The European Association of Chinese Studies was founded in 1975. The main event of the association is a biannual conference, which largely became the successor to the Conference of Young Sinologists, which was held annually from 1948 to 1972. The XVIII conference was held in Riga in July 2010. Along with young scientists, recognized masters of modern sinology traditionally take part in the discussions, which makes these conferences, which, unfortunately, are still little known in our country, notable events in the scientific life of European Sinology.

The stated theme of the conference "Culture is a crowded bridge" did not restrict the participants in choosing topics for their reports. Due to the impressive scale of the event (over 240 registered participants, 17 thematic sections), compiling a complete review of the conference is a difficult task. Therefore, below we have limited ourselves to describing the most significant messages that were heard at the sections where the authors were able to visit. They hope that, despite the unavoidable incompleteness, the presented report will allow the reader to get some idea of the range of topics and the level of scientific discussion of the conference.

E. Shaughnessy Section of Ancient and Medieval History. (University of Chicago) in his report briefly described the most significant bronze vessels with inscriptions discovered in the last ten years. Unfortunately, sinological science has long had to accept the fact that new finds come not from planned archaeological excavations, but from antique markets. However, according to E. Shaughnessy, people who work with this material are aware of the responsibility of their work and do everything in their power to ensure that truly valuable finds are still acquired by museums, and not by private collectors. It is known that E. Shaughnessy does not share the views of the participants of the Chinese project "Chronology of Xia-Shang-Zhou", dedicated to establishing the exact chronology of Ancient China up to 841 BC (it is from this date that the continuous countdown of events in Sima Qian's "Historical Notes" begins). Some of the bronze vessels presented to him really make us doubt the correctness of the calculations proposed by Chinese scientists. Moreover, E. Shaughnessy believes that the data of recent finds make it necessary to revise the ancient Chinese chronology not only before, but also after 841 BC.

The report of W. Baer (University of Zurich) was also devoted to the inscriptions on bronze vessels, but the narrower question of grammatical variations and their possible connection with regional linguistic features was considered. At the current stage of studying the grammar of the ancient Chinese language, it is difficult to offer unambiguous conclusions, but it is known that some well-established ideas (such as the idea of an unconditional correlation between the order of words in a sentence and the order of the location of the definition and the defined word) are not confirmed in the actual material. V. Behr, based on the actual material, shows that the language of inscriptions on bronze vessels reflects a much wider range of deviations from the basic grammatical rules than the corpus of written texts, which was influenced by later editors.

Ms Khayutina, representing the University of Munich, addressed the problem of identifying "non-Chou" political entities. The speaker suggested that the Zhou political system should be considered as an inter-territorial network of lineage states ordered on the principle of kinship. M. Khayutina pointed out a number of reasons leading to the fact that "non-Zhousians" who left their mark in ancient Chinese epigraphy often fall out of the observer's field of view. "Non-Zhousians" were often referred to by the name of their related group, usually derived from the toponym of their place of residence, while the discriminating names rong, di, man, and or specific ethnonyms were indicated only in inscriptions compiled by Zhousians and reporting conflicts with "non-Zhousians". Non-Chousians who did not engage in such conflicts often go unnoticed. As an example of a "non-Zhou" political entity, Ms Khayutina cited the Peng political entity, whose rulers ' burial ground was discovered in 2004 on the northern bank of the Heng River in the south of Shanxi Province. The speaker points out that the Peng rulers were related by marriage to the ruling houses of the Zhou "states" belonging to the strongest Zhou Ji clan, including the Zhou royal house itself.

T. Baker (National University of Taiwan) presented his research on the continuity between the Han and Tang planning of Chang'an. Despite the fact that the city grew and changed its layout, clear traces of the Han road network can be traced even according to the plans of the 30s of the XX century. The planning principles of the Han road network were determined with sufficient accuracy, and this opens up the possibility of localizing those elements of urban planning that belong to the Tang time proper.

M. V. Korolkov (Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) presented the results of his research on the Qin land registration system, which he reconstructs based on paleographic sources. In the Qin state, a unified system of agricultural land planning was practiced, which formed a single whole with the state's road network (roads simultaneously served as borders between land plots). At the same time, this system was flexible enough to be adapted to the geographical conditions of the periphery of the Qin state. The paleographic documents studied by M. V. Korolkov come from the Qin burial site in the Qing-chuan district of the prov. Sichuan, i.e. in the lands relatively recently annexed to Qin. The flexibility of the Qin land registration system seems to be related to the flexibility of the Qin legislative system, which allowed local officials to make necessary changes and clarifications to national legislation.

Yu. Pines (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presented his hypothesis about the formation of a fundamentally new concept of history in the Qin Empire. In his opinion, in a break with the tradition of the legalist school of public thought, the propaganda machine of the Qin Empire first formulated the concept of the" end of history", based on the celebration of the successes already achieved by the empire. In the future, the Chinese state abandoned this ideology, but adopted many other elements of the state structure that first appeared during the brief period of the Qin Empire.

