Peyton Bowman

In a corporate luncheon at the Japan Society on Wednesday, a panel of experts gathered to discuss the responsibilities that come from living in an increasingly information-intensive world.

Titled “Digital Social Responsibility: Search for a Sound, Responsible Information Society,” the luncheon provided a forum for discussion about information stewardship and the risks and issues that come from integrating businesses in ways enabled by new technologies.

Panelists included Charla Griffy-Brown, Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Pepperdine University Graziadio School of Business and Management, Jun Kurihara, Senior Fellow at the Ash Insitute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Harriet Pearson, Vice President of Regulatory Policy and Chief Privacy Officer at the IBM Corporation. Devin Stewart, Director of Global Policy Innovations at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, moderated the panel.

After Stewart made some opening remarks on the recent human rights guidelines adopted by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, Griffy-Brown gave a presentation on the importance of information stewardship, security, and what she called the “Digital Divide.” She also discussed how attitudes in information and technology firms are evolving with regard to these issues. Regardless of country, concerns in firms seem to revolve around the same matters of privacy, accuracy, property, and accessibility.

Besides the need to protect privacy, ensure data accuracy, and preserve copyrights and other forms of information property, accessibility becomes more of an issue every year. As information technology grows in importance, so too does the “Digital Divide” between those who have access to it and those who don’t. Lack of access, Griffy-Brown argued, implies a whole new kind of poverty, since it also entails an inability to participate in a global ‘knowledge space.’ It further increases the divides in health care and education.

Kurihara spoke next about the need to build information and communication systems that are robust, and to foster leadership that recognizes the vulnerabilities of firms in crises which disrupt important data transfers. Organizations must find ways to mitigate risk as they work to get back to ‘business as usual’ after a disaster and put plans into place beforehand to ensure essential damage control and a speedy recovery.

Japan, being an earthquake and typhoon-prone country, has a special need to develop systems to help mitigate these kinds of risks. Kurihara called for leadership and increased efforts to build a robust eJapan, which, perhaps, can serve as a model for other parts of the world.

Pearson followed with a discussion about the evolution of international business in the 20th and 21st centuries and highlighted some of the ways that IBM has been a leader in developing ethical guidelines and technologies promoting information stewardship and trust. Business has moved from models, normal in the 20th century, where companies exported goods and services or replicated their infrastructure in countries around the globe, to a period where companies are working to develop true unity across borders. She called this the era of globally integrated enterprises, and it involves new challenges in the way data is distributed and shared.

IBM was one of the first companies to have polices on corporate privacy practices, and lead the way in guidelines for the use of RFID chips and other technologies. The company has also taken a number of initiatives to preserve privacy in the Information Age, including a Privacy Research Institute which actively seeks to develop technologies that enable privacy.

In a global society, information must flow easily across borders. The way organizations handle it, moreover, must balance the needs of the host cultures with more universal ethical concerns. Pearson backed up Kurihara’s remarks regarding the need to develop systems to make networks more robust and to fix or at least mitigate problems when something goes wrong.

Stewart followed up by touching on key points like trust and stewardship, risk mitigation, and how entities and governments must keep up with the accelerating process of cross-border integration.

A question-and-answer period followed, which touched on these and other issues.

The event was held in a conference room at the Japan Society, and was sponsored by the Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies.

Faced with the challenge of ruling a large and often fractious country, the rulers of Imperial China had to find a variety of ways to legitimize their power.

One such way, documented in an ongoing exhibition at the China Institute in America, involved demonstrating mastery of China’s literary and cultural history by amassing definitive collections of calligraphy and painting.

The exhibit, titled “The Last Emperor’s Collection: Masterpieces of Painting and Calligraphy from Liaoning Provincial Museum,” brings to the United States for the first time over 20 of these masterpieces, some of which date back as far as the fourth century. All pieces in the catalogue, once owned by rulers of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, were ultimately dispersed at the hands of the twelfth and final Qing emperor, Pu Yi. Beginning in 1949, an effort by the Liaoning Provincial Museum started bringing these works back together.

Besides exploring the historical periods in which the works were originally created, the exhibit takes particular care to examine the way works in the Imperial collections were managed and evaluated.

Special care, for example, is taken to present the “The Studio of Zhulu Hut” by Shen Zhen (1400-1482) as both a work of art in its own right, and as a piece to which the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1795) had a personal reaction. Included in the display is a translation of a poem written and appended to the scroll by the emperor himself. Another part of the exhibit details the way in which Qianlong graded works with a variety of seals.

Some of the works, such as “Ten-Thousand-Year-Old Pine Tree,” were painted by emperors themselves — in this case, by Zhu Zhanji. Also known as Emperor Xuanzong (1399-1436), Zhu painted it as a gift for his mother on her birthday in 1431. Other works demonstrate emperors’ commitment to calligraphic study, like Qianlong’s “Calligraphy in Imitation of the Ten Thousand Character Essay by Huaisu.”

Painting and calligraphy were of particular interest to the Manchu Qing dynasty, which, as racially distinct from the majority of its subjects, needed to find ways to prove itself to the many peoples of China and to the bureaucrats who ran the empire.

It is perhaps not suprising, then, that the greatest patrons of these arts were from this dynasty — Kangxi (r. 1661-1722), Yongzeng (r. 1732-1735), and, of course, Qianlong. Kangxi claimed that, with the aim of improving his calligraphy, he sometimes practiced over 1000 characters a day, wrote out his edicts himself, and studied various archaic styles.

Such an imperial focus on calligraphy and painting was both a cause and consequence of their inextricable place in the cultural heritage of China.

“Throughout history,” gallery director and co-curator Willow Weilan Hai Chang said in a press release, “many emperors — either as a result of their own personal passion or their awareness that art could be a means to legitimize their authority — diligently collected painting and calligraphy, which, like a magnet, bonded art and culture to Chinese identity.”

Though the primacy of calligraphy and painting in Chinese culture has been eroded to some degree over the course of the 20th century, their place in the canon of pre-modern Chinese art will likely go unchallenged.

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The exhibit, which began on September 25, will run until December 14 of this year. Afterwards, it will move to Cincinnati, where it will be on display at the Taft Museum of Art May 29-August 2, 2009.

A companion exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Chinese Art from the Imperial Palaces” is also on display until December 14.

The China Institute in America is located at 125 East 65th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues.