update their holding statements (simultaneously with their internal updating). Efforts should be made to find an European institution with the technical equipment, the computer know-how and the necessary personnel that is willing to permanently host the SSELP and be in charge of the ongoing operation that should be much reduced when compared to the present.

A decision will have to be made by the EACS in 1999 based on the experiences with SSELP whether to pursue a similar but much larger project for sinological monographs or special sections thereof, for which financing from European foundations should be sought.

The SSELP is the first on-line European Union Catalogue of serials in non-Western scripts. It is an achievement of all those who worked to make this possible. The scholarly community owe gratitude to them as well as to the CCK for generous financial support.

In August 1997 a Belgian management recruiting firm approached the EACS to jointly enter a bid to manage a EU project that is to send junior and middle level managers from European firms to China for a two year language, guanxi, and knowledge development program. This firm runs the equivalent program for Japan, but the management in Japan is in the hands of MITI, and there is no language part. As many EACS members are competent in Chinese language training, the firm approach us to cooperate. The Board agreed to give it a try and make a final decision later on when exact conditions were known. A preliminary bid was entered, and was short-listed among the five groups asked to submit a detailed proposal. The Belgian firm at this moment decided that profitability was too low, and withdrew.

I think, this experience notwithstanding, some more effort should be made to involve EACS on a European level. At the moment there are only neatly defined programs, there is no funding for anything outside these programs. But there might be situations where these programs fit EACS interest and profile, and then another bid might be considered.

I also suggest that we should continue the efforts to keep the members updated about programs that are of possible interest to individuals or institutions within EACS. For this both the newsletter and the website should be used.

4. Scholarly Activity

The EACS does not have the staff to follow scholarly developments that would enable me to make a solid and data-based assessment here. What follows are very subjective impressions.

a. The efforts to upgrade the professional quality of the EACS conferences through a system of referees, by publishing the abstracts ahead of the conferences, and by selecting some of the papers for a conference volume have been largely successful. The difficulty that referees are too shy to apply rigorous scholarly standards in the selection of papers to be presented is gradually being overcome. I would suggest that referees should be encouraged to give some help and suggestions especially to scholars who due to their age or location have had little exposure to such a competition. If the core of a proposal sounds promising, this help could go far in making it acceptable. Accepting the duty of a referee should imply personal attendance at the conference and chairing some of the sections for which the referee was responsible. The referees should also be encouraged to join the conference with a paper of their own. The participation of senior scholars with their own papers has not been strong enough. I would suggest that efforts should be made – for example by asking them to become referees – to encourage senior scholars to actively participate in the Conferences.

b. Most institutes have been hit by the sharp restrictions on state spending that came during the past two years. Their mostly insufficient libraries have further fallen behin
d, in many cases they have lost jobs.

c. Research project funding has remained available from national funding organizations for a sizeable amount of research projects, conferences and the like. This is not really due to high allotments earmarked for Chinese Studies, but at least in part due to the very uneven distribution of applications, and the generally rather low number of applications at least in some countries. The successful applications to the CCK are for a good part for institutional enhancement for which it is hard to find financing from European institutions. The applications for research projects have had a very high rejection rate; this must be attributed to the fact that they did not match international professional standards. It reflects the fact that most of the best project applications go to national funding agencies. The members of the Board should encourage scholars with high-quality projects to consider the CCK, and efforts should be made to help scholars professionalize their applications. A workshop for this purpose might be considered at the next EACS conference.

d. The quality of the applications for the pre- and postdoc scholarships of the CCK has remained generally high. The fact that the stipends are taxed in some countries, and are lower after taxation than other forms of support, has led to an imbalance of applications with practically no applications from the Nordic countries.

e. While many European sinologists are invited to international scholarly conferences or compete in the submission process of such conferences as the AAS, I feel this number is far too low in view of the number and qualifications of sinologists here. One problem certainly is the language of publications, another an inordinately strong focus among many of our US colleagues on things published by other US sinologists and a relative disregard for things published elsewhere, even if this be in English. Given the growing ease of younger scholars with English, the Association might help to ease communication here by publishing calls for papers, topics of international conferences as well as reports on such conferences by European participants in the Newsletter.

f. The number of operative high quality refereed sinological periodicals in Europe is rather low. The number of European scholars successfully submitting papers in the main journals of the field outside Europe should also be distinctly higher. It may be a hopeful sign that two new journals have been launched in Chinese Archaeology and in Chinese gender studies, and that a third is about to be launched with a focus on XXth century China.

