Zhibo Li Lectures Online Tonight on the Three Kingdoms: Records, Romance and Peking Opera
A special lecture hosted by the Chinese Writers Association of the San Francisco Bay Area (CWASFB), "A Shooting Star Across the Sky Amid the Drums of War: The Hero-Filled Three Kingdoms in Chinese History," began online at 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, October 31. The speaker, Zhibo Li, a former vice president of Motorola, compares how the Records of the Three Kingdoms, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Peking opera each portray the most dramatic 15 years of the Three Kingdoms period. The talk is held on Zoom and livestreamed on the association's YouTube channel, and is now under way.
According to the organizer, the lecture compares how the historical Records, the novel Romance and Peking opera describe those 15 years: the novel and the stage are full of embellished tales, the organizer notes, yet each in its own way has served the spread of culture. Dynasties rose and fell, loyal officials and villains took their turns, and each generation produced its heroes; without Luo Guanzhong's retelling and added episodes, the organizer says, that history would not have become the gripping stories that made its figures immortal.
The lecture poster. Courtesy of the Chinese Writers Association of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The organizer also notes that in ancient times most common people could not read and had no access to history books, so local opera served to teach and enlighten; the lifeline of Chinese culture, the organizer says, was carried on by novelists and dramatists, whose educational role was in some ways greater than that of historians. Through this lecture, the organizer hopes audiences will no longer look down on modern historical novels and the large historical TV dramas adapted from them.
Speaker Zhibo Li graduated from the mechanical engineering department of National Taiwan University and went on to earn a master's degree in energy engineering and a doctorate in computer-aided engineering from the University of Illinois in the United States. From 1984 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001, he worked at Motorola in the United States, serving as general manager of its mobile phone division, vice president of its handset unit and a vice president of the corporation; from 1988 he long headed Motorola's various cooperation programs with China, drove the debut of the first Chinese-display mobile phone, and saw the related encoding adopted by the International Telecommunication Union as the standard for Chinese encoding. From 1997 to 2000 he was president for Asia at CellStar, a NASDAQ-listed company, overseeing its distribution of mobile phones and accessories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; from 2001 to 2006 he worked at China Netcom, becoming the first foreign senior executive in China's telecom operator sector; from 2006 to 2008 he was president and COO of TechFaith Wireless, also NASDAQ-listed. In 2008 he gradually stepped away from the corporate world and has since been travelling in retirement.
How to join: Zoom meeting ID 4088398596, passcode 55555; the organizer notes that after the first 100 participants, viewers should join via the livestream. The YouTube livestream is on the Chinese Writers Association of the San Francisco Bay Area's YouTube channel, where a replay will also be available afterwards. The start time for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is 10 a.m. on Sunday, November 1.
Related: Five Thousand Years of China (eBook)
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：讲座海报上半部，讲题与主讲人李之柏。金山湾区华人写作协会供图。 / Top portion of the lecture poster, showing the talk title and speaker Zhibo Li. Courtesy of the Chinese Writers Association of the San Francisco Bay Area.