H. van Ess (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) shared his observations on the unity of the numerological scheme underlying the structure of the chapters of Sima Qian's Historical Notes and Ban Gu's History of Han. According to the speaker, groups of 12 and 4 chapters play a key role in the structure of both monuments, and the specific location of the chapter in this numerological group may also have significant significance. Identifying and formulating the numerological features common to the structure of both works will make it possible to significantly advance the issues of authenticity of individual chapters of texts, as well as the correspondence of their current structure to the original author's intention.

M. Richter Section of Religion and Philosophy. (University of Colorado Boulder) presented his approach to interpreting the recently discovered Heng Hsien  cosmogonic text from the Shanghai Museum collection. Although M. Richter touched upon the issues of translation and interpretation of disputed signs, in general, his report was devoted to the ideology within which this text was formed. According to the researcher, Heng Xian solves quite practical problems, asserting the inherent right of the ruler to assign names.

Report by F. Assandri (Heidelberg University) was dedicated to the development of ideas about the afterlife during the Six Dynasties (III-VI centuries AD), when Buddhism first spread in China. Having analyzed the materials of the database of inscriptions on tombstones and oath stelae, F. Assandri comes to the conclusion that the spread of Buddhism did not lead to the rejection of the traditional vision of the afterlife. These epigraphs show an extraordinary variety of opinions about the structure of the other world, which surprisingly combine elements of what we might call Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian teachings.

Environment and Ecology Section. R. Sterks (University of Cambridge) cautioned the audience not to take a simplistic view of the question of the human attitude to the environment in Ancient China. Uncritical perception of information from traditional sources can form a perverse idyllic picture of the relationship between man and nature. However, if we pay attention to the ideological context of composing texts, the nature of the information described in them, and the peculiarities of transmitting texts in time and space, we will have to come to a disappointing conclusion: the available data can rarely be used as sources of accurate information about the history of the environment in Ancient China.

M. V. Karpov Section of Modern Economics and Society. (ISAA MSU) criticized the concept of Chinese economists Fan Gang and Sheng Hong about the "two-track system".-

the "transition" of the Chinese economy from a command-administrative to a market model based on the parallel existence of planned and market prices in the Chinese economy. The speaker noted that the" two-track " pricing model as an integral general economic system with clear and transparent parameters hardly ever existed. With the abandonment of directive planning and the decentralization of pricing mechanisms, the Chinese economy has developed a very specific scheme of a bureaucratically coordinated market, which is based on non-transparent paid contractual relations between party-state bodies (governments) of various levels and economic entities. These contractual relations determine the main criteria and parameters of participation of economic entities in market transactions, primarily in terms of ownership structure, pricing and taxation. Taking into account that the specific forms and nature of these contractual relations differ significantly by region, industry, and even by specific enterprises, M. V. Karpov suggested calling the described scheme of bureaucratic coordination of the market a "multi-track model".

Zheng Yiwen (Institute of Regional Studies, Leiden) gave a detailed description of the socio-economic relations between farmers-tobacco suppliers, local and central governments, and state-owned tobacco companies-monopolists in modern China. Noting the significant efforts of central agencies aimed at easing the situation of farmers in the face of price dictates from local governments and tobacco monopolies, the speaker drew attention to the inconsistent nature of these efforts. As a result of many years of searching for a "golden mean" between their own bureaucratic interests and the lobbies of state-owned companies and local governments, central departments eventually managed to discipline the latter to a certain extent. However, Beijing still has very limited opportunities to regulate socio-economic relations between local authorities and farmers - direct producers of tobacco leaf. Local authorities and regional representatives of tobacco monopolists still have a significant resource of administrative and economic pressure on the village.

Modern History section. The report of Wu Guoguang, Program Coordinator for China at the Center for Asia-Pacific Initiatives at the University of Victoria (Canada), attracted the attention of the section's participants. The speaker drew attention to a certain cyclical pattern in the socio-economic and political development of China over the past century and a half. High rates of economic growth and the achievement of a certain higher level of material well-being than before did not lead to socio-political stabilization in China, but, on the contrary, each time caused an aggravation of social contradictions and ultimately led to systemic cataclysms. The first such cycle, according to Wu Guoguang, took place in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, chronologically coinciding with the last decades of the Manchu Qing Dynasty in China. The second such cycle began to develop during the" Nanking Decade " of Kuomintang rule in mainland China, and the civil war of 1946-1949 and the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party with all the socio - political and economic consequences that followed became a systemic catastrophe. The speaker emphasized that at the stage of cataclysms, the scale of destruction of accumulated material and social values was so great that the historical memory of subsequent generations of Chinese people managed to preserve only fragmentary and residual evidence of the realities of life in previous eras.

