China's Future: Navigating Geopolitics in a New Era
2025-04-07 17:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Room L-166, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:David J. Firestein, President and CEO of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations

Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute; Fairbank Center Visiting Scholar

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Daisy Yan Du - Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion
2025-04-11 12:00 - 13:30 | CGIS South, Room S153, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Daisy Yan Du, Associate Professor, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Moderator: Alexander Zahlten, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Registration appreciated for planning purposes.

Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion is the first edited volume that explores the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmedialities of Chinese animation, from early animated special effects to socialist classics, from computer-generated-imagery (CGI) blockbusters to edgy independent films, and from stop-motion to virtual reality.

Its fifteen chapters, grouped under the five themes of junctures, gender, identities, digitality, and practices, span a century of animation since the 1920s across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and the diasporic world. Derived from the 2021 Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), this volume as a whole defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the peripheries of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand, and from the margins of Western and Japanese animation studies on the other. Incorporating diverse academic approaches and perspectives, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable guide for a rapidly growing community of scholars, students, animators, fans, and general readers interested in Chinese and world animation.

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Art of Journeys: From Ape Tales to the Monkey King Wukong
2025-04-11 13:00 - 17:30 | Sackler Building, Lower Level, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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The launch of the hit game, “Black Myth: Wukong,” in August 2024 has sparked renewed interests in the many historical sites that inspired its stunning visuals. In fact, the role that players take on in the game—an anthropomorphic monkey with supernatural abilities—also has many previous incarnations in the history of Chinese and East Asian art at large. The most well-known is perhaps the Monkey King Sun Wukong, from Wu Chengen’s monumental sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West. Yet Wu’s Journey to the West was only one of the converging points that brought together visual and textual sources dating back to the Han dynasty. Harvard Visual China’s 2025 Graduate Symposium presents two panels on the topic of Art of Journeys—From Ape Tales to the Monkey King Wukong.For a complete program and more information, visit https://www.harvardvisualchina.com/hvc-2025-symposium-info-reg.

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Indigenous Narrative: The Dynamic Biographies of gShen-rab Mi-bo, Founder of the Tibetan Bon Religion
2025-04-16 11:30 - 13:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Konchok Tsering, Assistant Professor, School for Tibetan Studies, Minzu University of China; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2024-25

Chair/Discussant: Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard University

This talk delves into the transformation of gShen-rab Mi-bo’s life stories within the Tibetan Bon religion, examining three significant texts: mDo ‘dus, mdo gzer mig, and mdo dri med gzi brjid. Each biography, emerging from distinct historical contexts, showcases the evolving nature of Bon religious thought and its interaction with cultural influences. The mDo ‘dus, a concise tenth-century work, is recognized as an early foundational narrative. mdo gzer mig, believed to originate in the eleventh century, is essential for understanding the integration of Buddhist elements within Bon literature. The expansive mdo dri med gzi brjid, from the fourteenth century, enriches the narrative tapestry with folkloric and cultural details, demonstrating how oral traditions have shaped its development. This exploration highlights the adaptive storytelling of the Bon tradition, reflecting shifts in historical and cultural landscapes.

Venue

Film Screening: Wang Bing's Youth Trilogy - Youth (Homecoming) Qingchun: Gui
2025-04-25 18:00 - 20:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
More than two decades after making his monumental West of the Tracks (2002), documentary auteur Wang Bing (b. 1967) has released a new cinematic fresco of Chinese workers. Whereas his debut work memorializes the declining Socialist industrial complex in Northeast China and its aging employees, the Youth trilogy chronicles the plights of young migrant workers struggling with the vagaries and pressures of a free capitalist market. Between 2014 and 2019, Wang Bing and his crew shot around 2,600 hours of footage in the garment-making township of Zhili, near Shanghai, with hundreds of thousands of seasonal laborers from all over the country sewing children’s clothes in some 18,000 workshops. The three installments of Youth—Spring, Hard Times and Homecoming—premiered in competition at the Cannes, Locarno and Venice film festivals, respectively. Taken together, this documentary trilogy not only provides a nuanced, empathetic and critical look at China’s fashion industry, but could also inspire in its audiences alternative experiences of time, space and the material fabric of our lives.

Youth (Homecoming) Qingchun: Gui

The final installment of the Youth trilogyzooms in on a handful of workers as they return to their villages for the Lunar New Year, meanwhile zooming out spatially from Zhili’s garment workshops to China’s vast countryside. After seeking payment of their owed wages, Mu Fei and Dong Minyan board a packed train to Yunnan and take a van up a hazardous mountainside road. In homes decorated with giant Chairman Mao portraits, their parents speak of illnesses and injustices, debts and expenses. Firecrackers, a confetti gang, bride-carrying and karaoke create an exuberant atmosphere at Shi Wei’s and Liang Xianglian’s wedding. From the southwest mountains, the film moves to the lower Yangtze River to celebrate the God of Prosperity and another wedding banquet. After the holidays, the bride Fang Lingping takes her husband to Zhili and teaches him to sew. The last third of the film revisits familiar characters from Spring and Hard Times such as Lin Shao and Chen Wenting, no longer teenagers in love but young parents, uncertain how the cycles of seasonal labor will shape their children’s future.

