Modern China Lecture
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Isabella Weber – How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate
https://youtu.be/Vu34m6CeK5w https://soundcloud.com/fairbank-center/how-china-escaped-shock-therapy-with-isabella-weber Speaker: Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst China 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Fang Xiaoping – Pandemics and Politics in Mao’s China: The Rise of the Emergency Disciplinary State
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw8Qrq8D1uw Speaker: Fang Xiaoping, Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Eugenia Lean – The Ideograph and a Cantonese Pun: Linguistic Divergence and Spurious Chinese Marks in Global Capitalism
Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University By 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Joan Judge – China’s Mundane Revolution: Vernacularizing Science and Scientizing the Vernacular in the Long Republic, 1894-1955
Speaker: Joan Judge, Professor, Department of History, York University What 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Yajun Mo – Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912–1949
CGIS South Room S354 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: 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 […]
Modern China Lecture featuring Philip Thai – Communist China’s Capitalist Front: The China Resources Company in Cold War Hong Kong
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Philip Thai, Northeastern University The 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Taisu Zhang: The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions
Room S030, CGIS South 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United StatesSpeaker: 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. […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Benno Weiner – This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion! The Ethnopolitics of Great Nationality Chauvinism in Early-Maoist China
CGIS South Room S354 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Linh Vu – The Politics of Martyr Commemoration in Modern China and Contemporary Taiwan
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Linh Vu, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University This 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. […]
Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri – Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers: 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 Moderator: Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Chair: Arunabh Ghosh, Associate […]
Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri – Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers: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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Jennifer Altehenger – When Folding Chairs Became Bestsellers: The Revolutionary Roots of China’s Furniture Exports
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jennifer Altehenger, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Merton College, Oxford The 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 […]