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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260226T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260226T184500
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20260109T141321Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260129T185406Z
UID:44002-1772127000-1772131500@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Micah Muscolino — Remaking the Earth\, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Micah Muscolino\, Professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History\, University of California San Diego \n\n\n\nFrom the 1940s to the 1960s\, soil and water conservation measures remade both the arid\, erosion-prone landscape of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Drawing from his recent book\, Micah Muscolino discusses how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and they navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history interviews\, Muscolino’s multitiered investigation uncovers relationships between the forces of nature\, Chinese state policies\, and the embodied experiences of rural men and women. This approach highlights the contestations and compromises that the state’s environmental interventions triggered in rural society. Because modern China’s revolutionary transformations altered human relationships with the natural world\, as Muscolino demonstrates\, understanding that history from the perspectives of China’s common people requires sustained attention to their everyday interactions with the environment. \n\n\n\nMicah Muscolino is Professor and Pickowicz Endowed Chair in modern Chinese history at the University of California\, San Diego. His publications include Remaking the Earth\, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press\, 2025) and the forthcoming edited volume Revolutionary Natures: Grassroots Environmental Histories of China’s Mao Era (University of Washington Press\, 2026).   \n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-micah-muscolino/
LOCATION:Room K354\, CGIS Knafel\, 1737 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:FCCS Modern China,Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/muscolino.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260224T123000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260224T140000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20260203T192334Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260222T211405Z
UID:44201-1771936200-1771941600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:***POSTPONED*** Modern China Lecture Series featuring Xiaobo Lü — Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China’s Republican Era
DESCRIPTION:***DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER\, THIS TALK IS POSTPONED UNTIL A FUTURE DATE***Speaker: Xiaobo Lü\, Associate Professor\, Department of Political Science\, University of California\, BerkeleyXiaobo Lü is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California\, Berkeley. His research explores the relationships between fiscal policies\, party-building\, and state-society relations in authoritarian regimes\, particularly in China. He is particularly interested in the formation and functioning of political parties and institutions in authoritarian regimes across both historical and contemporary contexts. Xiaobo Lü earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2011. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-xiaobo-lu-domination-and-mobilization-the-rise-and-fall-of-political-parties-in-chinas-republican-era/
CATEGORIES:FCCS Modern China,Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/xiaobo-lu.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20250304T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20250304T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20250130T144353Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250227T174031Z
UID:39213-1741104000-1741109400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Yixin Chen — Famine and Rebellion: The Counterrevolutionary Case of the Chinese People’s Life-Saving Army in the Western Stream Villages\, 1959-1960.
DESCRIPTION:register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Yixin Chen\, Professor of History\, University of North Carolina Wilmington.  \n\n\n\nThis talk explores why numerous cases of counterrevolutionary groups emerged in rural China during the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s\, despite the brutal and large-scale Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries campaigns earlier that decade. Focusing on the case of the “Chinese People’s Life-Saving Army\,” formed by peasants in the Western Stream (xixi) Production Brigade in southern Anhui Province in 1960\, this study highlights how the group’s grain-stealing actions were not acts of political rebellion but survival strategies during the famine. Far from fitting the state’s definition of counterrevolutionary behavior\, these actions represented collective resistance to starvation. The study argues that local authorities and judicial institutions played a central role in politically overinterpreting these struggles for food. Through the excessive use of state violence and ideological overreach\, acts of self-preservation were reframed as counterrevolutionary offenses. This mischaracterization contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in rural counterrevolutionary group cases during the Great Leap famine. \n\n\n\nYixin Chen earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His book\, When Food Became Scarce: How Chinese Peasants Survived the Great Leap Forward Famine (Cornell University Press\, 2024)\, provides a grassroots analysis of why some peasants survived while others in the same village\, despite facing identical food shortages\, did not. The book argues that the natural environment and lineage-based social mechanism played crucial roles in peasant survival during this prolonged ordeal. An expanded Chinese edition of the book\, titled Jingyan Jihuang (Experiencing the Famine)\, authored by Chen\, was published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in January 2025. Professor Chen specializes in the socioeconomic history of modern China and has published extensively in academic journals in the U.S.\, China\, and Hong Kong\, in both English and Chinese. In 2009\, he received the Vernon Carstensen Memorial Award for the best article published in Agricultural History. He is currently working on a book that explores organized peasant counterrevolutionaries in Mao’s China. \n\n\n\nAlso via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hOiD_AYoTeKJI3XpNB7Jmw \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-yixin-chen-famine-and-rebellion-the-counterrevolutionary-case-of-the-chinese-peoples-life-saving-army-in-the-wester-stream-villages-1959-1960/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Yixin-Chen.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241105T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241105T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240812T161133Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:37138-1730822400-1730827800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Selda Altan — Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism\, Chinese Labor\, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Selda Altan\, Assistant Professor of History\, Randolph College \n\n\n\nThis talk explores labor conflicts during the construction of the French railway between China and Vietnam (1898–1910) as an episode in the emergence of Chinese workers as a global working class. Drawing on Chinese\, French\, and English sources\, the discussion reveals how inter-colonial competition for cheap labor and the global circulation of anti-Chinese discourses shaped labor market dynamics in China. These developments set the stage for labor to emerge as a radical force in Chinese politics. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-selda-altan/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Selda-altan.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241021T161500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241021T174500