The third cycle, according to the speaker, was developed with the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's policy of "reform and openness"at the turn of the 70-80s of the XX century. Wu Guoguang emphasized that he does not predict a systemic collapse of the current regime in China. However, in his opinion, there are very disturbing trends in modern China that are typologically comparable to the socio - economic evolution of the situation in the country during the previous two full cycles of "growth - prosperity-socio - political tension-cataclysm". Having identified a cyclical pattern, the speaker raised a question about its causes, but did not formulate a definite answer in his message.

H. Bartos Linguistics Section. (Budapest University) made a report on the history of Sinological linguistics (phonology, theoretical and historical grammar) in Central and Eastern Europe over the past two centuries, from X. Steinthal and H. G. von der Gabelenz to S. A. Starostin and the current state. The speaker focuses on Germany and Russia, which are the main centers of Chinese studies in the region, but he also pays special attention to the following issues:

H. Bartos notes the influence exerted by the works of researchers from Eastern and Central Europe on the development of linguistics in general, as well as undeservedly forgotten aspects of their achievements.

K. Giorgio (Italian Cultural Institute, Shanghai) spoke about the lexicography of the Chinese language in Europe and the development of bilingual Chinese dictionaries. Despite the ancient lexicographic tradition, bilingual dictionaries appear in China only at the end of the Ming era, except for the Chinese-Sanskrit dictionaries of the Tang period. A new impetus to Chinese lexicography was given by the active work of European missionaries in compiling dictionaries at the end of the XVI century. Until now, Chinese dictionaries use Latin transcription with tonal diacritics and phonetic arrangement of the material-principles inherited from early European lexicographers. The work of Protestant missionaries (Morrison, Adkins) served to develop Chinese dialectology, which, having existed in China since ancient times, had previously occupied a marginal position.

L. Colangelo (Roman University of La Sapienza) devoted her report to the influence of European languages on the morphology and syntax of modern Chinese through translations of Western fiction at the beginning of the XX century.L. Colangelo emphasized that this process took place two decades before the "May 4 movement".

A. Aleksanyan (IDV RAS) (the report is presented in writing), taking into account the achievements of his predecessors (B. Laufer, R. Gauthier, P. Pellio, J. Harmatta, E. Pulliblank), studied some new aspects of Sino-Iranian linguistic relations: mechanisms and strategies for the penetration and assimilation of loanwords, relevant aspects of phonetic reconstruction, as well as inculturation, i.e. assimilation of elements of foreign culture. The speaker focused on religious terms of Pahlavi and Sughd origin in Manichaean texts in Chinese.

H. Klieter (Ruhr University, Bochum) analyzed "Arte de la lengua chio chiu" - the oldest known grammar of the Chinese language, created in the early 17th century by a Spanish missionary in Manila. It reflects a certain South Min dialect, apparently formed as a result of the interaction of Zhangzhou, Quanzhou and Chaorou dialects. Missionaries are often reproached for using the Greek-Latin system to describe Asian languages, which leads to imposing alien categories on these languages and ignoring their important characteristics. H. Kleter showed that the grammar described by him is free from these shortcomings due to the rejection of some and rethinking other aspects of European terminology, inventing new terms and using transcription and special order in the location of the examples.

E. Raini (Roman University of La Sapienza) devoted his report to transcription in the works of the Jesuit Martino Martini. In his grammar of the Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language, M. Martini used the transcription created by his predecessors M. Ricci and N. Trigo based on the Portuguese spelling, but after 1654 he switched to the Spanish transcription. E. Rainey spoke about the influence of Martini transcriptions on subsequent researchers of the Chinese language, and also put forward a hypothesis about the reasons for the transition of Martini from the well-known replace the Portuguese system with a somewhat exotic Spanish one.

Another speaker from La Sapienza University of Rome, L. M. Paternico, also examined the aforementioned Martini grammar in detail. Its search in many libraries around the world proved that this is the first written (1652) and printed (1696) grammar of the Mandarin dialect. For this research, L. M. Paternico was awarded the prize of the European Sinological Association.

D. Kadar (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) studied the acquisition of Chinese politeness rules by Ryukyu students on the basis of the late 17th-century manual "Xue guanhua" ("Study of Guan-hua"). Currently, Japanese and Okinawan have a greater variety of courtesy categories than Chinese. However, during the period described, the ratio was reversed, so this aspect was of particular importance in teaching Chinese. D. Kadara's report was the first historical and pragmatic study of Sino-Okinawan relations.

V. A. Bogushevskaya (ISAA MSU) devoted her report to the semantics of the Chinese word "blue-green" ("qing"). She analyzed the historical correlation of its meanings "blue", " green "and" black", as well as the composite words and hieroglyphs that emerged on its basis, where the corresponding sign is a determinative.

