About Global China Humanities Series 全球中國人文講座
The Center launches its inaugural Global China Humanities Lecture Series in February 2021. We invite internationally renowned scholars and young, first-book authors to discuss their latest works on topics ranging from Cold War history, diaspora studies, global medicine to literature.
香港科技大學全球中國中心舉辦全新的人文講座系列。我們邀請國際知名的學者、剛推出首本著作的年青學人來探討冷戰史、離散研究、全球醫療史、文學史等等課題。
每次講座先由講者演講50-60分鐘，隨後有30分鐘的問答時間。講座免費，公眾人士均可報名參與，惟必須先報名。講座將以中文或英文進行。
GLOBAL CHINA HUMANITIES SERIES: Paving The Road Away From Reconciliation: The Anatomy Of Injustice In Post-WWII Japanese War Crimes Trials
Prof. Barak Kushner 顧若鵬教授 ( Cambridge)
4th May 2021 (Mon) 16:00 (HK), 0900 (Cambridge)
Language: English
Please REGISTER HERE to secure your place
Abstract:
The Tokyo Trial, 1946-1948, and the lesser BC class war crimes trials throughout East Asia of former Japanese soldiers, never get mentioned with the same hushed tones of legal reverence as the Nuremberg Tribunal of Nazis. Why did justice seemingly fail in East Asia when theoretically the same international law was pursued on both sides of the globe? Put another way, if Nuremberg bequeathed an academy to carry forth into the next generation the Nuremberg Principles, what happened in war crimes courts in East Asia that rendered such notions legally impotent? This talk investigates how a history of injustice developed in postwar East Asia and how it came to wield the potent political force it manifests today.
About the Speaker:
Barak Kushner is Professor of East Asian History in the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has edited four volumes and written three single authored monographs, most recently Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Winner of the American Historical Association's 2016 John K. Fairbank Prize). In 2020, he hosted and narrated three episodes of a television documentary series on war crimes trials in China produced by the Shanghai Media Group, the Asia-Pacific War Crimes Trials Documentary Series 《亚太战争审判》. He was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study last year and is also a guest visiting professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University.