Directed by Wang Bing

France/Luxembourg/Netherlands 2024, DCP, color, 160 min. Mandarin with English subtitles

General Admission Tickets $10, $8 Non-Harvard student, seniors, Harvard faculty and staff. Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) $15 – $20.

Tickets go on sale 30 minutes prior to show time at the box office and are also available in advance on the HFA website.

Venue

Film Screening: Wang Bing's Youth Trilogy - Youth (Hard Times) Qingchun: Ku
2025-04-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
More than two decades after making his monumental West of the Tracks (2002), documentary auteur Wang Bing (b. 1967) has released a new cinematic fresco of Chinese workers. Whereas his debut work memorializes the declining Socialist industrial complex in Northeast China and its aging employees, the Youth trilogy chronicles the plights of young migrant workers struggling with the vagaries and pressures of a free capitalist market. Between 2014 and 2019, Wang Bing and his crew shot around 2,600 hours of footage in the garment-making township of Zhili, near Shanghai, with hundreds of thousands of seasonal laborers from all over the country sewing children’s clothes in some 18,000 workshops. The three installments of Youth—Spring, Hard Times and Homecoming—premiered in competition at the Cannes, Locarno and Venice film festivals, respectively. Taken together, this documentary trilogy not only provides a nuanced, empathetic and critical look at China’s fashion industry, but could also inspire in its audiences alternative experiences of time, space and the material fabric of our lives.

Youth (Hard Times) Qingchun: Ku

Focusing on the factory laborers’ economic struggles and workplace conflicts, the second installment of Youth follows multiple narrative threads that stretch and tighten, sometimes to a breaking point of violence and despair. A young woman keeps making mistakes and must redo several batches of trousers, while her colleagues discuss ways to dodge the manager’s surveillance. Just released from police detention after an altercation with his boss, a young man searches in vain for his lost account book. Parents pore over sewing machines while their child plays with scissors and cell phones. From the balcony outside their shop, a group of workers watch their indebted boss beat up a fabric supplier and run away without paying their wages, so they sell the shop’s sewing machines while the landlord cuts the power and water of their living quarters. In another dark dorm, a worker who made tons of unsold denim recounts his participation in a labor riot and the ensuing police brutality. The exhaustion of overtime and deadlines thus alternates with the anxiety of dead time and wasted time, accruing into the bitterness at the core of Wang Bing’s trilogy.

Directed by Wang Bing

France/Luxembourg/Netherlands 2024, DCP, color, 226 min. Mandarin with English subtitles

General Admission Tickets $10, $8 Non-Harvard student, seniors, Harvard faculty and staff. Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) $15 – $20.

Tickets go on sale 30 minutes prior to show time at the box office and are also available in advance on the HFA website.

Venue

Film Screening: Wang Bing's Youth Trilogy - Youth (Spring) Qingchun
2025-05-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
More than two decades after making his monumental West of the Tracks (2002), documentary auteur Wang Bing (b. 1967) has released a new cinematic fresco of Chinese workers. Whereas his debut work memorializes the declining Socialist industrial complex in Northeast China and its aging employees, the Youth trilogy chronicles the plights of young migrant workers struggling with the vagaries and pressures of a free capitalist market. Between 2014 and 2019, Wang Bing and his crew shot around 2,600 hours of footage in the garment-making township of Zhili, near Shanghai, with hundreds of thousands of seasonal laborers from all over the country sewing children’s clothes in some 18,000 workshops. The three installments of Youth—Spring, Hard Times and Homecoming—premiered in competition at the Cannes, Locarno and Venice film festivals, respectively. Taken together, this documentary trilogy not only provides a nuanced, empathetic and critical look at China’s fashion industry, but could also inspire in its audiences alternative experiences of time, space and the material fabric of our lives.

