Nov. 19 - Chris Patten and Amartya Sen!

I saw Chris Patten and Amartya Sen today!

Today at Sheldonian Theatre there was a Distinguished Public Lecture, titled "The Pursuit of Justice", by Professor Amartya Sen. Chairing the lecture was Lord Patten of Barnes, the current Chancellor of University of Oxford and previously the last Governor of Hong Kong.

Interestingly, Professor Amartya Sen started and ended commenting about the two kinds of knowledge and the contradiction of theory and practice. He especially mentioned Raphael's Athenian Academy. I don't want to praise myself but this contradiction between knowledge of theory and knowledge of practice was something that I have been thinking about since the beginning of 2009, and I am pretty sure this is my original thought, just like the "Matt Hastings Question" in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding about the logical validity of waking up next morning finding oneself floating in the air.

Professor Amartya Sen reminded me of a question that I had earlier this year when we dealt with Rabindranath Tagore in Religion 309. India has produced some great intellectuals in the twentieth century. Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen are two perfect examples of influential public intellectual who are very influential both domestically and internationally. This tradition could easily be traced back to Rammohun Roy, the father of modern India. Tagore was an international celebrity with no doubt. Sen was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. I wonder, when can China produce great intellectuals like such? I can't imagine at the moment any Chinese being the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, or of Balliol College, Oxford. Looking back at the century, China never had intellectuals of such tremendous influence: 100+ people lining outside of Sheldonian after it was full, waiting to hear an Indian speak. When can we have such great intellectuals? Also, India has produced a great many brilliant scholars including Spivak, Amin, Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Charkrabarty, Sugata Bose, and many more. Not many scholars in China are as thoughtful as they are on issues of critical social theory. Wang Hui and several others are pretty good, but that's it. I really wish China could produce more great intellectuals to benefit the entire human world.

The link to this event is http://ophi.qeh.ox.ac.uk/subindex.php?id=eventsSenJustice.

P.S. By the way I spoke at the Oxford Union on Monday! Although it was only a crappy nervous speech for the emergency debate... It reminded me of the days when I prepared for provincial secondary school student English public speaking competition back in 2003 and 2004.

Nov. 10 - Coincidence!

Coincidences in life always come up unexpectedly. Well, they are so by definition, so I guess my previous sentence was an analytic judgment, according to the most revered, most self-disciplined Immanuel Kant.

I went to a talk today at St. Antony's College. This seminar series was recommended to me by Professor Brian Hatcher, who sent me an email more than two weeks ago saying, "Chao, If you can make it, look for this event...The Chair is a friend of mine. Introduce yourself and say hi for me!" So I went, and both I and Dr Bose, the Chair that day, wondered how Professor Hatcher got to know about this seminar series. This is how mysteriously wonderful this guy named Brian Hatcher is.

And back from the digression. I went to the talk today. The topic today was on the book Prisoner of the State. The lecturer was Dr Zhang Wei 张炜 (Zhang as family name), a quite prominent figure and insider. (Surprisingly I just found out several minutes ago that Dr Zhang is the supervisor of Anna File's master thesis at Cambridge. You're so so lucky, Anna.) Throughout the talk I noticed the guy who sat across from me at the other side of the table. The American face looked very familiar to me. So after the talk I went up and asked his name. As expected, he was indeed a person whom I met more than three years ago in my high school in Shanghai! It was June of 2006, and the Yale accapella singing group took a tour to Asia, visited my high school (like Professor Tom Lutze did back in 1973) and gave a performance. He and I were the two emcees of that day. He studied Chinese at Yale and was going to be a junior. He was the student representative of Yale to welcome President Hu Jintao when Hu visited Yale earlier that year. President Hu Jintao was very impressed with his Chinese language skills so Hu sent him to his own alma mater, Tsinghua University, for his studying abroad. We met each other in June 2006 and never had any contacts ever since. It was such a coincidence and to my great surprise that I met him today. He asked me what have happened to me in the past three years and what brought me here. I started recounting my life and memory began to appear unreal again. It was such a different me back in 2006. Even the appearances--he could not recognize my face today. Later I took out a citizen ID card of the People's Republic of China, which had on it a photo of me when I was young, and he said, oh, that was how you looked like when I met you.

It just reminds me of the summer of 2008, when, in that August, I was going through the customs between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The customs officer looked up and down several times at my face and the picture on my passport, and finally said to me, "Oh, you look thinner back then."

Nov. 5 - Essays after Essays after Essays after Essays

I, historically, wrote 4668 words in three nights. This is a new record. 6:30 a.m. Now is time to sleep.

And, the 405th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot!