Colloquium: That Noble Dream? Reflections on History Dialogue and Reconciliation in East Asia

The UCLA Center for Chinese Studies presents Professor Daqing Yang of George Washington University.

Speaker Bio:
A native of China, Professor Yang graduated from Nanjing University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He specialized in the history of modern Japan. His research interests include the Japanese empire, technological developments in modern Japan, and the legacies of World War II in East Asia.

In 2004, Dr. Yang was appointed a Historical Consultant to The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group at the U.S. National Archives. In fall 2006, Dr. Yang served as the Edwin O. Reischauer Visiting Professor of Japanese Studies at Harvard University.

Professor Yang is a founding co-director of the Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific program based in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and is currently working on a new project on postwar China-Japan reconciliation. He is the author of Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945. He co-edited the following books: Historical Understanding that Transcend National Boundaries, which was published simultaneously in China and Japan; Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia; and Communications Under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications.

Professor Yang has been pivotal in the reconciliation movement between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (over the interpretation of the past).