M. Fabre spoke about psycholinguistic experiments that shed new light on the problems of word order and actual division in the Chinese language.

E. Haas Translation Section. (Tallinn University) made a presentation on the theory of translation of statutory Tang poems from the point of view of how poetic translation was understood by R. Frost, R. Jacobson, U. Eco and other philologists and writers. It identifies two main categories of translators of classical Chinese poetry: "translator-sinologist" and "translator-poet".

Another speaker from Tallinn University, E. Koort, analyzed two translations of the Tao te Ching into Estonian. Based on the thesis that the translation reflects the cultural trends of the time in which it was performed, E. Koort compares the political and cultural discourses that were widespread in Estonian society during the corresponding periods based on the translations of L. Mull (1979) and J. Kaplinsky (2001).

M. Zlotea (University of Bucharest) presented the results of the study of the first complete Chinese translation of The Social Contract by J.-Zh. M. Zlotea drew attention to how the translator used traditional Confucian terms to translate such concepts of the source text as "common will", "individual", "people", "natural and civil rights". According to the researcher, the choice of translator shows which Confucian concepts contained the prototype of European ideas that penetrated China at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries.

Report by Pan Shao-yu (National University of Taiwan) It was devoted to the problem of early Chinese translations of foreign novels, considered on the example of the famous Japanese sentimental novel "Nami-ko"by Kenjiro Tokutomi. Translations of novels occupied a low position in the hierarchy of the" prose revolution " proclaimed by Liang Qichao. Nevertheless, they were very popular with Chinese readers. Nami-ko attracted the attention of the famous translator Lin Shu with a detailed description of the Sino-Japanese war. In the comments, Lin Shu outlined his understanding of the reasons for the defeat of the Qing fleet. At the same time, the novel reveals the extremely relevant theme of the conflict between feudal family relations and the feeling of marital love.

Section of modern literature. The report of V. Vuillemieux (University of Geneva) was related to the theme of the "destroyed body" in Chinese literature of 1917-1949. V. Vuillemieux considers the literal and metaphorical understanding of body images, the dichotomy of "soul" and "body", as well as "strong" and "weak", "individual" and "collective" bodies. V. Vuillemie relates various interpretations of "body" to two periods in the development of Chinese literature: 1910-1920 and 1930-1940 years

A. Rodionov (St. Petersburg State University) made a report on nationalism and internationalism in right-wing Chinese literary magazines of the 1930s.The movement for national literature was launched by the Kuomintang Party in order to fight proletarian literature. It was closely connected with the interpretation of nationalism in the West: the leaders of the movement actively adopted the experience of Western nation-states formed in the XIX century. (Germany, Italy), as well as regions with strong nationalist traditions (Scotland, Vietnam, India). Reviews of Western literature, translations, and articles about events abroad occupied a large place in right-wing magazines. The polemic against communism and proletarian literature also played an important role.

Chau Pak (Hanguk University of Foreign Languages, Republic of Korea) spoke about two methods of describing Koreans in Japan in the Chinese literature of the 1930s and 1940s using the example of the works "The Return of the Chicken" by Guo Mojo and "Overseas People" by Mei Niang. Both writers lived in Japan for some time, and their texts are a valuable source for studying how relations between China, Japan, and Korea were reflected in Chinese literature during this period.

M. Winter (University of Vienna) described the main trends in the development of Chinese literature in the last decade. Using a reverse chronology from 2010 to 2000, he noted the criticism of recent history and modern society (including by such popular authors as Han Han, Hong Ying), the invasion of "forbidden topics" (the events of 1989, etc.), the important role of female writers, the" social relevance "of literature, and the importance of women writers' work. Internet, international relations and emigration, writers ' appeal to the screenplay genre.

Fine Arts section. P. Lukicheva (RSUH) presented the results of a study of spatial concepts in the visual arts of the Ming period on the example of paintings and book illustrations ("Eight Kinds of Autumn Mood" by Dong Qichang and illustrations of publications of the Wanli period), as well as theoretical statements of Ming and early Qing authors (Li Zhihua, Dong Qichang, Tang Xianzu, Wang Yuanqi). The speaker considered:-

social concepts in the context of their physical, mental, and cultural connotations, including literary and religious discourse.

R. G. Shapiro, Performing Arts Section. (RSUH, University of Malaya), made a report on the results of field studies of Chinese puppet theater in Malaysia. The historical roots of this phenomenon were traced, the religious and social functions of representations were analyzed, the device of dolls, ways of manipulating them, features of musical accompaniment, the structure of the performance, and the main plots of plays were described.

At the meeting of the Association's Management Board, the venue for the 2014 conference was chosen - Coimbra, Minho University (Portugal). The 2012 Conference, as previously agreed, will be held in Paris.

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