With the inaugural Tang Prize year already in the history books and the next round approaching, the Tang Prize Foundation is touching down at strategic points all over the world to promote the core values of the prize and its four categories: Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law. Tang Prize Foundation CEO Dr. Jenn-Chuan Chern traveled to Chicago this week (March 26-29) for the 2015 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual meeting.
According to Dr. Chern, the Tang Prize’s category in Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an important field on the world stage, and he has taken the opportunity of the 2015 AAS meeting to stimulate more international discussion and bring more talented minds to the mill of Chinese thought. Representing Taiwan, Dr. Chern also delivered a short speech at the event on behalf of Zhu Yun-han, CEO of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and Jen-der Lee, researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology. Chinese culture is playing an even bigger role on the world stage, said Dr. Chern, and although the classics of Chinese thought may not be technologically relevant, they offer us new ways at looking spiritually at the world and ourselves; that is why they continue to be published and read by an ever growing audience in this technology-focused age. Add to that China’s extraordinary growth over the past two decades, and it becomes no surprise that research of Chinese history and culture is becoming ever more relevant.
AAS was founded in 1941 and currently boasts a membership of over 8,000 members worldwide. It is not only the world’s largest organization for Asian-related studies, but is also the organizer of the world’s largest annual meeting for research on China, Sinology, and Asia in general. Some of its attendees include the Academia Sinica, the National Central Library of Taiwan, and National Taiwan University; altogether a respectable 3,500 separate organizations participate each year. Four full days of presentations, roundtable discussions, and other academic topics makes this event a nexus of Asian studies.
Aside from the lively discussion, ceremony also had its place this year. On March 27 the National Central Library donated its newest publications to the University of Chicago’s East Asian Library in a donation ceremony attended by National Central Library Director Lü Bao-jia, East Asian Library Curator Yuan Zhou, Director of the Center for East Asian Studies Donald Harper, and Tang Prize CEO Dr. Chern. In this collaboration for strengthening academic exchange between Taiwan and the US, the central library presented the university with 474 publications, 524 volumes in total, on topics in the humanities and the social sciences.
Included in the donation was the DVD collection of the first Tang Prize year and publications on the reconstruction efforts after Typhoon Morakot. The DVD collection records such notable events from the 2014 Tang Prize year as the award ceremony and concert—where Western and Chinese opera mixed and mingled with Taiwanese opera, symphony, and aboriginal tunes; the Tang Prize Lectures and Masters’ Forum series, where the five inaugural laureates shared their life stories; and the four short specials on the life and work of the laureates. The University of Chicago has also given much to Taiwan—it is alma mater to such scholars as the previous vice president of Taiwan and Academia Sinica member Dr. Cho-yun Hsu.
AAS will be the first in a series of international meetings that the Tang Prize will attend this spring. From next week, March 28 to April 1, the Foundation will attend Experimental Biology in Boston, where it will also hold the first Tang Prize hosted lecture in the United States. The March 31 lecture will be given by the inaugural Tang Prize laureate in Biopharmaceutical Science, Dr. James P. Allison, and is part of a 10-year cooperation the Foundation has signed with the leaders of the event directed at promoting attention in the bio-medical field. From Boston the Tang Prize then moves to Washington DC for the American Society of International Law (ASIL) annual meeting (April 8-11), rounding out its first-ever tour of international conferences and adding one more platform for international academic exchange.
