Modern China Lecture
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 […]
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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Shellen Wu – Writing Global History from an Asian Perspective
CGIS South Room S354 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Shellen X. Wu, Associate Professor and L.H. Gipson Chair in Transnational History, Lehigh University Global 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 […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Kelly Hammond — Chinese Ethnopolitcs and State-Building: The Case of Muslim General Bai Chongxi
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Kelly Hammond, Associate Professor of East Asian History, Department of History, University of Arkansas Bai 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 […]