Youth (Spring) QingchunThe first in Wang Bing’s opus centered on young migrant laborers in Zhili employs his trademark long takes and fixed camera setups, contrasting routine days of sewing, stitching and scissoring with bustling street scenes and after-hours sequences set in the workers’ cramped living quarters, chancing upon dramas that inevitably emerge from such a repetitive, cloistered and threadbare existence. While Zhili’s privatized structure and incentive-based production model allows for certain advantages over the kind of centrally governed factories seen in earlier Wang films like West of the Tracks (2002), it also leaves employees at the mercy of predatory managers, a situation the director depicts as an endless tug-of-war for better pay. With textbook rigor, Wang captures a new economic reality that, for all it promises, has only fostered a new form of exploitation. – Jordan Cronk

Directed by Wang Bing

France/Hong Kong/Luxembourg/Netherlands 2023, DCP, color, 215 min. Mandarin with English subtitles

General Admission Tickets $10, $8 Non-Harvard student, seniors, Harvard faculty and staff. Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) $15 – $20.

Tickets go on sale 30 minutes prior to show time at the box office and are also available in advance on the HFA website.

Venue

Film Screening and Discussion: Caught by the Tides
2025-09-07 13:00 - 16:00 | MA
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Directed by Zhangke JiaStarring Tao Zhao, Zhubin LiCaught by the Tides (风流一代) is an ambitious, genre-blending film from acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Spanning over two decades, the film interlaces newly shot scenes with archival footage, fragments from Jia’s earlier films, and documentary-style material to create a haunting portrait of love, memory, and transformation in modern China.The story follows Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao), a dancer and club performer in early-2000s Datong, whose lover, Guo Bin, abruptly leaves to seek fortune elsewhere. Her quiet, persistent search for him unfolds against the sweeping changes of the nation—from mass displacement during the Three Gorges Dam project, to rapid urbanization, to the isolating years of the COVID-19 pandemic.Post Screening Panel DiscussionOur distinguished panel will delve into the film’s themes and its broader cultural, historical, and cinematic contexts. The discussion will consider how CAUGHT BY THE TIDES reflects on China’s transformation, the interplay between personal stories and national history, and the ways cinema can blur the lines between fiction and documentary.Shujen Wang, Professor of Media Studies, Emerson College; Research Associate, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard UniversityShujen Wang is the author of Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (2003), and her research spans media globalization, platformization, film distribution, piracy, and global copyright governance. She has contributed to multiple anthologies and published in leading journals including Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Former president of the Chinese Communication Association, Dr. Wang has served as a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center since 2002 and sits on the editorial advisory boards of several peer-reviewed journals. Her work has been translated into Portuguese and Chinese, reflecting her global scholarly influence.Catherine Yeh, Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature, Boston UniversityCatherine Yeh’s scholarship examines 19th- and 20th-century Chinese literary, media, and visual culture, with particular attention to the role of entertainment, literature, and “marginal” figures in driving modernity. Her books include Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 and Performing the ‘Nation’ (co-edited, 2008). She has written extensively on Shanghai courtesan culture, the political novel, the entertainment press, and the rise of modern Chinese star culture. A recipient of numerous fellowships and research grants, Professor Yeh’s work illuminates the intersections of art, politics, gender, and urban modernity in China’s cultural transformation.Moderator: Xueping Zhong, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature, Chinese Culture, Film, Tufts UniversityXueping Zhong is the author of the Masculinity Besieged?: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century.Screening at West Newton Cinema, 1296 Washington Street, West Newton, MA 02465

Venue

Taiwanese Politics and US-China-Taiwan Relations Under Trump 2.0
2025-09-22 17:00 - 18:30 | Room 101, Boston University Kilachand Center For Life Sciences and Engineering, 610 Commonwealth Ave,, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, United States
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Speaker: S. Philip Tsu, National Taiwan UniversityThis talk will examine this following aspects of the US-Taiwan-China relations: 1. How Taiwan society views the US and China, and the main developments in Taiwan’s party politics/democratic governance since President Lai was inaugurated in 2024; 2. The implications of US foreign policy under Trump 2.0 for the trilateral relations; and 3. The implications of China’s policies toward the US and Taiwan for trilateral relations.

Registration link: https://bostonu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_42BUHhGC7PoMxj8

Venue

Is Authoritarian Constitutionalism an Oxymoron?
2025-09-26 12:20 - 13:20 | WCC 3007, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School; Co-editor, Oxford Handbook of Law and Authoritarianism

Professor Tushnet, who graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies of constitutional review in the United States and around the world, and the creation of other “institutions for protecting constitutional democracy.” He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and a history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s.

A light lunch will be provided.

Please note: In past years, most EALS talks were in Morgan Courtroom (Austin 308), but due to the construction project currently underway next to Austin Hall, we will hold most EALS talks in Wasserstein Hall this year.

Venue

Film Screening: “Made in Ethiopia”
2025-10-02 17:00 - 20:00 | Boston University Howard Thurman Center, First Floor, 808 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Massachusetts, United States
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Filmed over four years with singular access, “Made in Ethiopia” lifts the curtain on China’s historic but misunderstood impact on Africa, and explores contemporary Ethiopia at a moment of profound crisis. The film immerses viewers in two colliding worlds: a booming industrial powerhouse driven by profit and progress, and a disappearing countryside where life is still guided by the rhythm of the seasons. Co-organized by the Boston University African Studies Center, African Studies Library, Center for the Study of Asia and Global Development Policy Center, the event will feature a 90-minute film screening followed by a 30-minute Q&A with directors Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan.

