"Asia at Noon" Series Will Consider Marxist and Revisionist Views of Chinese History

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "Asia at Noon," the University at Buffalo brown-bag series of lectures and discussions that looks at research on Asia, will present two programs this month that consider China today from historical and economic perspectives.

The programs will be held at noon in 280 Park Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. They are free of charge and open to the public.

On Nov. 16, Paul Zarembka, Ph.D., professor of economics at UB, will present a lecture titled, "Reflections on Marxism in China."

Zarembka is the editor of Research in Political Economy, an annual yearbook on Marxist theory and empirical work published in the Netherlands. He has published books on economic development, econometrics and modern capital theory. His work at UB includes courses in Marxist theory and socialist economics.

This year, he participated in a conference in Kunming, China, on the theme of Marxism in 2001. The parlay was comprised of 30 scholars from China and 15 from Europe, the Middle East and the United States, all of whom addressed the current state of Marxist theory and practice.

The Nov. 30 program will feature a lecture by Mark Selden, Ph.D., titled "Reflections on the Nanking Massacre." Selden is a widely recognized authority in the revisionist history of Asia, and deals with subjects of war and war memory.

His visit is co-sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and the Department of History. At 3 p.m. that day, Selden will be a featured speaker in the history department's colloquium series.

That lecture is titled, "The United States, Japan and the Noncombatant in Twentieth-Century Wars in Asia: Reflections on Responsibility, Reparations and Reconciliation." This event, open to the campus community and public, will take place in 532 Park Hall, North Campus. It is free of charge.

Selden holds a joint appointment in history and sociology at Binghamton University and is a professorial associate of the East Asian Program at Cornell University. He has published widely in the fields of Chinese rural revolution and rural development, Southeast Asian society and politics, and U.S.-Japanese relations and historical memory.

Among the many books he has written or co-edited are "China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited" (1995), "Reinventing Vietnamese Socialism: Dai Moi in Comparative Perspective" (1993), "The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (1997, co-edited with Kyoko Selden) and "Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States" (2000).