The Freedom of Intellectual Exchange Starting to work on the modern Chinese literary essay in the 1990s, I published my Ph.D. thesis The History of the Chinese Essay in 1998. Because it was written in German, I hoped since then to raise interest in this subject in the anglophone world, too. With this volume in hand, this wish has become true. Some of the topics I dealt with in my thesis like the development of the genre, biblio-biographies of several essayists etc., are elaborated here extensively by my collegues in English and more detailed than I could do it in my first ground work in German. Moreover, this collection documents the lively discussion, which started among sinologists in the last years of the 20th century. I remember quite clearly, how the idea of the conference was born during a meal at the Boston AAS conference hotel with King-Fai Tam. Leo Ou-fan Lee had helped to bring both of us together, knowing that we shared a seemingly specialized hobby, the modern Chinese essay. King-Fai was preparing two collection of essay translations, one with essays from mainland China and one from Taiwan. The first is scheduled for publication. I prepared another collection of essays with both, Chinese original and English translation, published by The University Press Bochum half a year ago. The common intention of both of us is to make more Chinese essays available in English translations. King-Fai Tam and me are both fascinated of the idea of promoting this long time neglected genre and to find out more about its characteristics and the reasons of its success in the 1920s and 1930s as well as in the 1980s and 1990s. On a napkin, we outlined an AAS panel, an international conference and a volume with essays on the essay. All of these ideas are now becoming real more or less in the way we planned it: The AAS panel became an NEAAS panel at Yale, the conference took place in August 25-27, 2000 at the Academy of Euro-Asian Economy and Culture in Achern, in the Black Forest, Germany. 14 scholars of Chinese literature, from the States, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and Germany took part. All of them share the fascination of the phenomenon of the essay. Language was no barrier: The conference was conducted in English with the exception of a few papers in Chinese with English abstracts. The collection of essays on the essay are the conference proceedings in hand, this book contains extended versions of the conference papers. It was published by The University Press Bochum in December 2000. More important is the fact, that through this opportunity, we now have lively email discussions and a website with updated information on the Chinese essay. Here I would like to take the opportunity to thank the members of the organizing committee Charles Laughlin, Xinmin Liu, King-Fai Tam, and Alexandra Wagner for their great help. I very much enjoyed the discussions via email. A common philosophy stands behind the whole project: We want to share information, help each other and do not care about language barriers. Everybody can contribute in English or Chinese, some of us like me being non-native English speakers. We encourage the reader to make use of the large margins for personal notes in the awareness of pursuing a tradition dating back to the very origins of essay writing. Having most of the conference papers in hand with this book, everybody is welcomed to give a feed back. This kind of free intellectual exchange I first experienced in the States when Leo Ou-fan Lee invited me to stay from 1998-1999 as a visiting scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. The contributors to this volume can only introduce and draw the attention of the readers to this Chinese genre, the joy of reading remains to the reader himself. M.W.weiterlesen