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240812T142027Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:37119-1729527300-1729532700@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Janet Chen - Medium or Message? The Politics of Language in Broadcasting in Taiwan\, 1945-1975
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Janet Y. Chen\, Professor of Chinese History; Director\, East Asian Studies Program\, Princeton University \n\n\n\nAt the end of 1975\, the KMT government in Taiwan passed the Radio and Television Law\, designating Mandarin as the “primary language of broadcasting” and mandating the reduction of dialect. This legislation\, which took effect in January 1976\, was the culmination of more than twenty years of debates over the politics of language in mass media. Radio and television broadcasting were crucial components of the state apparatus for fighting the “psychological war” (心戰) of “opposing the Communists and resisting the Soviets” (反共抗俄). Yet using the national language as the medium of broadcasting made it difficult to effectively disseminate the messages crucial to sustaining the cause of anti-Communism. Programming in Minnanhua and Hakka could reach wider audiences\, but at the cost of diluting the national language project. Which was more important—the medium or the message? This talk will examine changes in the mass media environment\, the effects on people’s interactions with the KMT’s ideological goals\, and the history of Radio and Television Law. \n\n\n\nJanet Chen is Professor of History and East Asian Studies\, specializing in twentieth-century China.  Her first book\, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China\, 1900-1953(Link is external)(Princeton University Press\, 2012)\, is a study of the destitute homeless during a time of war and revolution.  A new book project underway\, titled “The Sounds of Mandarin: The Making of a National Language in China and Taiwan\,” will be a study of how ordinary people learned to speak “Mandarin” at its various stages of historical formation. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-janet-chen/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/janet-chen-talk.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240917T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240917T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240812T154251Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:37135-1726588800-1726594200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Rebecca Nedostup - "War Being" in Mid Twentieth Century China and Taiwan
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Rebecca Nedostup\, Associate Professor of History\, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies\, Brown UniversityTwo decades of intense hot and cold war in China and Taiwan between the 1930s and 1950s produced not only significant economic\, political\, and environmental changes\, but notable consequences for the epistemological structuring of everyday experience. Using examples of shifting conceptions of physical and cosmological refuge found in Jiangsu\, Sichuan\, and Taiwan\, I suggest some ways in which the scale and conduct of warfare during this period challenged but did not entirely erase extant conceptions of space and time. Although national and geopolitical frameworks threatened to eclipse alternate ways in which people made community among the living and the dead\, knowledge and projections of spatial and chronological arrangements were still intimately tied to the social networks that activated them – even as such networks were themselves in flux. The tension between state utilizations of population displacement and the self-conception and self-organization of the displaced themselves would set the stage for the large-scale social experiments and new migration patterns of the late twentieth century. \n\n\n\nRebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan at Brown University. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and the relationship of transitional justice and historical consciousness. Her book Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity looked at the modern categorization of religious practice and its social and political ramifications. Her next book. War Being\, is on the making and unmaking of community among people displaced by conflict across China and Taiwan from the 1930s through the 1950s. More broadly\, she is interested in ritual studies\, critical archive studies\, digital ontologies\, and historic preservation. She is faculty director of the Choices program\, and was previously Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-rebecca-nedostup/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Rebecca-Nedostup.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240403T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240403T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240221T181510Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:35570-1712160000-1712165400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture featuring Uluğ Kuzuoğlu - Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Uluğ Kuzuoğlu\, Assistant Professor of History\, Washington University in St. Louis \n\n\n\nIn the late nineteenth century\, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters\, they argued\, were too cumbersome to learn\, blocking the channels of communication\, obstructing mass literacy\, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than three millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. In this talk\, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu draws on his book to rethink the historical origins of Chinese script reforms––efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system—from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts\, Kuzuoğlu demonstrates that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age\, precipitated by new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial\, educational\, and bureaucratic pressures for information management. Situating China within a global context\, this talk describes how scripts became instruments to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures in China and the world.”  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-featuring-ulug-kuzuoglu-codes-of-modernity-chinese-scripts-in-the-global-information-age/
LOCATION:CGIS South\, Room S050\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ulug.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240319T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240319T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240123T172706Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:35155-1710864000-1710869400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Christopher Courtney - Heat and the Urban Environment of Modern China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Christopher Courtney\, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History\, Durham University \n\n\n\nThroughout history\, people living in Chinese cities have often had to contend with extreme heat. Although this is natural feature of the climate\, it has been exacerbated by anthropogenic processes\, which have transformed cities into urban heat islands. Drawing upon a variety of sources\, including oral histories collected in the “furnace city” of Wuhan\, this paper examines how people have understood and sought to cope with the problem of extreme heat in China since the beginning of the twentieth century. It describes how\, at the beginning of this era\, traditional ideas about heat toxins and malign qi were challenged by biomedical theories about thermoregulation\, eventually forming the syncretic blend of ideas about heat and health that exists in China today. This paper then examines how new technologies\, such electric fans\, air-conditioning\, and refrigeration\, promised to alleviate the effects of extreme heat. Yet it describes how these technologies met with resistance\, from those who believed that unnatural forms of thermal comfort could injure your health. The paper continues by exploring how\, in the austere years following 1949\, bourgeois cooling technologies were rejected in favour of a new modes of heat governance. While the Maoist state promoted alternative technologies\, such as the air raid shelter air-conditioning and earth refrigerators\, most people relied upon even humbler technologies\, such as bamboo beds and hand fans. Finally\, this paper describes how\, since the 1990s\, China has witnessed the inexorable rise of cooling technologies. Air-conditioning and refrigeration have helped to reshape cities and transform lifestyles yet have had a dramatic effect upon the environment.  \n\n\n\nChris Courtney is an Associate Professor in Modern Chinese History at the University of Durham\, UK. His research focusses largely upon the environmental and social history of Wuhan. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China (published in Chinese as 龙王之怒)examined the history of the 1931 Central China Flood. He has also published on topics including the history of environmental religion\, fire disasters\, and Maoist flood (mis)management. Over the past few years\, he has been collaborating with colleagues at the National University of Singapore on a project examining the historical and contemporary problem of heat in Asian cities. His next monograph is tentatively entitled A World History Wuhan.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-christopher-courtney/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/MCL-CC.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240305T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240305T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20240123T174727Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:35158-1709654400-1709659800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Fa-Ti Fan - Disaster Governance and Political Participation in China: From the Mao Era to the Present
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Fa-Ti Fan\, Professor of History\, Binghamton University\, State University of New York \n\n\n\nThis talk discusses the modes of disaster governance and crisis management in China from the early Mao to the post-Covid era. We will start with the 1960s-70s when China was going through severe political crises\, natural disasters\, and geopolitical challenges. We will then broaden the timeframe and trace major similarities and changes in disaster governance from the early years of the communist regime to the present. My main focus is on state policies\, but I will also discuss political participation from various social and political groups in times of disaster or crisis. \n\n\n\nProfessor Fan is a historian of science and of modern China. His research and teaching have focused on three related areas – history of environmental sciences\, 20th-century China\, and science and empire. He is the author of British Naturalists in Qing China: Science\, Empire\, and Cultural Encounter (2004; Chinese translation 2011) and dozens of essays on a range of topics in history and in science studies. He is currently completing two books\, one on earthquakes in communist China and the other on science and politics in republican China. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-fa-ti-fan-disaster-governance-and-political-participation-in-china-from-the-mao-era-to-the-present/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MCL-feb-13.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231114T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231114T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20231025T152648Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:34201-1699977600-1699983000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Kelly Hammond — Chinese Ethnopolitcs and State-Building: The Case of Muslim General Bai Chongxi 
DESCRIPTION:Register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Kelly Hammond\, Associate Professor of East Asian History\, Department of History\, University of Arkansas \n\n\n\nBai Chongxi’s life spanned the Late Qing\, the founding of the Chinese Republic and its fracturing into the so-called “Warlord Era\,” the Nanjing Decade\, the Second Sino-Japanese War\, the Chinese Civil War\, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. He is rightly recognized for his dedication to Guangxi and his illustrious military career. He receives less credit for his active participation in Muslim organizations\, his advocacy for the inclusion of Muslims into state-building projects\, and his diplomacy with Muslims in and beyond China.  This talk examines some of the tensions between the ways that Bai tried to ensure that Muslim voices were heard at the national level throughout his military career. By doing this\, we see that Bai attempted to foreground Muslim concerns as a pressing geopolitical issue for the Nationalists. Bai’s actions from the 1920s through to the 1960s expose the fraught and complex processes of nation and state building in China and show how the political and military architects of KMT state-building efforts often had loyalties that conflicted with the KMT.   \n\n\n\nKelly Hammond is an Associate Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. She is also the Associate Director of International and Global Studies. Hammond specializes in modern Chinese and Japanese history\, and her work focuses on Islam and politics in 20th-century East Asia. She is the author of China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II. She serves on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century China and is the Associate Editor for Modern China at The Journal of Asian Studies.   \n\n\n\nAlso via Zoom.Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Er_y618RQp2L2JszSP9xbw \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-kelly-anne-hammond-chinese-ethnopolitcs-and-state-building-the-case-of-muslim-general-bai-chongxi/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Bai.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231026T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231026T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20230918T141219Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155052Z
UID:33730-1698336000-1698341400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Shellen Wu - Writing Global History from an Asian Perspective
DESCRIPTION:Register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Shellen X. Wu\, Associate Professor and L.H. Gipson Chair in Transnational History\, Lehigh University \n\n\n\nGlobal history has drawn criticism for its lack of diversity among its practicing ranks and the flattening effect of its materialist focus. I would like to propose a middle way: a global history that encompasses individual agency; an intellectual history that addresses the racism and misogyny built into much of frontier discourse from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a history that acknowledges the exclusions built into archives and written records but also the way that these unpalatable pasts created the modern world in which we live. The use of multiple and intersecting biographies as a global history method breaks down the flattening effect of larger historical narratives into the individual trajectories of lived lives along with all their associated messiness\, triumphs\, and reversals of fortune. Individual lives give texture to broader concepts of “empires\,” “frontiers\,” and “nations” and cross the temporal and spatial boundaries we have created in the professionalization of modern history writing. \n\n\n\nAlso via Zoom. Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_p20wuoxoTxCJWrNJ4oYQzw \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-shellen-wu-writing-global-history-from-an-asian-perspective/
LOCATION:CGIS South Room S354\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230919T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230919T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20230830T150934Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:33610-1695139200-1695144600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Jennifer Altehenger - When Folding Chairs Became Bestsellers: The Revolutionary Roots of China’s Furniture Exports
