Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Harvard CAMLab Fall Public Visits
2023-11-11 12:00 - 18:00, 2023-11-17 12:00 - 18:00, 2023-11-18 12:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Sackler Building, Lower Level, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
reserve a tour

During Public Visits, CAMLab welcomes our audiences to explore immersive installations that stage cultural history with digital technologies.

CAMLab Cave Public Visits are guided group tours. Reservations are limited to 15 per hour, in order to preserve the experiential dimension of CAMLab’s multisensorial project installations. Tours are led by a team of Harvard Student Educators, hailing from graduate programs across the university as well as Harvard College.

Currently installed in CAMLab Cave, the Cave Dance and Embodied Architecture projects activate the narrative, cultural, and sensorial potentials of interpreting historical data.

Cave Dance integrates thousands of depictions of dance from Dunhuang with motion capture of trained dancers, who performed movements preserved by textual records. With this human-computer collaborative choreography as its foundation, the Cave Dance installation instantiates movement sequences within ethereal motifs and enacts the “bodiless body,” a state of transcendence epitomized by celestial dancers at Dunhuang.

Combining photogrammetry with procedural generation and CGI, Embodied Architecture presents the world’s most comprehensive 3D model of the Yingxian pagoda, the world’s tallest timber structure. Serving as a stage for opening a cosmological understanding, the installation progressively unfolds the multisensory experience that the pagoda embodies—elucidating the lens of ritual practice.

Advanced reservations are required, and all are welcome. Tickets are pay-as-you-wish, with $10.00 suggested for non-Harvard visitors. Proceeds directly support CAMLab’s future research and projects.

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Margaret Hillenbrand - Read Your Mind: Facial Recognition Technology and Contemporary Chinese Portraiture
2023-11-16 13:30 - 15:00 | Presented via Zoom
Speaker: Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, University of Oxford

Margaret Hillenbrand’s paper probes the links between facial recognition technology and contemporary Chinese portraiture. Its point of departure is a recent paper published by two AI researchers based in China. The paper introduces a facial recognition algorithm apparently capable of predicting the status of an individual as a convicted criminal with almost 90% accuracy using only a driver’s license-style photograph. Unsurprisingly, the paper attracted a furious backlash, as commentators around the world pointed out its unabashed parallels with the long-discredited pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology. Less obvious, though equally intriguing, is the relationship between this branch of facial recognition technology and the practices of art-making. To explore this submerged linkage, Hillenbrand turns to the work of contemporary painters Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, whose experiments in the domain of portraiture mirror in inverted, mocking ways the operations of machine learning software which attempts to read the human mind and predict behavior. These parallels matter because they show that many facial recognition technologies are brazen forms of visual media, interventions in the seeable world which borrow outrageously from pictorial traditions of portraiture, old and new. This recourse to art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the professedly impartial, ideologically scientized field of facial algorithms shakes the latter’s foundational myth: namely, that individual identity is genomically predetermined in ways which only the most objective methods can disclose.

Presented via Zoom.Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97027197260?pwd=[REDACTED]

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The Lifestyles in the Tang Dynasty under the Influence of Manuscript Culture
2023-12-01 11:30 - 13:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Zhao Shuyang, Nanjing University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2023-24Chair/Discussant: Prof. Xiaofei Tian, Harvard University

The physical form of books plays a crucial role in human’s daily life. Prior to the advent of woodblock printing in ancient China, the manuscript era prevailed, in which all books were laboriously copied by hand. This unique method of production bestowed upon these books’ distinct features such as flexibility, unpredictability, and individuality. During this period, people came up with various strategies to accommodate these traits to facilitate the smooth dissemination of written works. Adapting to this manuscript-based literary culture, the ancients in China developed specific ways of life that left a lasting impact on fields like history, culture, and literature. These historical lifestyles are different from what we know today and interpreting them through the perspective of the print era could lead to misconceptions. A genuine understanding of these lifestyles and the historical documents they produced is only possible when contextualized within the manuscript era.

More info: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/events/the-lifestyles-in-the-tang-dynasty-under-the-influence-of-manuscript-culture/

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International Mitigation Finance: Carbon Mitigation, Welfare, and Optimal Recipient Design
2023-12-06 15:00 - 16:00 | Pierce Hall 100F, 29 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Naixin Huang, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, Tsinghua University; Harvard-China Project Fellow

International mitigation finance is a primary way in global climate cooperation to limit fast-growing carbon emissions of developing countries. Using a multi-country-multi-sector quantitative trade model, we take the year 2017 as an example to estimate carbon mitigation and welfare effects from mitigation finance and explore its optimal recipient allocation. We find that 2017’s 44.2 billion USD mitigation finance can reduce 533 million tons of carbon emissions, or 1.5% of 2017’s world total. Each recipient country’s welfare increased and the total welfare of all providers increased. In addition, to maximize carbon mitigation, finance should be redistributed to a small number of countries with the lowest marginal mitigation cost instead of large emitters. Marginal mitigation cost is determined by the initial ratio of clean energy quantity to dirty energy quantity, clean energy endowment, price index, and carbon emission coefficient. Global welfare would be raised by redistributing finance, as it can reduce 875 million tons of carbon emissions, or 2.5% of 2017’s world total.

Naixin Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in economics from Tsinghua University. Her research with HCP research associate Dr. Mun S. Ho and visiting Prof. Jing Cao focuses on the global carbon price floor’s welfare effects and optimal design. The 2°C goal is challenging to reach, and it will be essential to consider the international differences in mitigation costs and benefits. IMF (2021) proposes a system of global carbon prices in which countries at different economic levels assign different carbon prices. Using a global trade model, she and colleagues seek to illustrate the impact of such a differentiated price floor system. Then, they seek an alternative design for the worldwide carbon price floor. Besides the global carbon price floor, she and visiting Prof. Jing Cao also researched international climate finance’s welfare effects and optimal design.

Sponsored by the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

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He Wenkai - Book talk: Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China
2023-12-07 11:30 - 13:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: He Wenkai, Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; HYI Visiting Scholar 2016-17

In this book, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), Wenkai He examines the connections between state capacity, state legitimation and the expansion of political participation. He demonstrates how in each case a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation provided a common platform upon which state and society collaborated to provide public goods such as famine relief and large-scale infrastructural facilities. In this way, state and society strove to overcome their respective weaknesses in attaining good governance. Moreover, each discourse of state legitimation entailed ‘passive rights’ that allowed subordinates to justify their demands on the state to redress welfare grievances; these often took the form of collective actions. Conflicts between domestic welfare and other dimensions of public interest, however, could instigate cross-regional and cross-sectoral mass petitions for fundamental political reforms that were likewise justified by the state’s proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest; these mass petitions might ultimately transform the state. Such a political ‘great divergence’ occurred in England (1760s-1780s) and Japan (1870s-1880s), but not in China.

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Hou Zhe - Between Ideals and Reality: The Working Class‘s Role in China’s Education Revolution
2023-12-11 11:30 - 13:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Hou Zhe, Assistant Professor, Institute of China Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2023-24

Chair/Discussant: Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

The assertion that “the working class must lead everything” was a fundamental tenet in the ideological framework of the education revolution during Mao’s era in China. This principle, along with the beliefs that “education serves proletarian politics” and “education should be combined with productive labor”, underscored the legitimacy and importance of the working class in this transformative period. This talk aims to delve into the multifaceted role of the working class in shaping the educational landscape during this revolution. It will explore the instrumental role of the Workers’ Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams within the educational systems and the impact of the School Revolutionary Committees within educational institutions. Furthermore, it will examine the implementation and outcomes of labor education across various types of schools during this era. By doing so, this discussion seeks to illuminate the complex interplay between class, politics, and education within the context of China’s historical and socio-political fabric.

More info: www.harvard-yenching.org/events/hou-zhe-between-ideals-and-reality/

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The China Challenge and America's Future
2024-02-12 18:00 - 20:00 | JFK Jr. Forum, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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Join us for a special conversation with Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. This conversation will be moderated by former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Douglas Dillon Professor of Government Graham Allison, and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Meghan O’Sullivan.

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Jiajun Zou - Is Examination Success the Result of Geographical Luck? New Ming Provincial Examination Dataset and Its Macro Social and Historical Implications
2024-02-13 15:30 - 17:30 | CGIS South Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Speaker: Jiajun Zou, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Emory University

Jiajun Zou introduces a fresh perspective to Ming dynasty studies with his pioneering dataset of 92,000 juren profiles. In his presentation, Zou will share his journey in assembling this comprehensive dataset, utilizing a mix of CBDB resources, computational techniques, and prompt engineering via ChatGPT. He will then present statistical and macro-level evidence of a geographical bias within the examination system, underscoring how proximity to examination centers at both the provincial and national levels significantly impacted odds of success. Zou contends that the examination system displayed a clear proximity bias, favoring those closer to central hubs in terms of outlasting and exhausting their group competitors over time. The challenges faced by peripheral prefectures and regions are attributed not to a lack of talent—as some of the most distant prefectures produced the highest number of juren in China but only a handful of jinshi. Moving beyond the narratives of educational and intellectual traditions, Zou explores whether rising costs of competition, influenced by geographical and social dynamics, shifted the balance of political power in Ming China. This presentation aims to highlight the value of a macro analytical approach using a large dataset to reveal hidden trends and to encourage modern scholars to independently tackle research challenges with innovative digital techniques.

Also via Zoom. Reigster: https://bit.ly/exam-luck

An event sponsored by China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) and Digital China Initiative (DCI), Harvard University

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Harvard East Asia Society Conference 2024 - Knots: Complex Legacies and Imagined Futures of East Asia
2024-02-16 12:00 - 2024-02-17 17:00 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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The Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Graduate Student Conference is an annual event which provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students to exchange ideas and discuss current research on topics related to Asia. The conference allows young scholars to present their research to both their peers and to renowned scholars in relevant fields. All panels will be moderated by Harvard University faculty. The conference will also allow participants to meet others in their research area conducting similar research and to forge new professional relationships.The theme of this year’s conference is: Knots: Complex Legacies and Imagined Futures of East Asia. The knot is a traditional form of art that can be found throughout China, Korea, and Japan, made from the orderly connection of different individual threads. The committee chose the figure of the knot to represent the intertwined memories, legacies, and histories of interaction between and throughout the different parts of the region we now call East Asia. We thus welcomed scholarship that attempts to bridge different spaces, times, and disciplines, which includes (but is not limited to) history, philosophy, religion, literature, art history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, political science, gender studies, environmental studies, and law. Please find the conference schedule and booklet here.

For detailed information, visit: https://linktr.ee/harvard_heas

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Transport and Communication in Late Imperial China: Routes and Costs
2024-02-20 15:30 - 17:00 | CGIS South, Room S001, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Ruoran Cheng, Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics.

Ruoran Cheng will introduce his work on transport routes and costs in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Using techniques from geographic information science and data from historical route books, he has proposed a more accurate and comprehensive account of transport routes. Based on this and other data he has constructed the relative costs of different modes of transportation from 1202 to 1890. Currently, he is also working on the connection between trade potential proxied by natural routes and the location of economic activities proxied by archeological sites in China for a period spanning from Neolithic villages (7000 BP) to the unified empire (2000 BP)

Sponsored by the China Biographical Database Project, China Historical GIS, and the Digital China Initiative

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Elizabeth Perry - Public Health, National Strength and Regime Legitimacy: China’s Patriotic Health Campaign
2024-03-05 17:00 - 18:30 | Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, 121 Bay State Rd, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Speaker: Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

This talk focuses on China’s longest-lived mass movement: the Patriotic Health Campaign(PHC). Introduced by Mao Zedong in 1952 during the Korean War, the PHC continues even today, having recently played a role in Xi Jinping’s Zero-Covid effort. The talk will question the official characterization of the PHC as a “uniquely Chinese” approach to sanitation and epidemic control, noting the influence of the American Tuberculosis Movement and YMCA health campaigns, while at the same time emphasizing the central importance of public health in the legitimation of Chinese Communist rule, from revolutionary days to the present.

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Echoes of the Past, Visions for the Future: The Power of Ideas to Navigate the China- West Divides
2024-03-08 09:15 - 2024-03-09 13:45 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speakers:Tiziana Lippiello, Ca’ FoscariMichael Puett, Harvard UniversityAnna Irene Baka, Harvard University; Ca’ FoscariBryan Van Norden, Vassar CollegeTao Jiang, Rutgers UniversityHsinning Liu, Academia SinicaWen Yu, Boston CollegeBenjamin Gallant, Harvard UniversityKaren Turner, Harvard University; College of the Holy CrossFranklin Perkins University of Hawai’iDimitra Amarantidou, University of MacauLisa Raphals, University of California, RiversideWang Hui, Tsinghua UniversityPeter Bol, Harvard University

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Michelle Miao - Health Code Apps as Social Control in China: Empirical Findings from the Pandemic
2024-03-19 12:20 - 13:20 | Morgan Courtroom, Austin Hall, 1515 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Michelle Miao, Associate Professor of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Fellow, Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Michelle Miao is Associate Professor of Law at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her major areas of research include ethics of technological innovation, comparative law, criminal justice, law and society, and rule of law and authoritarianism. As a CUHK-Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow for 2023-2024, she is working on a project exploring the interaction between artificial intelligence and the shifting paradigm of authoritarian governance. Professor Miao is an awardee of the American Society of Comparative Law’s Hessel Yntema Prize for the most outstanding scholarship by a scholar under 40 years of age.

