I am very happy to say a few words about the 20th
birthday of the ACSC.
As you can see from the photograph, I am no longer
the young
man I was just 15 years ago when I first came to work at the Canadian
Embassy
in Beijing!
Reflecting back to those early days, I realize how
greatly
different the Association is today than when it started out. Many of the early members of the Association
have “gone to see Marx” as we used to say in those days.
But their contribution lives on in their
successors present here in Chongqing
today.
Twenty years ago, China was still in the
early phases
of its opening and reform program. It
was not so easy to be a Canadianist. Those were the days of the “Spiritual
Pollution Campaign” and its successor in 1987, the “Bourgeois
Liberalization
Campaign.” A lot of people in China were deeply concerned that
Western
concepts would negatively impact China’s social, political,
and
cultural life. Some of them were
suspicious of Canadian Studies.
But the 20 years of history of the ACSC has proven
that both
China and Canada have benefited from the study of
Canada in China. Over the years there have been some projects
undertaken by Canadianists in China that have directly involved
transfer of
technology between Canada
and China, such as
the Chinese
Academy of Social
Sciences – Royal
Society of Canada Democracy Project that Chen Qineng and Jiang Peng
were
associated with for several years. This
project was about exploring the political and social institutions that
best
serve a modern market economy. Much of
the early period Canadian Studies work was simply descriptive. There was great thirst in China
to know
more about the world outside. An
opportunity to travel to a foreign country was enormously exciting in
those
days.
Twenty years on, the field of Canadian studies in China
has
matured considerably. And the work is no
longer directed simply to a Chinese audience.
For example Professor Liu Guangtai’s
study of
Chester Ronning is without question the
best of the
books on Ronning that have been published
to
date. His contribution is not just to Canadian studies in China but to Canadian
studies
everywhere. The same can be said for the
studies of Canadian missionaries out of Shandong University. Li Wei has done a wonderful piece of work in
translating Alvyn Austin’s Saving China.
As a mirror of this, his colleague, Dong Linfu’s,
study of James
Menzies will be coming out in the spring in English published by
the University
of Toronto Press.
Studying Canadian things no longer seems strange
or
exotic. The focus is not longer so much
on the “foreign-ness” of Canada,
but of Canadian things as expressions of our common humanity.
Let me thank you for giving me this opportunity to
“speak”
at this meeting even though I am not able to come to attend myself.
I wish the ACSC continued success
Charles Burton
October 26, 2004
于Niagara