DESCRIPTION:Register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Jennifer Altehenger\, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History\, Associate Professor of Chinese History\, Merton College\, Oxford \n\n\n\nThe People’s Republic of China is one of the world’s leading furniture producers\, and international media frequently report on its furniture exports. Descriptions of how goods from China came to furnish homes and workplaces across the world tend to start with the economic reforms of the 1980s. When they take a longer historical view\, they often gloss over the Mao era (1949-ca. 1976). This gap severs furniture exports from their revolutionary contexts and legacies. After 1949\, Chinese factories shipped wardrobes\, chairs\, cupboards\, tables\, and other items to the Soviet Union\, Australia\, Eastern and Western Europe\, the Middle East\, and many parts of Asia including Hong Kong. Most of the factories that produced export furniture after 1978 were established between the 1940s and 1960s\, their designers trained in state academies\, and their workers apprenticed in the socialist workplace of factories and cooperatives. Notable designs\, such as the Beijing Northern Suburb Timber Mill’s metal folding chair\, date to the 1960s and became bestsellers in the early 1970s. In this talk I explore stories from this world of furniture exports in Mao’s China: how design\, production\, and trade worked; who participated\, benefited\, or lost out; and how these developments laid the foundation for the PRC to become a global producer both of cheap and high-quality furniture.  \n\n\n\nAlso available on Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dpZ2dC97SnGbyUrQPoBpzw \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-jennifer-altehenger/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230315T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230315T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20230209T165121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:31614-1678896000-1678901400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri - Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
DESCRIPTION:Register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeakers:Gal Gvili\, McGill University; Author\, Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious\, 1895–1962Adhira Mangalagiri\, Queen Mary London; Author\, States of Discontent: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth CenturyModerator: Karen Thornber\, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations\, Harvard UniversityChair: Arunabh Ghosh\, Associate Professor of History\, Harvard University \n\n\n\nJoin us as we hear Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri discuss their exciting new books in a conversation moderated by Karen Thornber. \n\n\n\nAlso available via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AHDv2BY4Ry-wHRRm7XRlwg \n\n\n\nSponsors:Fairbank Center for Chinese StudiesHarvard University Asia CenterHarvard-Yenching InstituteCenter for Global Asia\, NYU Shanghai \n\n\n\n\n\nYouTube recording of “Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri – Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India”\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/gail-gvili-and-adhira-mangalagiri-imagination-and-disconnection-new-literary-studies-of-china-india/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260506T234207
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260506T234207
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20230209T162257Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154956Z
UID:31606-1778110927-1778110927@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri - Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
DESCRIPTION:Register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeakers: Gal Gvili\, McGill University; Author\, Imagining India in Modern ChinaLiterary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious\, 1895–1962Adhira Mangalagiri\, Queen Mary University of London; Author\, The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century \n\n\n\nModerator: Karen Thornber\, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations\, Harvard University \n\n\n\nChair: Arunabh Ghosh\, Associate Professor of History\, Harvard University \n\n\n\nCome join us as we hear Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri discuss their exciting new books in a conversation moderated by Karen Thornber.Co-Sponsors:Fairbank Center for Chinese StudiesHarvard University Asia CenterHarvard-Yenching InstituteCenter for Global Asia\, NYU Shanghai \n\n\n\nAlso available via Zoom. Register at https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AHDv2BY4Ry-wHRRm7XRlwg.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/gal-gvili-and-adhira-mangalagiri-imagination-and-disconnection-new-literary-studies-of-china-india/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221129T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221129T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20220921T143954Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:29568-1669737600-1669743000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Linh Vu - The Politics of Martyr Commemoration in Modern China and Contemporary Taiwan
DESCRIPTION:register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Linh Vu\, Assistant Professor\, Arizona State University \n\n\n\nThis talk focuses on (1) the politics of martyr commemoration in Republican China (1911–1949) and (2) the governance of the posthumous identities of the Nationalist Chinese dead in contemporary Taiwan. The Chinese Republic laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through the governance of these millions of war dead. In addition\, the commemoration of war martyrs has been the unifying and consolidating force in the formation of national identity and sovereignty in a place with complicated status such as Taiwan. My case studies of China during the Republican era and Taiwan in recent decades demonstrate how the power of the dead necessitates that political\, social\, and cultural institutions develop the means to control the way by which they are remembered. The dead are invested with significance to constitute the national spirit\, to affirm political legitimacy\, and to recreate social coherence and temporal continuity. \n\n\n\nLinh Vu is an assistant professor of history in the School of Historical\, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University\, Tempe\, Arizona\, USA. Her first book\, Governing the Dead: Martyrs\, Memorials\, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China (Cornell University Press\, 2021)\, examines the efforts of the Chinese nation-state to record\, commemorate\, and compensate military and civilian dead and how such efforts transformed China’s social and cultural institutions.This event also available on Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6yUmfHCUSRy5_1M2doG8ow \n\n\n\n\n\nYouTube recording of “Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Linh Vu – The Politics of Martyr Commemoration in Modern China and Contemporary Taiwan”\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-linh-vu/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221117T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221117T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20220829T153928Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:29390-1668700800-1668706200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Benno Weiner - This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion! The Ethnopolitics of Great Nationality Chauvinism in Early-Maoist China
DESCRIPTION:Read the Transcript Here\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Benno Weiner\, Associate Professor\, Carnegie Mellon UniversityThrough much of the 1950s\, the Chinese Communist Party considered disunity between ethnocultural groups (minzu)primarilyto be a product of “great nationality chauvinism\,” which refered to exploitation committed in the past by the Han majority against “minority nationalities.” In parts of China’s Northwest\, however\, the Party identified Hui Muslim elites\, not Han\, to be the main agents of nationality exploitation and Tibetans to be their principal targets. It therefore declared Tibetans of all classes to be a priori victims of nationality exploitation. By contrast\,because Hui were considered to be both victims and traffickers of nationality exploitation\, the regional leadership ordered “good” Muslims be distinguished from “bad.” While echoing Qing and even Republican-era practices of labeling Muslim communities and responding to rebellion\, I argue that its 1950s permeation must be understood within the CCP’s own practices of minoritization and frameworks for conceptualizing the new socialist nation-state. All of which was made more urgent by a string of uprisings that between late-1949 and mid-1953 engulfed several Muslim-majority areas along the Qinghai-Gansu Highlands and spilled into the Tibetan and Mongol-dominated grasslands to their south. \n\n\n\nDr. Weiner is a historian of Modern China\, Tibet and Inner Asia. His research revolves around China’s contested and possibly incomplete transition from empire to nation-state and in particular the processes and problematics of twentieth-century state and nation building within China’s ethnic minority regions. Before joining CMU\, he taught at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. \n\n\n\nDr. Weiner’s first book\, The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Cornell UP\, 2020)\, is among the first major studies of a “nationality minority region” during the formative years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)\, and the first to examine early efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to integrate the vast region known to Tibetans as Amdo into the PRC. Applying the theoretical lens of imperial transition to the methodology of local history\, it argues that in 1950s Amdo Party leaders implicitly understood both the administrative and epistemological obstacles to transforming a vast multiethnic empire into a unitary\, socialist nation-state. For much of the decade the CCP therefore employed a “subimperial” strategy\, referred to as the United Front\, as a means to “gradually\,” “voluntarily\,” and “organically” bridge this gap between empire and nation. However\, the United Front ultimately lost out to a revolutionary impatience that demanded immediate national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization\, “democratic reforms\,” and large-scale rebellion. Despite successfully identifying the tensions between empire and nation\, and attempting to creatively resolve them\, empire was eliminated before the process of de-imperialization and nationalization was completed. Like so many of the world’s most intractable conflicts\, he therefore contends that at the root of the Sino-Tibetan conflict lies the unresolved legacy of empire.Read the Transcript Here: Read Transcript \n\n\n\n\n\nYouTube recording of “Modern China Lecture Series featuring Benno Weiner – This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion! The Ethnopolitics of Great Nationality Chauvinism in Early-Maoist China”\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-benno-weiner-this-absolutely-is-not-a-hui-rebellion-the-ethnopolitics-of-great-nationality-chauvinism-in-early-maoist-china/
LOCATION:CGIS South Room S354\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221103T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221103T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20220927T150450Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:29721-1667491200-1667496600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Taisu Zhang: The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems\, Politics\, and Institutions
DESCRIPTION:read the transcript here\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Taisu Zhang\, Professor of Law and History\, Yale UniversityHow states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science\, legal theory\, economics\, sociology\, and history. Increasingly\, scholars believe that China’s relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China’s imperial history. Through the Qing example\, the book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former\, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter\, in the Qing case by artificially limiting the production of economic information that could have been used to challenge fiscal conservatism. \n\n\n\nTaisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history\, private law theory\, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. His first book\, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England\, was published by Cambridge University Press\, and received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. A second book\, The Ideological Foundations of the Qing Fiscal State\, is in progress. He has published articles and book chapters on a wide array of topics\, winning awards from several academic organizations\, and is a regular essayist on Chinese law\, society\, and politics in media outlets. \n\n\n\nZhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School and is the current president of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law\, the University of Hong Kong\, Brown University\, and the Tsinghua University School of Law.  He holds a secondary appointment at Yale as Professor of History.Read the Transcript Here: Read Transcript \n\n\n\n\n\nYouTube recording of “Modern China Lecture Series featuring Taisu Zhang: The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems\, Politics\, and Institutions”\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-taisu-zhang/
LOCATION:Room S030\, CGIS South\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221011T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221011T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20220829T150506Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:29386-1665504000-1665509400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture featuring Philip Thai -  Communist China’s Capitalist Front: The China Resources Company in Cold War Hong Kong
DESCRIPTION:REgister for Hybrid Zoom Attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Philip Thai\, Northeastern University \n\n\n\nThe China Resources Company is a Hong Kong-based\, Chinese state-owned conglomerate with diverse businesses interests in real estate\, retail\, pharmaceuticals\, energy\, and other industries. Today\, it is one of the largest corporations in the world and currently ranked no. 70 on the Fortune Global 500. During the Cold War\, China Resources operated as a front company advancing the economic and geopolitical interests of the People’s Republic. Most importantly\, it served as the primary commercial intermediary between China and Hong Kong\, supplying the British colony with food\, petroleum\, and other essential supplies for decades before and after “Reform and Opening.” This talk will trace the development of the company and explore its role in circumventing international embargoes\, promoting foreign trade\, and operating in Hong Kong. It will consider how the history of China Resources could address critical questions in the history of Hong Kong and the Cold War more generally. \n\n\n\nPhilip Thai is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Northeastern University. A historian of Modern China and East Asia\, he has research and teaching interests that include legal history\, economic history\, and diplomatic history. He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law\, Economic Life\, and the Making of the Modern State and the forthcoming Diplomatic History journal article\, “Hong Kong in the U.S.-UK War on Drugs\, 1970–1980”. During the 2022-23 academic year\, Professor Thai will be in residence at Harvard Radcliffe Institute as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Frederick Burkhardt Fellow working on his new project\, a history of underground economies across “Greater China” during the Cold War. \n\n\n\nThis event is also available on Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lflaHpU3QsScF0HGYvNxvA \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-featuring-philip-thai/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220929T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220929T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20220829T145908Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:29382-1664467200-1664472600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Yajun Mo - Touring China: A History of Travel Culture\, 1912–1949