Venue

CLA x Lambda Panel on LGBTQIA+ Advocacy in China
2025-10-06 12:30 - 13:15 | WCC 1015, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Yanhui Peng, LGBTQIA+ rights litigation advocate in ChinaMingyue Gao, Partner, Guantao Law Firm, ChinaYing Xin, Program Manager, Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program, HKS Carr-Ryan Center; Former Director, Beijing LGBT CenterJoin CLA and Lambda for a panel discussion on LGBTQIA+ activism and advocacy in China! Lunch will be provided at the event.

RSVP(https://forms.gle/JZNxYivSGfTVxmFL9). Questions: Zeqing Li at zli@jd27.law.harvard.edu or Shengdong Guo at sguo@sjd.law.harvard.edu.

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Ryan Martinez Mitchell — The Rise of Authoritarian Sustainability? China's Transformative Engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
2025-10-22 12:20 - 13:20 | WCC 3018, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Ryan Martinez Mitchell, Associate Professor of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Author of Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law

Since the adoption of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, this global development concept has been increasingly incorporated into the People’s Republic of China’s structures of state planning, intra-Party governance, and a comprehensive ideological narrative articulating both national and global objectives. Indeed, China’s role in and advocacy for the SDGs, beginning during the negotiations on their formation, is now at the heart of its foreign policy and international law initiatives. There has also been an increasing permeation of SDG indicators into Beijing’s domestic formulation and evaluation of policies (including for audiences of elite policymakers). Significantly, China has also come to be seen by many as a model of achievement with regard to the SDGs at a time of US withdrawal and generalized crisis in the arena of global development.

The emerging pattern could be seen as one example of “authoritarian sustainability”: a configuration in which the legitimacy of illiberal governance is extensively reinforced by the discourse and metrics of sustainable development. As a unique melding of China’s domestic politics with a global agenda, the SDG targets now serve as guiding principles, integrating social and environmental policy, economic regulation, and state legitimacy claims into a single project. At the same time, viewed in connection with the international legal order, Beijing’s approach may help spur a global transition away from civil and political conceptions of human rights, in favor of the similarly universalist but “post-liberal” SDG framework. However, while in many ways a success story, China’s model of SDG engagement also includes several paradoxical features that may indicate its own replicability challenges, latent drawbacks or contradictions, and the need to contemplate alternative paths. Empirical and structural analysis of China’s legal and regulatory approaches indicate features–such as reliance on controlled disruption, völkisch ecology, and “saltationist” mobilization–that call into question the viability of authoritarian sustainability as a long-term model in China or as an example for developing states.

Ryan Martínez Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work on international and comparative law, legal history, Chinese law, and Asian legal systems has appeared in leading academic journals. His analysis of these issues has also featured in policy-related publications including Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The Diplomat, and others, and his analysis has been cited in media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The National Interest, NPR, Bloomberg, Nikkei Asia, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, and other major media outlets. His first book, Recentering the World: China and the Transformation of International Law, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Mitchell holds a B.A. with honors from The New School, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was also a Cravath International Fellow and an Irving R. Kaufman Public Interest Fellow, and a Ph.D. in Law with distinction from Yale Law School, where he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Fellow and obtained Yale’s Archaia qualification in the study of premodern societies. He is a member of the State Bar of California and has experience in international human rights litigation. In the current academic year, he will be a visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Global Faculty at the Freie Universität Berlin Department of Law, and an International Affairs Fellow in Japan for the Council on Foreign Relations.

A light lunch will be provided at this event. Please register here.

*Location note: In past years, EALS talks were generally in Morgan Courtroom (Austin 308), but due to the construction project currently underway next to Austin Hall, we will hold most EALS talks in Wasserstein Hall during the 2025-2026 academic year.

Venue

Lik Sam Chan — The Politics of Dating Apps in Urban China
2025-10-28 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
zoom meeting link

Speaker: Lik Sam Chan, Lecturer, University of SydneyMomo, Blued, Aloha, Rela, Lesdo. These were, once upon a time, some of the most popular mobile dating apps in China. In this book talk, Lik Sam Chan dissects how urban life and dating apps shape each other in the context of southern China. The narratives explored include straight women migrating from villages to metropolitan areas, straight men navigating the pressure to showcase wealth in a highly capitalized environment, queer men envisioning a more equitable future in urban politics, and queer women seeking community despite their invisibility in the city. These dynamics are reflected in diverse interpretations and interactions on dating apps. My concept of “networked sexual publics” underscores that such publics are always regionally specific. Consequently, the use of dating apps—or communication technology more broadly—must be understood through the lens of local contexts and cultural concepts.