g. The number of databases in Chinese studies has been growing exponentially over the last years. While a number of them are available to on-line to users in other places, many of them have rigid proprietary restrictions or a technical structure (such as CD-Rom) that makes it very hard to access them on-line. The availability of these databases to which now a digitalized Siku quanshu is being added, as well as on-line information resources for bibliographical purposes or information retrieval has brutally changed the standards of the field regardless whether the individual scholar has on-line or in-house access to these data or not, is aware of these resources or not, or fundamentally loathes computers or not. The EACS had done much to keep its members abreast at least of some of the developments, and a fair pool of these databanks exist in various European institutions. However, the actual competence of European scholars in this field and in their real-life use of these very rich resources leaves still much to be desired, quite apart from the fact that most of these resources have an extremely uneven distribution and accessibility in Europe. I would suggest that the EACS continues and broadens its efforts at familiarizing sinologists with these resources and their use through the Newsletter and workshops during or outside the biannual meetings.

h. The board might want to consider whether to include into the Newsletter and the Torino agenda features that would help improve the professionalism especially of young scholars in writing papers, submitting proposals for conferences, and in writing proposals for funding agencies. In many cases the lack of often very simple knowledge and skills can kill a proposal with a good potential. The publication of short articles on these subjects, and a workshop at a conference might be a good way. A similar project might be considered for the access and use of databases both in modern and classical Chinese studies.

5. European Job Market in Chinese Studies.

EU law opens the European job market. It is my understanding that it is even illegal within EU to give preferential treatment to candidates from the country where the job is situated over candidates from other EU countries.

To a certain and rather small extent hiring of non-nationals has already been practised. This was mostly the case for senior positions irrespective of the nationality of the applicant, or hiring followed a longer pattern of the kind as in the case of British universities hiring US citizens, and vice versa. This should and will continue. The emerging open job market of the EU, however, is quite a different matter, and one which I believe is of great importance for our field. I think that an open European job market on all levels would be to the benefit of the profession because it would increase competition and lower the borders between different national scholarly communities. At present, Chinese Studies like area studies all over the world are in an important generational shift. The intervening dry years have prompted many gifted potential scholars to turn elsewhere. It is all the more important that the best will be selected from as big a pool as possible to insure quality, and, last not least, the quality of the next generation’s education. EACS as a professional organization should take a positive stand on this issue.

Practically I think EACS should do two things: First actively promote and develop the option provided by the EACS website to make it an important information bulletin for jobs. To an extent this is happening already, especially for German jobs, but too few people know about it, and too many jobs still are not advertised there. Second, give a short, informative article about the legal situation of European job offering in the academic field with references to the relevant documents and paragraphs in the Newsletter.

6. Farewell

It has been a pleasure working with the Board in furthering the development of our field in Europe and internationally. I wish to thank the members of the board as well as the membership at large for their continuous encouragement and support which made this heavy burden bearable. I wish the EACS a further healthy and strong development and I will certainly continue to do what is in my modest powers to contribute to this.

The President

To the European Association of Sinological Librarians

Dear Colleagues,

it has become a sad habit that the biannual meetings of our two organisations are held in different places at about the same time. I believe we all agree that a sinologist is much like a helpless infant without a library and a competent librarian to manage it, and that a library does need the constant input of suggestions from the scholars using its reso
urces.

I therefore think that both EACS and EASL would greatly benefit from holding their meetings in conjunction at the same place. This would enable scholars to meet the librarians from other institutions, and would enable librarians to make their own contributions to the community of scholars and familiarise themselves with shifting scholarly interests. As there are many things that have to be discussed among librarians, a solution might be to start the EASL meeting a day early, and to continue to have part-time EASL meetings that could also be attended by non-librarians interested. The joint organisation would also mean that much of the preparatory work (facilities, hotels, rooms) could be handled by the EACS organisers without much additional work. The next EACS conference will be in Turin in 2000.

A second item concerns SSELP. Many of you have been exceedingly supportive and helpful to build up this database, and many have only been prevented by lack of time and resources. For this we owe you much gratitude. SSELP is financed for one more year, then it will have to trot on its own feet or find another sponsor in Europe. Two urgent requests come to my mind for the coming year: Your co-operation in familiarising the scholars and students in your libraries with this resource and in easing the access from your library computers. Second, to help us in developing with all precipitation the routine that will allow on-line updating of holdings, as well as an easy downloading of an institute’s own holdings. This would cut costs dramatically, enhance quality, and improve access.

Given the very close connection between the work of SSELP and the general purpose of EASL you might also want to consider whether EASL would be willing to join EACS in the further development of this project and endorse it. This would very probably also help in securing the long-term viability of SSELP.

My presidency ends this year. However, I did not want to leave this position without this appeal to you fellow-sinologists to join us in a common endeavour. With my best wishes for a successful and stimulating meeting, and my hopes that we will soon hold our meetings in conjunction

Rudolf G. Wagner

Ostasiatisches Seminar der Universität Zürich – Zürichbergstr. 4, CH-8032 Zürich

Sinologisches Seminar Universität Heidelberg

Akademiestr. 4-8 D 69114 Heidelberg

Zürich, October 7, 1998

Dear Professor Wagner,

thank you very much for your letter to the conference of EASL, dated Sept. 9, 1998.

It was discussed at length, and on behalf of all the members of EASL present at the conference I would like to answer according to the outcome of our discussion.

***********************************************************************************

The members of EASL regret that for about ten years it has not been possible to hold EASL and EACS meetings at the same place and time. Without researchers, scholars and other interested users our libraries are meaningless. On the other hand, what could researchers achieve without libraries? Nevertheless, the nature of the discussions by scholars and librarians at their respective conferences are in many respects quite different. Furthermore, time has shown that it is almost only the German colleagues who combine being a sinological librarian and student, assistant or researcher in one person, and who therefore would want to participate in both conferences. Since the founding of EASL in 1980 it has been an integrated and very important part of our conference’s schedule to visit interesting collections and libraries in order to learn as much as possible about what colleagues all over Europe are dealing with. Therefore, the meetings are always held in places where there is at least one important or so far unknown collection to look at. This is one reason why in 1997 the members agreed not to meet in Edinburgh this year but in Cambridge.

The members decided to uphold this policy for their meetings, but were in principle willing to have their conferences in some kind of conjunction with the EACS congress wherever and whenever it is possible. EASL will probably meet in Naples next year. The millennium in 2000 will at the same time be the 20th anniversary of EASL. Since EASL was founded in Leiden, there will be a jubilee meeting every ten years there, and Leiden has issued an invitation to us. The next possibility for EASL and EACS to meet together therefore lies ahead in four years time. Owing to this fact it was decided to offer the following procedure to the EACS. At the EACS conference in 2000 in Turin, some members of EASL would report on those activities of their association which are of interest to EACS participants and demonstrate our achievements in the field of library automation and networking.

There will be a need for co-ordination of dates to enable EASL members to travel to Turin after the conference in Leiden. EACS would organise hotels, computer equipment and other facilities. EASL should be able to make detailed arrangements at the conference of September 1999. Therefore, it would be necessary to establish contact between a delegate member of EACS and the chairman of EASL during 1998/99.

Concerning SSELP, it goes without saying that many EASL members have been supporting the project as much as they could. They were very pleased indeed to hear that it can be financed another year and are quite concerned about its continuation in the future. Since EASL in principle does not hold funds, unfortunately we cannot offer any financial support. Your requests have been taken very seriously, and will certainly be fulfilled according to the capacities of each library and librarian. In the hope that EACS and EASL could in the future move closer together, and with my very best wishes, I remain

Yours sincerely,

Katharina Thölen

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EU-China Academic Network (ECAN)

Second Annual Conference

Venue: Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

January 21-22, 1999

Speakers will include Prof. Barry Naughton (University of California, San Diego), Prof. Fan Gang (National Economic Research Institute, Beijing), Prof. Peter Nolan (University of Cambridge), Prof. Steve Tsang (Oxford University), Prof. Hung-mao Tien (Institute for National Policy Research, Taipei), as well as other senior scholars, government and business representatives from Europe, China, Taiwan and the United States. Topics to be addressed will include SOE reforms, social change, the resurgence of nationalism, and the impact of the Asian financial crisis. A final panel discussion will seek to provide uniquely European perspectives on developments in China and Asia.

For Further information contact:

Rachel Garbutt Leila Fernandez-Stembridge

ECAN, SOAS, University of London &
#9;Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental,

E-mail: ecan@soas.ac.uk E-mail: ceao@uam.es

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