DESCRIPTION:Register For Hybrid Zoom session\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Yajun Mo\, Boston CollegeWhen and under what circumstances did modern tourism infrastructure emerge and expand in China? How did the development of tourism shape print media and travel culture? This talk\, based on Yajun Mo’s recently published book\, Touring China: A History of Travel Culture\, 1912-1949\, explores these questions by tracing the roots of China’s domestic tourism to the first half of the twentieth century. More than simply introducing new practices and values associated with leisure mobility to the urban middle class\, tourism and travel culture in the Republican period\, Mo argues\, enabled Chinese citizens to imagine an inherent unity to their country despite its territorial fragmentation. \n\n\n\nProfessor Mo teaches courses on modern China and women’s and gender history. Her research focus on China’s production of its national image. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled From Shanghai to Shangri-La: Zhuang Xueben and China’s Ethnographic Frontier. It focuses on the life and work of Shanghai photographer Zhuang Xueben\, whose explorations and photography of the Sino-Tibetan frontiers in the 1930s and 1940s provide one of the broadest and most striking visual records of the region and its diverse peoples. This project won a Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship. Professor Mo’s first book\, Touring China: A History of Travel Culture\, 1912-1949\, explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited\, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. Drawing on an extensive range of sources\, this book de-Westernizes the history of tourism in China. In addition to original research\, Professor Mo has also been active in academic translation and has translated academic writings in both directions—from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English—forging connections with academic communities in both Anglophone and Sinophone worlds. \n\n\n\nThis talk will also be available on Zoom. To register\, visit https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-7dfmQhnR_ywX9BK2rkN-Q \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-yajun-mo/
LOCATION:CGIS South Room S354\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211130T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211130T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20210614T213408Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:10809-1638288000-1638293400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Joan Judge - China’s Mundane Revolution:  Vernacularizing Science and Scientizing the Vernacular in the Long Republic\, 1894-1955
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Joan Judge\, Professor\, Department of History\, York University \nWhat can we learn from intellectual detritus? Focusing on cheap print\, vernacular daily-use knowledge\, and common readers in the Long Republic (1895-1955)\, this talk argues that the books an age discards as slipshod and unscientific\, and the readers it disparages as superstitious and ignorant\, comprise the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change is actualized. Premised on the notion that what we currently know about China’s iconic 20th-century revolutions does not explain enough\, it shifts our attention from innovation to ingenuity\, from “knowledge what” to “knowledge how\,” from the momentous to the mundane—without losing sight of the momentous. The talk first introduces a project on “China’s Mundane Revolution” that is based on some 500\, largely unstudied\, daily-use texts\, together with material gathered from the interstices of various archives. It then zeros in on one of the “how to” topics in the study: “how to treat a cholera infection.” Examining the ways individual common readers might have approached “the most spectacular ‘new’ disease of the nineteenth century\,” the example highlights the dynamic processes of scientizing vernacular and vernacularizing scientific forms of knowledge. It also raises questions about the ways these processes align—or misalign—with the various iterations of mass politics in this critical period. \nJoan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship\, member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto\, Canada.She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender\, Visuality\, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press\, 2015)\, The Precious Raft of History: The Past\, the West\, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press\, 2008)\, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press\, 1996)\, and co-editor of Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic\, 2020)\, Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press\, 2018)\, and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press\, 2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project\, China’s Mundane Revolution: Cheap Print\, Vernacular Knowledge\, and Common Reading in the Long Republic\, 1894–1955. \nPresented via Zoom \nAlso streaming on YouTube \n\n\nTranscript: Download Transcript
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-joan-judge/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211102T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211102T173000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20210614T212319Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
UID:10807-1635868800-1635874200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Eugenia Lean - The Ideograph and a Cantonese Pun: Linguistic Divergence and Spurious Chinese Marks in Global Capitalism
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Eugenia Lean\, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director\, Weatherhead East Asian Institute\, Columbia University \nBy examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap\, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats. Xiangmao soap was featured in the first ever trademark litigation trial in China held in 1889. In that trial\, it became evident that the emerging global trademark regime was premised on an Orientalist understanding of the Chinese character as ideograph. A second case in 1919 that also featured the alleged counterfeiting of the Xiangmao brand then reveals how the homophonic nature of Chinese and the issue of dialect were often the basis of wordplay and punning in Chinese trademarks\, and that international trademark law was unable to accommodate these practices. The key legal premise that an offending trademark rested on its function to deceive the public prevented the system from recognizing (and thus\, successfully prosecuting) marks that while likely to have been emulative\, turned precisely on a knowing audience\, willing to purchase the “counterfeit” because of the witty pun or wordplay at work. Both bring to the fore how the emerging trademark regime was premised on romance languages and failed to appreciate the complexity of both the Chinese language and the nature of the Chinese consumer market. Hardly marks that purposefully deceived in acts of “passing off\,” so-called “spurious” marks aided (and arguably abetted) knowledgeable and appreciative consumers in their wily acts of consumption and were part of a larger market of rogue knock-offs in China that eluded the emerging trademark regime in the early twentieth-century and that continue to elude the global IP today. \nEugenia Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990)\, and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry\, mass media\, consumer culture\, affect studies and gender\, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press\, 2007) which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history\, given by the American Historical Association. \nProfessor Lean’s second book\, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in theMaking of a Cosmetics Empire\, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press\, 2020)\, examines the manufacturing\, commercial and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early twentieth century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism\,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing and was marked by heterogeneous\, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. \nPresented via Zoom \nAlso streaming on YouTube \n\n\nTranscript: Download Transcript
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-eugenia-lean/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211019T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211019T213000
DTSTAMP:20260506T234207
CREATED:20210614T210901Z
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UID:10805-1634673600-1634679000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Fang Xiaoping - Pandemics and Politics in Mao’s China: The Rise of the Emergency Disciplinary State
