China and the World: Recent Talks and Publications by Professor Menegon
Professor Menegon presented a paper on March 18, 2017 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto, Canada, in a panel entitled “Information, Texts, and Intermediaries in the Making of Global Knowledge about Late Imperial China.” The paper, entitled “Court Missionaries as Imperial Informants in Early Modern China and Europe” discussed the role of court missionary technicians and officials at the Qing court as intelligence gatherers for foreign powers in Beijing, as well as the role of Jesuits as Qing imperial ambassadors to the papal court in the 18th century.
He then participated and offered comments in a roundtable at Harvard University, as part of the conference Disentangling Global Early Modernities on March, 24, 2017, together with David Armitage (Harvard University), Jorge Canizares-Esguerra (Univerity of Texas, Austin), Laura Mitchell (University of California, Irvine) and Roger Chartier (University of Pennsylvania and Collège de France).
Finally, as part of his current research on the Europeans in Beijing, he just published with Routledge and the Monumenta Serica Institute an essay entitled “Yongzheng’s Conundrum. The Emperor on Christianity, Religions, and Heterodoxy.” Through an exploration of the Yongzheng Emperor’s audiences with court missionaries in the period 1724-1733, this essay addresses a conundrum: why did Yongzheng decide to forbid the proselytization of Christianity in the Chinese provinces in 1724, while he allowed missionaries and Christians to continue their activities in Beijing, at the very core of the empire? Was this truly a contradictory set of policies? The contradiction was only apparent. The simultaneous formal prohibition of Christianity and retention of the foreign priests at court stemmed from both pragmatic governance considerations and the pursuit of Yongzheng’s religious ideology of unification of the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism). Missionary sources offer us glimpses of imperial personal views on religions and “heterodoxy” in intimate settings, and complement what we know from Qing institutional sources, helping us disentangle “Yongzheng’s conundrum.”