Dr. Lik Sam Chan is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney’s Discipline of Media and Communications and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication. His research focuses on the intersections of digital platforms, gender and sexuality, and culture. His first book, The Politics of Dating Apps (MIT Press, 2021), explores dating app culture in China across diverse user demographics. His work has been cited by international media outlets, including the BBC and Rest of World.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98722032936

Venue

Films from the Film Study Center: Screening and Conversation
2025-11-13 18:00 - 20:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Please join us, in partnership with ArtsThursdays, for a special screening of short films by Darol Olu Kae, Kendra McLaughlin, Tiff Rekem, and Svetlana Romanova—current fellows at the Film Study Center at Harvard. Following the screening, the filmmakers will participate in a conversation with Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.

Tiff Rekem : Trilogy (working title), 2026, work in progress, 15 min. Ten years ago, prominent director of Taiwan popular cinema Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) set out to make three historical epics set during the little-known 17th-century Dutch colonial period in Taiwan — until the production fell apart, unfinished, in 2025. This project refashions the visual and sonic traces of the Taiwan Trilogy into an alternative historical period piece that, during a time of rising nationalism in Taiwan, observes the construction of cinema as the construction of a national identity. A work in progress.

Kendra McLaughlin : Lo que las olas no rompen (What the Waves Don’t Break), 2026, work in progress, 12min 30s. Along Lima’s southern coast, men fish, camels eat, and life cycles through death and back again.

Svetlana Romanova: Hinkelten, 2023, Russia, 15 min. Filmed in the Yakutian Arctic and constructed out of personal poems and notes, this visual essay poses questions about our perception of contemporaneity and image production’s intersection with the creation of narratives around the idea of love (romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal).

Darol Olu Kae: Keeping Time, 2023, USA, 32 min. Keeping Time is a kaleidoscopic audiovisual homage to musicians who pass on the magic and the communities that nourish them.

This event is co-presented by the Film Study Center at Harvard University and ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).

Venue

Domee Shi — Drawing from Life: Storytelling, Heritage, and Turning the Personal into the Universal
2025-11-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Radcliffe Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for in-person attendance

Speaker: Domee Shi, Academy Award–Winning Director, Writer, and Storyteller; Creative Vice President, PixarDiscussant: Ju Yon Kim, Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English, Harvard University

Join the Academy Award–winning director, animator, and filmmaker Domee Shi for an engaging conversation about creative expression and empathetic storytelling. A self-described “film nerd,” Shi will be joined by Ju Yon Kim, the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard, to discuss Shi’s life and career, taking surprising creative risks, and using animation to explore worlds different from our own while finding universality through the stories told.To attend in person, each individual will need to register.To view this event online, each individual will need to register via Zoom.

Domee Shi is an Academy Award–winning director, writer, and storyteller with a 14-year career in the animation industry. She began as a story artist on Pixar’s Academy Award–winning Inside Out (2015) before contributing to The Good Dinosaur (2015), Incredibles 2 (2018), and Toy Story 4 (2019). In 2015, she pitched the idea for Bao (2018), a deeply personal short film that went on to win the Academy Award for best animated short.

Shi made history with her feature directorial debut, Turning Red (2022). Praised for its bold storytelling and exploration of adolescence and family, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature. Her latest film, Elio (2025), a sci-fi adventure, was released in theatres this past June. Alongside directing, Shi is also a creative vice president at Pixar, playing a key role in shaping the studio’s creative vision and consulting on projects in both development and production.

Shi was born in Chongqing, China, and resided in Toronto, Canada, for most of her life. She currently lives in Oakland, California, and notes that her love of animation is only rivaled by her love of cats.

Venue

Aaron Halegua — Fighting Forced Labor on U.S. Soil: Litigation on Behalf of Chinese Workers
2025-11-19 12:20 - 13:20 | WCC 3008, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Aaron Halegua, Lead Counsel for Plaintiffs, Wang v. Gold Mantis Construction and Liu v. Wellmade Industries

Aaron Halegua leads a boutique litigation firm in New York City focused on labor and employment litigation, with particular experience representing human trafficking and forced labor victims. In 2021, he won $6.9 million for seven Chinese construction workers trafficked to build a casino on the island of Saipan. As a result, Aaron was named the Human Trafficking Legal Center’s “Litigator of the Year” in 2021 and received the “Grantee Hero Award” from the Impact Fund in 2023. Since then, Aaron has represented dozens of Chinese, Filipino, and other immigrant workers in forced labor cases around the country, including in New Mexico, New York, Georgia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Since 2024, Aaron has been a Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Immigration and Human Trafficking. Aaron began his legal career as a Skadden Fellow and clerked at the Southern District of New York. He speaks, reads, and writes Mandarin Chinese.