Boxed lunch will be provided.

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Mitchell Presnick - US-China Business Relations: Past, Present, and Future
2024-03-19 18:00 - 19:30 | Room K354, CGIS Knafel, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Mitchell Presnick, Visiting Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Mr. Presnick will lead a fireside chat about his 30 years in China from 1988 – 2019. Topics will include serving on Budweiser’s（百威啤酒) China market entry team, founding the China practice of APCO Worldwide (安可顾问), a Washington, D.C. based global advisory and advocacy firm, founding Super 8 Hotels China (中国速8酒店连锁) an economy hotel chain with over 1100 locations, and serving as board member and vice chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in China during China’s accession to the GATT (now WTO).

We will also explore current opportunities and challenges inherent in US-China business relations in the post-engagement era.

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Racing to Be a Better Race: A Longue Durée History of China's Toilet Revolution
2024-03-26 10:30 - 11:45 | Presented via Zoom
Register now

Speaker: Nicole Barnes, Associate Professor of History, Duke University

More information: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

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Taiwan Conference: Tension in the Taiwan Strait: The Role of U.S. Allies
2024-03-28 16:00 - 18:30 | Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, 121 Bay State Rd, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
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Speakers:Akio Takahara, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Politics, Graduate School of Law and Politics, University of TokyoJa-Ian Chong, Associate Professor of Political Science, National University of SingaporeSatu Limaye, Vice President, East-West Center; Director, East-West Center in Washington

This event examines the risks for conflict in the Taiwan Strait and the implications that the changed geo-strategic environment has for the US, Taiwan, the Sino-US relationship and the US-led system of alliances in the region. It builds on a series of BUCSA events about Taiwan’s security that we have held over the past few years, including a talk with Taiwan Defense Minister Andrew Yang in the Spring of 2021 and a presentation and discussion with senior US diplomat Chas Freeman in March 2022.

For more information, visit: https://www.bu.edu/asian/2023/12/04/taiwan-conference-tension-in-the-taiwan-strait-the-role-of-u-s-allies-march-28-2024/ .

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Film Screening: Yi Yi (A One and a Two …), with introduction by Kalli Peng
2024-03-29 19:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Edward Yang’s cinematic swan song, released at the turn of the millennium, is a moving tapestry that weaves together the dissolution and reconstitution of the fragile subjectivities in an increasingly global, capitalist and mediated urban society. Yi Yi opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral. What unfolds between love and death is everything that saturates our modern existence: awakening, nostalgia, contingency, anxiety, alienation, the ennui of everyday banality and the oscillations between longings for interpersonal dependence and fears of intimacy. This three-hour-long audiovisual epic unfolds the confusions and struggles of the multigenerational Jian family. As the grandmother falls into a coma, the family members take turns sitting at her bedside relaying their life to her, only to hear their own doubts and uncertainties reverberate in the resounding silence. At his tenderest moment, Yang, through Yi Yi, delicately, wisely and elegantly portrays the poignant reminiscences of the stirrings of first love and unveils the beauty that all too often shies away in the face of a perceived emptiness of life.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Wu Nien-Jen, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

Taiwan/Japan 2000, 35mm, color, 173 min. Mandarin, Min Nan, Hokkien, English, Japanese and French with English subtitles

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Film Screening: A Brighter Summer Day (Guling jie shaonian sharen shijian), with introduction by Kalli Peng
2024-03-30 18:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Similar to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), A Brighter Summer Day also traces the experiences of a large family during a critical historical epoch in Taiwan. Set in the early 1960s, against the backdrop of a society witnessing the consequences of major demographic shifts and political oppression, this film depicts the difficult trials awaiting the simple and harmonious life of the Zhang family. With Yang’s exacting demands on the historical accuracy of the props, such as the family house and the furniture in the classrooms, A Brighter Summer Day splendidly restores the material historical world to us while inquiring into its zeitgeist. Caught between the world of rock ‘n’ roll, gang rivalry, love triangles and the White Terror paranoia, a group of teenagers are compelled to learn to negotiate the tensions and discrepancy between ideals and reality. The adolescent struggles in grasping that which is worth holding on to, be it people or principle, turn out to be an inescapable fate for adults alike.

