Last Wednesday, Rose Cafe hosted Professor Mertha, a professor of government specializing in Chinese and Cambodian politics. While his entire lecture was filled with interesting information and tidbits, the part that stuck out to me most was his personal story about traveling to Cambodia in order to collect information about past Cambodia-China relations and politics. While he wasn’t allowed access to historical documents in China, he found luck in Cambodia and was able to gain a substantial amount of access to related documents there. He expressed awe at the sheer amount of documents that he could read and learn from, including but not limited to documents detailing infrastructure projects that both countries were involved in at the time. These documents provided Professor Mertha with very clear insights into past Cambodia-China relations, vastly furthering his research. He also detailed a story where he had trouble decoding and translating some documents that had been written in very technical Chinese. He was able to solve this when an advisee of his offered the help of her Chinese grandmother who had been working in the Chinese government at around the same time as when the documents were written.

Having very little knowledge of Cambodian-Chinese politics, I found it very interesting to hear perspectives and stories about conducting research in a different part of the world as well as finding such a large wealth of very interesting information. This lecture has made me eager to discover and educate myself further on politics in that region in order to eventually gain a clearer understanding of Asian influences on global politics, both historical and current.