A light lunch will be provided.

Please register here.

*Location note: In past years, EALS talks were generally in Morgan Courtroom (Austin 308), but due to the construction project currently underway next to Austin Hall, we will hold most EALS talks in Wasserstein Hall during the 2025-2026 academic year.

Venue

Chuncheng Liu — Metricocracy: The Data and Symbolic Politics of a Chinese Social Credit System
2025-11-21 12:00 - 13:30 | William James Hall, Room 1550, 33 kirkland st, cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Chuncheng Liu, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Northeastern University

Numbers have become the universal language of modern governance. What happens when an authoritarian state attempts to quantify the moral worth of its citizens? Drawing from my fieldwork inside China’s social credit system bureaucracy, this talk reveals how a quantification system designed to enhance state legibility and control instead produces opacity, distortion, and disillusionment. I document the everyday politics of quantification governance through two tensions: first, between ambitious data collection goals and limited bureaucratic capacity, resulting in selective data production and widespread fabrication; second, between the state’s efforts to impose authoritative meanings on merit scores and citizens’ persistent reinterpretation and resistance. Through ethnographic observation, I show how grassroots bureaucrats and citizens collaborate in maintaining an elaborate performance of governance while privately acknowledging its futility. Yet the system persists, not because it achieves its stated objectives, but because it fulfills internal political functions—particularly advancing officials’ careers within China’s competitive bureaucratic hierarchy. By demonstrating how quantification systems demand constant social and organizational maintenance while generating institutional strain and symbolic contestation, this ethnography offers crucial insights into algorithmic governance worldwide—revealing how numbers designed as instruments of control transform into performative ends that ultimately govern the state more than society itself.

Venue

Weila Gong — Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities
2025-11-25 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
Zoom Meeting link

Speaker: Weila Gong, University of California-San Diego

Why are some Chinese cities more successful than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy actions? Despite being the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has committed to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Since the early 2010s, Beijing has selected over one hundred low-carbon pilot regions—from townships to cities to provinces—to explore policy solutions for decoupling economic growth from fossil-fuel use. In her new book, Implementing a Low-Carbon Future, Weila Gong finds variation in levels of low-carbon policy institutionalization across the case studies. This includes varying successes of the standards, regulations, and laws put into place through these policy experiments. Based on original research including extensive expert interviews, comparative case studies, and process tracing of the low-carbon policy experimentation in these pilot cities, Gong opens the black box of the subnational climate policy process in China’s centralized political system and identifies mid-level local bureaucrats as playing an essential “bridge leader” role in successful implementation despite changes in political leadership.Weila Gong is a nonresident scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center and a visiting scholar at UC Davis’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. She is the author of Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities (Oxford University Press, 2025). With over ten years of experience working on the politics and policy of low-carbon energy transitions with a focus on China, she holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Technical University of Munich and has held fellowships at Georgetown University, Harvard Kennedy School, and UC Berkeley School of Law.

We would like to thank the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies for supporting this event. Please subscribe to our mailing list if you’d like to receive e-mail notifications: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/urbanchinaseminar.Join Zoom Meeting: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98722032936

Venue

U.S.-China Cooperation on Climate Change and Clean Energy: A China Energy Dialogue with John Holdren
2025-12-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Room 230, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138
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Speaker: John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Research Professor of Environmental Policy, Harvard Kennedy SchoolIn this inaugural China Energy Dialogue, John Holdren will give a talk on the history of collaboration between scholars at the Belfer Center, Tsinghua University, and other Chinese institutions to identify pathways and challenges to China’s goals to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

This seminar is part of the China Energy Dialogues (中国能源对话), a new monthly seminar series sponsored by the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program that brings together experts and Harvard community members to discuss energy, climate, and environmental issues in China.

RSVP required. A Harvard University ID is required to attend. Please note that this seminar is in-person only and will not be recorded.

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From Balancing to Coalition-Building: The US, Taiwan, & Asia’s Grand Reshuffling
2025-12-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Malkin Penthouse, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Steve Yates, Former Deputy National Security Advisor; Senior Fellow, Heritage FoundationTony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, at the Harvard Kennedy School; Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for AsiaEdward Cunningham, Director, Ash Center China Programs and the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School

As the Indo-Pacific enters a period of intensified strategic competition, alliances and partnerships across Asia are being redefined. What does this shifting landscape mean for U.S.–Taiwan relations, regional stability, and the future of American strategy? Join us for a timely conversation where we will explore Taiwan’s evolving role in regional geopolitics, the emerging coalition dynamics shaping Asia’s security order, and the implications for U.S. foreign policy and democratic resilience in the region.