DESCRIPTION:  \nSpeaker: Fang Xiaoping\, Assistant Professor of History\, School of Humanities\, Nanyang Technological University\, Singapore. \nDuring the 1961-1965 period\, a cholera pandemic ravaged the southeastern coastal areas of Mao’s China which was already suffering from lingering starvation\, class struggles\, political campaigns and geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. This lecture focuses on the first global pandemic that had plagued China after 1949 and the resulting large-scale but clandestine emergency response. Based on rare archival documents and in-depth interviews with the ever-dwindling witnesses of the pandemic\, this lecture examines the dynamics between disease and politics when the Communist Party was committed to restructuring society between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The speaker argues that disease and its control were not only affected by the social restructuring that began in the 1950s and strengthened since 1961\, but also integral components of this. Quarantine\, mass inoculation\, epidemic surveillance and information control functionalised social control and political discipline\, and therefore significantly contributed to the rise of an emergency disciplinary state\, which exerted far-reaching impacts on its sociopolitical system and emergency response since Mao’s China\, including the COVID-19 pandemic. \nXiaoping Fang is an assistant professor of history at the School of Humanities of the Nanyang Technological University\, Singapore. He received his PhD in History from the National University of Singapore (NUS)\, where he majored in modern China and the history of science\, technology and medicine in East Asia from 2002 to 2008. He studied and worked at the Needham Research Institute\, Cambridge\, UK (2005-2006)\, the Asia Research Institute of the NUS (2008)\, the China Research Centre of the University of Technology\, Sydney\, Australia (2009-2013)\, and the National Humanities Center\, USA (2019-2020). His research interests focus on the history of medicine\, health\, and disease in twentieth-century China and the socio-political history of Mao’s China after 1949. He is the author of Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester\, NY: University of Rochester Press\, 2012) and China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao (Pittsburgh\, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press\, 2021).   \nPresented via Zoom \n\n\nTranscript: Download Transcript
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-fang-xiaoping/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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UID:10802-1633449600-1633455000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Isabella Weber - How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate
DESCRIPTION:  \n \n \nSpeaker: Isabella Weber\, Assistant Professor of Economics\, University of Massachusetts Amherst \nChina has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet\, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade\, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization – but struggled over how to go about it. \nShould China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy\, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight\, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace\, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research\, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents\, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s\, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall\, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without. \nIsabella M. Weber is a political economist working on China\, global trade and the history of economic thought. She is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. \nPresented via Zoom Webinar \n\n\nTranscript: Download Transcript
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-isabella-weber/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210914T200000
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UID:10798-1631649600-1631655000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Jeremy Brown and Louisa Lim - Reassessing June Fourth: New Approaches and Sources on the Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre
DESCRIPTION:Speakers:Jeremy Brown\, Professor\, Department of History\, Simon Fraser UniversityLouisa Lim\, Journalist and Lecturer\, University of Melbourne \nPart of the Modern China lecture series \n \n \n  \nHow significant were the events of June 1989 in the broader span of recent Chinese history?  How does the aftermath of the Beijing massacre help to explain events since then\, including what is happening in Hong Kong today?  How deep is the state-imposed amnesia about Tiananmen?  What is the future of June Fourth Studies?  Join authors Jeremy Brown and Louisa Lim for a discussion about these and other questions. \nJeremy Brown is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University.  He is the author of June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 and City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide. \nDr. Louisa Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited\, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.  She was a correspondent for NPR and BBC based in China for a decade.  Her new book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong will be published in April 2022. \nImage courtesy: Holly Angell \n\n\nTranscript: Download Transcript
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-jeremy-brown-in-conversation-with-louisa-lim/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210413T200000
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UID:10112-1618344000-1618349400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Taomo Zhou - Leveraging Liminality: Shenzhen and the Origins of China’s Reform and Opening
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Taomo Zhou\, Assistant Professor of History\, Nanyang Technological University\, Singapore \nImmediately north of Hong Kong\, Shenzhen is China’s most successful Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening\, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People’s Republic’s adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This talk examines prototypes of the SEZ in Bao’an County\, the precursor of Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949-1976). Between 1949 and 1978\, Bao’an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown Colony. To create an enclave of exception to socialism\, communist cadres in Bao’an promoted individualized\, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns\, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the very hallmark of Deng Xiaoping’s economic statecraft. \nTaomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University\, Singapore\, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo’s first book\, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China\, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press\, 2019)\, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Taomo is working on a new research project on Shenzhen—the first Special Economic Zone of China—and its connections with the Export Processing Zones and free ports across Southeast Asia. This research is funded by a Tier 1 grant from the Ministry of Education\, Singapore. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/taomo-zhou-leveraging-liminality-the-border-town-of-baoan-and-the-origins-of-chinas-reform-and-opening/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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UID:9535-1616515200-1616522400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring E. Elena Songster - Presenting the Panda: The Symbolic Transformation of Animal to Ambassador to Advocate