Widely considered as Yang’s magnum opus, this film, based on a real-life murder, launched Chang Chen’s acting career at the age of fourteen. The brilliant juxtapositions of light and darkness, movement and stasis, sound and silence, all work together to yield a tragic lonesomeness that even the warmth of a bright summer day cannot cure.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Chang Chen, Lisa Yang, Chang Kuo-Chu

Taiwan 1991, DCP, color, 237 min. Mandarin, Min Nan, Shanghainese and English with English subtitles

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Film Screening: A Confucian Confusion (Du li shi dai)
2024-03-31 19:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
A satirical comedy with biting wit and a romance that is equally suspicious of and hopeful about love, this film ambitiously negotiates the coexistence of Confucianism with capitalism and democracy. In what feels like a second take of his Taipei Story, Yang stages a frantic tango that is danced not with two but twelve. A circle of closely knit friends and relatives forms an entangled web of relationships where lost and insecure young professionals (civil servants, accountants, businessmen, publishers, writers, and artists) navigate different emotional scenes in a vibrant Taipei. Following a series of misunderstandings, a pervasive sense of loneliness permeates these densely populated frames, resulting in a deliberate messiness. Intentionally not a guide for the perplexed, Yang’s dazzling world melts pretense, fakeness, authenticity and sincerity into a confounding pool of restlessness.

One of the two least heralded (or screened) films by Edward Yang (the other being Mahjong), A Confucian Confusion’sstylistic and narrative experimentation is in fact fiercer than ever, reflecting his ongoing formal exploration in a diverse oeuvre. Made after directing plays such as Likely Consequence (1992) and Growth Period (1993), A Confucian Confusionconducts, with a bold theatricality, a brilliant investigation into the challenging sedimentations of traditional ideals of social conformity and hierarchy in a modern age of independence.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Chen Li-Mei, Chen Shiang-chyi, Chen Yi-Wen

Taiwan 1994, DCP, color, 125 min. Mandarin and Min Nan with English subtitles

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U.S. - China Relations Today
2024-04-03 16:30 - 17:45 | L-332 DELAND, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Da Wei, Director, Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS); Professor of Department of International Relations, School of Social Science, Tsinghua University.Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard University

Join the Greater China Society at Harvard Kennedy School for a discussion on U.S.-China relations featuring Professors Da Wei and Rana Mitter, leading scholars on this topic. This event is part of the preview series to the 2024 China Conference organized by students at Harvard Kennedy School.

Professor DA Wei is the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua, and professor of department of International Relations, school of Social Science, Tsinghua University. He is renowned for his work on China-US relations and US security & foreign policy, and has a rich background in China’s academic and policy community.

Professor Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at Harvard, is an acclaimed author and commentator on China’s international relations and historical narratives. He is the author of several books, and his writing on contemporary China has appeared in influential media outlets. He previously taught at Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Register at: https://forms.gle/SZVqh5iwTpNBSkek7

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Glen S. Fukushima - U.S. Trade Policy, Japan, and China
2024-04-04 12:20 - 13:20 | Morgan Courtroom, Austin Hall, 1515 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Glen S. Fukushima, Vice Chair, Securities Investor Protection Corporation; Former Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China

Glen S. Fukushima was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden to serve as Vice Chair of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation in October 2021 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 2022. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1982, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo; associate at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker; Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan and China at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan; and senior executive in one European and four American multinational corporations. He served on Hillary Clinton’s Asia Policy Working Group in 2015-2016.

Boxed lunch will be provided.