Registration is required for this event. This event is in-person and open to Harvard ID holders. Please register using your Harvard email address.

Lunch will be served.

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Conference — Designers of Mountains and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate
2026-02-05 18:30 - 2026-02-06 18:00 | Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall - 42 Quincy St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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The Sinographic compound (山水), denoting “mountain and water,” is widely shared across many Asian contexts, with different regional traditions and approaches. As shanshui in China, sansui in Japan, and sansu in Korea, the term has historically referred to creative artistic and philosophical visions of the natural world, combining the vital elements of a fully dynamic landscape. With climate change underway, what contemporary elements and dimensions of nature are necessary for designing and building sustainable spaces for human habitation and flourishing? Contemporary landscape architects from Northeast and Southeast Asia are trying to answer this question by rethinking the relation between social and natural forms. Their aim is to design habitable futures at the intersection of the two.

This conference will feature leading landscape architects and scholars from China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, as well as Australia and the US, to discuss the perspectives, histories, politics, and the most compelling projects of sustainable design in the Asian context.

This conference accompanies the exhibition Designers of Mountain and Water, which will be on display in the Druker Design Gallery from January 20 to April 4, 2026. Curated by Jungyoon Kim, Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, the exhibition features more than 45 works of landscape architecture by 23 practices in Asia.For more information, including a detailed agenda, please visit the conference’s web page.

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Harvard East Asia Society Conference — Delineations: Temporality, Boundaries, and Imaginaries of East Asia
2026-02-13 08:00 - 2026-02-14 17:00 | CGIS South, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Graduate Student Conference is an annual two-day event that provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students to exchange ideas and discuss current research on topics related to Asia. This year, we are excited to host twelve panels featuring Harvard faculty and participants from around the world, as well as keynote addresses by Professor Paul Roquet of MIT and Professor Yoon Sun Yang of Boston University.

The HEAS 2026 conference is entitled “Delineations: Temporality, Boundaries, and Imaginaries of East Asia.” Through this theme, we aim to explore a simple question: What do we do when we draw the line? We delineate to describe, to trace, to portray, and to mark out the vagueness and ambiguities that find purchase in scholarship. How does navigating between liminalities inform our understanding of East Asia? This year’s conference asks scholars to re-examine how a world created entirely of ascriptions reveals intrinsic and extrinsic connections among subjects, space, borders, history, and time.

The conference will run from February 13-14, 2026, in Harvard CGIS South. More information can be found on its website here.

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China and the Asymmetric Great Power Competition in the Middle East
2026-02-26 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS Knafel K262, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Gangzhen She, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; Director, Center for Overseas Security and Associate Professor Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University, China

Discussant: Robert Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston University; Fairbank Center Associate

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Chinese Immigrant Lawyers in the United States: Challenges and Adaptation
2026-03-23 12:20 - 13:20 | WCC 3009, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speakers:Ji Li, John & Marilyn Long Professor of US-China Business and Law, UC Irvine School of Law William Lee, Partner, WilmerHaleEli Goldston, Visiting Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School Tiezheng Li, Assistant China Representative, International Law Institute David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Harvard Law SchoolJoin the Harvard Law and International Development Society (LIDS) and the China Law Association (CLA) for a panel discussion on Chinese Immigrant Lawyers in the US. Lunch will be provided.

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International Security and What’s Next for U.S. Strategy in the Indo-Pacific: A Discussion with Dr. Ely Ratner
2026-03-25 12:00 - 13:30 | Malkin Penthouse, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Ely Ratner, Principal, The Marathon Initiative; Senior Advisor, Clarion Strategies; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, 2021-2025 Respondent: Mark Wu, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese StudiesModerator: Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative.

The Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia invites you to a discussion focusing on the future of international security and what’s next for U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific with Dr. Ely Ratner. Mark Wu, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, will serve as a respondent. This conversation will be moderated by Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative.

Ely Ratner is a Principal at The Marathon Initiative and a Senior Advisor at Clarion Strategies. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs from 2021-2025 and as Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2015-2017. He has also worked in the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs at the State Department and in the U.S. Senate as a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Outside of government, Dr. Ratner has worked as the Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, a Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as an Associate Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. He received his B.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lunch will be served. This event will be recorded.

This event is open to Harvard ID holders only and registration is required.

