I really enjoyed the session on gender by Professor Moorti. One of the major take away for me is to use and speak more about “gender” rather than “women”. This really connected me back to a previous panel on a similar topic that I attended.

Earlier this summer, I attended a panel at Pulitzer Center in Washington D.C. on Women in Conflict Zone where  journalist, NGO workers and war photographers all spoke about their experiences. One of the panelists suggested that there is so much attention on gender that it actually distorted the truth on the ground. For NGOs, it became much easier to apply for grants if they have a focus on helping women living in conflict zones while in reality, there are actually many more men who need immediate treatment because many of them became soldiers. Another journalist noted a similar phenomenon citing the Boko Harem kidnapping that happened several years ago in Nigeria and the journalist noted that while there are actually more boys being kept hostage by Boko Harem, they never became the attention of media.

While I was left pretty confused after the lecture, I think it would have made more sense for them to speak about gender rather than exclusively on women, which reinforces the idea that women fell victimhood during conflict and needs extra protection.

It was also interesting to me that journalist and NGOs might have different missions and approaches to gender. For journalist, if their job is to report an event as comprehensively and accurately as possible, then does it mean that an additional focus on gender (for example, the emphasis on abducted school girls) might be against their ethics and distorted the truth? Or is it that journalists also need to conceptualize and acknowledge different forms of violence that all genders experience?

In yesterday’s session, we discussed truth commission and its role in post-conflict society. I find it incredibly interesting to bring this conversation back to China and envisioning a future that is more just.

In China, we’ve also had a pretty violent history with  many large-scale traumatic events that are structurally unjust and have imposed violence on many people. The Cultural Revolution is the first large-scale events that came to my mind- lasting more than 10 years and have wronged many people because of ideological and class differences. I have limited knowledge about how China was able to get the entire society back on track or seek justice for the victims to pull the society together. More than thirty years later, the word “harmony” has been a major goal for Chinese government. On the surface, the rapid development seemed to have brought peace and silenced the victims, yet I wondered if the unhealed trauma has haunted Chinese society and is responsible for much of the violence that we observe today.

This posed an interesting case as the government responsible for all the atrocity in the past is still in power and actively seeks to eliminate the remembrances, how is it possible to ask for justice or structural changes. Remembrances becomes political. While the Japanese invasion of China and the “century of Humiliation” are repeated and taught in our history textbooks to define our sense of national identity, other parts of history are simply forgotten, for example, the Chinese invasion and continued occupation of Tibet.

In class, we discussed different forms of memorials and how do we symbolically remember history and show our gesture. It is upsetting to think that in China there is no such gesture to admit the wrongs that the government has done to its own people or the wrongs we’ve done to ourselves.

The session on evaluating the effectiveness of reconciliation is incredibly interesting. Dr. Cole discussed multiple ways that we can attempt to see how people’s attitudes have changed. For example, we can use survey to quantify how the level of trust has changed. It is not surprising to hear that some of the short term reconciliation projects failed to work on paper, because changes in attitude don’t happen over night.  I find it interesting to reflect on the work that I’ve done previously with an NGO that does work on reconciliation between China and Tibet. They have a multifaceted approach which includes school-building that uses infrastructure as the base of their work. However, they also promote a mission-driven curriculum in school so that these Tibetan students will come back and devote to the own community that raised them. This is a very rare example of foreign NGOs that are able to operate and serve the Tibetan communities in China. Thus, in their outreach work, they use their own stories as an example to appeal to their audiences and spread the message that tangible change is possible in Tibetan despite the difficult circumstances. While this is not a project on direct reconciliation between the Chinese and Tibetans at first sight, it does build some sort of trust between the Chinese authorities who witness the good that they did through building this school and the Tibetans who might change their mind and believe in the future that will get better. However, it remains to be true that no matter how much reconciliation happens on the local level, if the larger structural change does not happen, meaning that if the government does not change their view on ethnic minorities residing in China or change their repressive policies, it is hard to scale up the ground work.