Literary exchange crafts cultural tapestry

It was another US-China exchange, only this one was not focused on weighty issues such as trade or politics but on literary scholarship. Xu Yuechun, vice-chairman and secretary-general of the Chinese Literature and Art Critics Association, and director of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles' Literature and Art Criticism Center, is the book's co-editor. Karen Thornber, professor of literature and East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University, said via video link that although she had only enough time to skim through the book, she deemed it "a wonderful opportunity for English-speaking scholars to have access to first-rate or more first-rate Chinese scholarship on a range of topics in the arts and humanities". Fundamental reason Zhang Qingmin, director of the Literature and Art Research Center at Henan University, who shared his thoughts on current Chinese literary and art criticism, said the Chinese scholars essentially presented the fundamental reason "why we view art and aesthetics 'this way, not that way'". He said the first Chinese novel he read was The Chess Master by Ah Cheng, published in 1984, which he called "a short novel that really opened a world for me and made me want to Recalling Europe's interactions with Chinese literature, Carrera, a native of Italy, talked about Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit priest who was the first European man to enter the Forbidden City in Beijing, in 1601, and became "a great scholar of Chinese culture".