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How US Internet Optimism Turned to AI Alarm with China
2026-03-25 12:00 - 13:30 | WCC 3013, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Graham Webster, Stanford University

US thinkers once looked to the future of Internet technology in China with dreams of liberalization. China and the US co-built and jointly profited from the 2000s digital economy and the smartphone revolution, yet in the 2010s both countries’ governments became increasingly anxious about their vulnerability and interdependence in the digital sphere. By 2020, anxieties combined with trade conflict, Covid recriminations, and AI futurism, cementing a rivalry mindset that today shapes partial decoupling and conditions of continued interconnection. This talk traces how US officials and thinkers acted on their visions of the future, and how reality intervened.

Graham Webster is a lecturer and research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at Stanford University, where he leads the DigiChina Project. He specializes in technology policy and development in China and US-China relations. His reporting and commentary has appeared in WIRED, Foreign Affairs, and the MIT Technology Review, among others. Graham was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School, where he was responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s Track 2 dialogues between the United States and China. In the past, he wrote a CNET News blog on technology and society from Beijing, worked at the Center for American Progress, and taught East Asian politics at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. Graham holds a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University. He is based in Oakland, California.

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The Death of Strategic Ambiguity: Middle Power Survival in the New U.S.-China Cold War
2026-03-26 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South, Room S050, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Seong-Hyon Lee, Senior Fellow, George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations; Associate, Harvard University Asia Center

Moderator: Andrew Erickson, Visiting Scholar, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University; Professor of Strategy, China Maritime Studies Institute, U.S. Naval War College

Registration appreciated for planning purposes.

For decades, East Asian middle powers like South Korea thrived by navigating a delicate geopolitical balance—relying on the United States for security architecture while depending on China for economic prosperity. However, as the “New Cold War” intensifies, this era of “riding two boats” has abruptly ended. Faced with shifting U.S. alliance postures, escalating technology and trade frictions, and the pressing realities of nuclear deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, nations can no longer afford strategic ambiguity. This talk will explore how middle powers are being forced into strategic clarity, recalibrating their foreign policies to survive a prolonged rivalry between Washington and Beijing. Drawing on recent developments in international security, we will examine the difficult choices ahead for East Asia’s most critical geopolitical fault lines.

Dr. Seong-Hyon Lee is a Senior Fellow at the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations and an Associate at the Harvard University Asia Center. He is the author of The New Cold War: U.S.-China Rivalry and the Future of Global Power (2025). He specializes in U.S.-China strategic competition, East Asian security, and North Korea and Korean Peninsula geopolitics.

https://asiacenter.harvard.edu/events/death-strategic-ambiguity-middle-power-survival-new-us-china-cold-war

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Against Erasure: Uyghur Poems, Imprisoned Souls, and the Act of Resistance
2026-03-27 16:00 - 17:30 | CGIS South, Room S050, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Aziz Isa Elkun, University of London

In the face of the Chinese government1s systemic efforts to silence the Uyghur people, the written word becomes a profound act of resistance. Against this backdrop of cultural erasure, two recently pubIished English-language poetry anthologies – Uyghur Poems and Imprisoned Souls, stand as vital testaments to love, survival, and defiance. These works serve as both a sanctuary for a threatened identity and a resonant cry for justice. Together, they form more than a mere collection of verses; they are a living archive for both the present and the future. They prove that while bodies may be confined and traditions targeted for erasure, the human pulse of love and collective memory remains indestructible. As enduring evidence of the Uyghur spirit, these works carry a cultural legacy to the next generation and awaken the consciousness of humanity as a whole, offering a glimmer of hope for the future.

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Butchered Rooms: Precarity, Resilience, and the Politics of Informal Housing in Post-Handover Hong Kong
2026-03-31 11:30 - 13:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Ruby YS LAI, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2025-26Chair/Discussant: Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

In the past decades, the growing housing crisis has destabilized individual housing tenure and exacerbated an everyday sense of insecurity, especially among low-income renters in megacities, where housing costs continuously soar under increased financialization and commodification. How do individuals and families build a home while facing heightened precariousness? This talk argues that housing precarity is an outcome of inequality resulting from the macro political-economic structure rather than a condition of poverty, by focusing on one of the world’s most unaffordable housing markets, Hong Kong, and its infamous subdivided units, also called ‘butchered rooms’—a form of informal housing unit subdivided from an entire compartment, characterized by an extremely tiny size, with a median as small as 11m?. Drawing on years of ethnographic and participatory fieldwork and policy analysis, the talk first illustrates the homemaking strategies through which occupants of butchered rooms navigate the spatio-material constraints of their built environment and the processes of resilience building. The second part of the talk provides a critical analysis of the housing policy regime in Hong Kong during the post-1997 period and unravels the political-economic structures that necessitate the invisible labor of occupants that buffers the consequences of housing inequality resulting from the city’s neoliberal housing regime and developmental urban governance, which resonate with housing crises in urban areas across the globe.

Butchered Rooms: Precarity, Resilience, and the Politics of Informal Housing in Post-Handover Hong Kong

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