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Film Screening: Mahjong (Ma jiang)
2024-04-07 15:00 - 18:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Mahjong is a game for four players, and the one who first collects winning sets of tiles wins. But the real game lies not in these rectangular pieces per se, but in deliberating what one already has and could afford to discard or how to acquire from others what one desires but does not yet possess. The funniest and angriest of Yang’s films, Mahjong questions the sustainability of the dominance of a calculating profit-mindedness and transactional mentality, incubated in a capitalist madness blown to the point of barbarity. Red Fish, the son of a missing millionaire, leads a group of four young men as they swim in the ocean of ambivalent values among European expats, entrepreneurs, liars and criminals. A series of surprising events expose a social world where tenderness only makes one vulnerable to be exploited or deceived, and people—avoiding responsibilities—lack courage to think or make decisions for themselves. Following A Confucian Confusion, this dark comedy continues to experiment with theatrical forms. Yang’s use of lighting in a scene of an astonishing and dramatically powerful murder recalls Béla Tarr’s intense chamber drama Autumn Almanac (1984). The repeated appearance of T.G.I. Friday’s and the Hard Rock Café, along with other globalist trinkets, casts an alluring, mysterious and uncanny shadow over Taipei’s colorful nightlife.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Tang Tsung Sheng, Chang Chen, Lawrence Ko

Taiwan 1996, DCP, color, 121 min. Mandarin, Min Nan and English with English subtitles

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Film Screening: The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi)
2024-04-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Characterized as “Yang’s most difficult, intellectually provocative, and structurally challenging film” (John Anderson), Edward Yang’s third feature-length film is a puzzle with immense reverberatory power. The Terrorizers depicts the intertwining of love and death among three different couples: a young photographer and his literary girlfriend; a middle-class and middle-aged married couple whose mutual estrangement grows to the point of no return; and a delinquent duo whose income comes from committing petty pickpocketing and blackmailing. Prank phone calls, amateur photography, writer’s block and coveted promotions serendipitously bring these separate lives together. As close relationships come to a dissolution, the distinctions between life and art, fiction and reality also edge toward implosion.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Cora Miao, Lee Li-Chun, King Shih-Chieh

Taiwan 1986, DCP, color, 110 min. Mandarin and Min Nan with English subtitles

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Dreams from China’s Past: Visions of the Future in Popular Science and Literature Magazines, 1927–1949
2024-04-09 10:30 - 11:45 | Presented via Zoom
Register now

Speaker: Aaron William Moore, Professor of Asian Studies and Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations, University of Edinburgh

More information: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

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2024 China Town Hall Featuring Kurt Campbell and Rana Mitter
2024-04-09 18:30 - 20:00 | L-332 DELAND, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Kurt Campbell, Deputy U.S. Secretary of StateRana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy SchoolJoin the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the Greater China Society at HKS on April 9th for the 2024 CHINA Town Hall (CTH), a two-part program that provides a snapshot of the current U.S.-China relationship and examines how that relationship reverberates at the local level – in our towns, states, and nation, connects Americans around the country with U.S. policymakers and thought leaders on China.

The 2024 CHINA Town Hall program will take place on Tuesday, April 9, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, with featured speaker Dr. Kurt Campbell, Deputy Secretary of State. Following the official program, students have the opportunity to discuss with Prof. Rana Mitter in-person reflecting on the event from 7:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET.

RSVP: https://forms.gle/cjDyW6LbUmfi58fV9

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Arbitrary Detention in Xinjiang: A Survivor's Story
2024-04-11 12:15 - 13:15 | WCC 1015, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speakers:Rayhan Asat, Uyghur Lawyer, HLS LLM ‘16Mihrigul Tursun, Uyghur Activist, Former Detainee and Camp Survivor

In 2015, Mihrigul Tursun was imprisoned in a re-education camp in Xinjiang by the Chinese authorities. Rayhan Asat’s brother, Ekpar, has been detained for right years and counting. Join Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights for a discussion with Tursun and Rayhan to learn more about what is happening in Xinjiang and what can be done.

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China: The Rise and Fall of the EAST - How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline
2024-04-11 17:00 - 18:30 | Building 66, 110, 25 Ames St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
Speaker: Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management; Faculty Director, MIT-China Program, Center for International Studies.

Discussant: Will Knight, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

More information: https://bit.ly/RiseFallChina

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Curatorial Chat: Central Asian Chronicles Echoes of the Silk Road in Manuscripts and Imagery
2024-04-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Houghton Library, Quincy Street & Harvard Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Join co-curators Dr. Gülnar Eziz, Preceptor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and Isa Youshe, PhD Student, Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University, for a 30-minute guided tour of the Central Asian Chronicles: Echoes of the Silk Road in Manuscripts and Imagery exhibition currently on display in Houghton’s Amy Lowell Room. This will include discussion of the rich histories and cultural significance of the collections on display and ample time for participant questions.

Attendees should gather in Houghton’s lobby. No registration is required.

Venue