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: E. Elena Songster\, Professor of History\, History Department\, Saint Mary’s College of California \nThe giant panda stumbled into ambassador work. Profoundly successful\, its diplomatic roles multiplied and evolved\, but its persistent existence as an animal repeatedly reframed its role as a diplomat and beyond. Songster discusses findings from her book\, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon (Oxford UP)\,  examining the history of the emergence of the giant panda as a national icon and the impact it has had on foreign policy and the natural environment. \nElena Songster’s research focuses on the environmental history of modern China.  She is currently researching medicinals found in nature through a historical lens. Other research projects include the history of snow leopard conservation and forestry history. Elena Songster teaches classes on Chinese History\, Japanese History\, Asian History\, and World History.  She has also taught in the Collegiate Seminar Program\, and JanTerm and serves on the Advisory Board for the Global and Regional Studies Program. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/e-elena-songster-modern-china-lecture/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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UID:10114-1614700800-1614706200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Andrew B. Liu - Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript for the event here. \nSpeaker: Andrew B. Liu\, Assistant Professor of History\, Villanova University \nTea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today\, and at the turn of the twentieth century\, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea\, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest\, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time\, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters\, he explains\, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists\, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together\, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India. \nAndrew B. Liu is assistant professor of history at Villanova University\, where his research focuses on China\, transnational Asia\, political economy\, and comparative history. \nThis event co-sponsored by The Joint Center for History and Economics\, Harvard University. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-andrew-liu/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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CREATED:20200825T155906Z
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UID:9533-1612886400-1612893600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series featuring Eddy U - A New Approach to Studying the Chinese Intellectual
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript of the event here. \nSpeaker: Eddy U\, Professor of Sociology\, University of California\, Davis \nNo system of rule has objectified the intellectual as much as communist rule of the twentieth century. Communist regimes codified\, identified\, and governed part of the general population as intellectuals based on Marxist thought. This talk builds on my recently published book and illustrates how the “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) in China evolved from an obscure classification of people during the 1920s to embodied subjects locatable everywhere after the 1949 revolution. This transformation of the intellectual changed Chinese society\, intensifying mass surveillance\, political education\, and other governing practices. My analytical approach moves the study of the intellectual in modern China into new terrains. I end with an interpretation of the current situation in Hong Kong. \nEddy U is Professor of Sociology at the University of California\, Davis. He grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. His book\, Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification (UC Press\, 2019)\, won the Barrington Moore Book Award given by the American Sociological Association. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/eddy-u-modern-china-lecture/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20201110T160000
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CREATED:20200729T143358Z
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UID:9446-1605024000-1605031200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Covell Meyskens - Mao's Massive Military Industrial Campaign to Defend Cold War China
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript of the event here. \nSpeaker: Covell Meyskens\, Assistant Professor of Chinese History\, Naval Postgraduate School \nIn 1964\, the Chinese Communist Party made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union\, a top-secret massive military-industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built\, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era\, and yet this huge industrial war machine\, which saw the mobilization of 15 million people\, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. Drawing on a rich collection of archival documents\, memoirs\, and oral interviews\, Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War\, merging global geopolitics with local change. \nCovell Meyskens is Assistant Professor of Chinese history in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He works on capitalist and anti-capitalist development in modern China\, especially as it relates to building big infrastructure projects. His first book\, Mao’s Third Front: Militarization of Cold War China\, published by Cambridge University Press\, examines how the Chinese Communist Party industrialized inland regions in order to protect socialist China from American and Soviet threats. His second book project\, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Hydraulic Engine for China\, analyzes state-led efforts to transform China’s Three Gorges region into a hydraulic engine to power national development in the twentieth century. Currently\, he is in the process of developing a third project on changing conceptions of national security in modern China. Dr. Meyskens also curates a website of images of everyday life in Maoist China. Meyskens is the author of articles and book chapters on Chinese railroads\, the Three Gorges Dam\, Sino-North Korean relations\, Maoist visual culture\, globalization\, radio in Mao’s China\, and racial violence in the Pacific War. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/covell-meyskens-modern-china-lecture/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20201027T160000
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CREATED:20200729T143120Z
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UID:9445-1603814400-1603821600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Fei-Hsien Wang - Everybody Loves Qianlong: Vernacular Fantasies\, Cultural Consumption\, and the “Prosperous Age” in Post-Imperial China
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript of the event here. \nSpeaker: Fei-Hsien Wang\, Associate Professor\, Department of History\, Indiana University Bloomington \nExamining a wide range of cultural products and genres from the late nineteenth century to the present\, this talk traces the evolution of the vernacular myths and popular fantasies about Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). As China’s cultural economy and political climate transforms overtime\, new stories and myths about Qianlong emerge to satisfy the changing desires of the audience as well as the political authorities. These popular cultural products have gradually shaped a common historical memory that takes the place of Qing “history” in most (Han) Chinese audience’s minds\, despite generations of specialists’ effort to debunk it. The voracious fascination with this most accomplished Manchu emperor\, however\, has been an uneasy one. At the core of the vernacular fantasies of Qianlong lies the unsolved tension between the modern Han/Chinese nationalism and the legacy of a non-Han “prosperous age” (shengshi). The unofficial endorsement by the PRC leaders of using High Qing to talk about a great China further prolongs the career of the vernacular Qianlong. \nFei-Hsien Wang is a historian of modern China\, with a particular interest in how information\, ideas\, and practices were produced\, transmitted\, and consumed across different societies in East Asia. Fei-Hsien Wang’s research has revolved around the relations between knowledge\, commerce\, and political authority after 1800. \nCo-sponsored by the Joint Center for History and Economics. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/fei-hsien-wang-modern-china-lecture/
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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