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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230315T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230315T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20230209T165121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
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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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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260512T141734
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260512T141734
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20230209T162257Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154956Z
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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:20260512T141734
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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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221117T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221117T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
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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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221103T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221103T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
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:20260512T141734
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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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220929T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220929T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
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:20260512T141734
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211102T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211102T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211019T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211019T213000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20210614T210901Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211005T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20210614T205548Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T155053Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210914T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210914T213000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20210614T204129Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210413T200000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210413T213000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20210120T142132Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210323T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210323T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200825T160542Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210302T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210302T173000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20210120T144159Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210209T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210209T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200825T155906Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20201110T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20201110T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200729T143358Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20201027T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20201027T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200729T143120Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154940Z
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/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20201013T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20201013T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200729T142310Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:9444-1602604800-1602612000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Gina Anne Tam - Dialect and the Making of Modern China: From Republican Revolutionaries to Hong Kong Protesters
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript for the event here. \nSpeaker: Gina Anne Tam\, Assistant Professor of History\, Trinity University \nTaking aim at the conventional narrative that standard\, national languages transform ‘peasants’ into citizens\, this talk will trace the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan – languages like Shanghainese\, Cantonese\, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language\, Mandarin. It shows how\, on the one hand\, linguists\, policy-makers\, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard ‘variants’ of the Chinese language\, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. I simultaneously highlight\, on the other hand\, the 1920s folksong collectors\, communist-period playwrights\, contemporary hip-hop artists and popular protestors in Hong Kong who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China’s national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the present\, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation – one spoken in one voice\, one spoken in many – interacted and shaped one another\, and in the process\, shaped the basis for national identity itself. \nGina Anne Tam is an assistant professor of Chinese history at Trinity University in San Antonio\, Texas. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016\, and her research and teaching focus on the construction of collective identity– national belonging\, ethnicity and race– in modern China. In addition to her book Dialect and Nationalism in China\, 1860-1960\, she has also published peer-reviewed work in Twentieth-Century China\, and has written about the relevance of her work to current events in Foreign Affairs\, The Nation\, and Dissent. Her new project will be a global history of Chinese restauranteurs and the making of pan-Asian cuisine in the twentieth century. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/gina-anne-tam-modern-china-lecture/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20200922T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20200922T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20200729T141244Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:9443-1600790400-1600797600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:MODERN CHINA LECTURE SERIES FEATURING Sören Urbanksy - Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian border
DESCRIPTION:Read the transcript of the event here. \nSpeaker: Sören Urbanksy\, Research Fellow\, German Historical Institute Washington \nThe Sino-Russian border\, once the world’s longest land border\, was special in many ways. It not only divided the two largest Eurasian empires\, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met\, where nomads and sedentary people mingled\, where the imperial interests of Russia and later the Soviet Union clashed with those of Qing and Republican China and Japan\, and where the world’s two largest Communist regimes hailed their friendship and staged their enmity. In this talk\, Sören Urbansky will discuss his recent book\, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian border\, which examines the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers\, barbed wire\, and border guards. \nPart of the Modern China Lecture Series \nPresented via Zoom Webinar
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/soren-urbanksy-modern-china-lecture/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190507T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190507T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T181240Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7410-1557244800-1557252000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Wen-hsin Yeh - Vast Ocean\, Small People:  The Aborigines of Taiwan
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Wen-hsin Yeh\, University of California at Berkeley \nFor centuries under the Ming and the Qing\, indigenous communities of Taiwan (i.e. the Austronesian-speaking tribal groups in the mountains and on the Pacific side of the island) led distinct styles of life in a state of relative insularity. That insularity ended in the 19th century when Western and Japanese naval vessels appeared on the Pacific. In response\, the Qing cut roads into the mountains and sent troops down the coast.  These events marked a new beginning for the aborigines who\, labeled as headhunters and savages\, came under successive regimes of colonial rule. Things changed again towards the end of the 20th century.  China adopted a “National Ocean Strategy” by which the People’s Navy would routinely project its presence on the Pacific.  And Taiwan\, out of a determination to deliver transitional justice\, issued in 2016 a presidential apology to the tribes as long-suffering victims of historical injustice. \nThis presentation on Taiwan’s indigenous people takes the Pacific as a point of reference to build a historical narrative.  In doing so\, the talk seeks to position Taiwan in a changing world of connecting oceans.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/wen-hsin-yeh-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190423T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190423T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T180936Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7408-1556035200-1556042400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Felix Boecking | Chinese trade wars in historical perspective— No Great Wall: Trade\, Tariffs\, and Nationalism in Republican China\, 1927-1945
DESCRIPTION:Listen to an interview with Felix Boecking on our “Harvard on China” podcast. Download and read the podcast transcript here Download and read the podcast transcript here. \n \nSpeaker: Felix Boecking\, University of Edinburgh \nNo Great Wall (Harvard Asia Center\, 2017)\, an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy\, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. It argues instead that during the second Sino-Japanese War\, China’s international trade\, the Nationalist government’s tariff revenues\, and hence its fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed. Drawing on the historical lessons of my research\, in this talk\, I will also discuss the unintended consequences of protectionism\, the difficulties of strategising trade wars\, and the differences between trade wars and real wars. \nFelix Boecking is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Economic and Political History at the University of Edinburgh\, UK\, and currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Among his research interests are China’s political economy\, the history of economics in the People’s Republic of China\, and the history of China’s foreign relations. His current project at the Wilson Center is “Economics on the Edge: An Intellectual History of Economists in the PRC since 1949.”
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/felix-boecking-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190326T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190326T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T180637Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7407-1553616000-1553623200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Anne Reinhardt - Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping\, Sovereignty\, and Nation-Building in China 1860-1937
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Anne Reinhardt\, Williams College \nChina’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute.  Its unequal relations with multiple powers\, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization\, has invited debated over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty.  In this talk\, Anne Reinhardt will discuss her recent book\, Navigating Semi-colonialism: Shipping\, Sovereignty\, and Nation-Building in China\, 1860-1937\, which examines steam navigation as a constitutive element of the treaty system in order to elucidate both conceptual and concrete aspects of the semi-colonial regime.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/anne-reinhardt-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190213T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190213T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T180351Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7405-1550073600-1550080800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Zuoyue Wang - Transnational Science in Modern China:  From May Fourth to the Cold War and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Zuoyue Wang\, California State Polytechnic University\, Pomona \nHow have transnational exchanges\, especially with the United States\, in science and technology shaped and reshaped modern China in the last century since the May Fourth Movement of 1919? This talk explores key players and events in this history from the Science Society of China during the Republican era\, the making of the atomic bomb during the Mao years\, the experiences of Chinese American scientists during the Cold War\, to the emergence of dissident scientists such as Fang Lizhi and the migration of Chinese students/scientists to the US during the reform era. Revisiting John Fairbank’s impact-response thesis\, it argues that we need to examine both how the world changed China and how China changed the world in science and technology. \nThis event is co-sponsored by the Asia Center Science and Technology Seminar Series
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/zuoyue-wang-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181113T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181113T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T175845Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7403-1542124800-1542132000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Denise Ho - New Exhibitions and China's Cultural Revolution: Rethinking Class\, Material\, Culture\, and Propaganda
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Denise Y. Ho\, Yale University \nListen to our “Harvard on China” podcast interview with Denise Y. Ho. \n \nDownload and read the transcript of this podcast interview. \nDenise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University\, and the author of “Curating Revolution: Politics on Display of Mao’s China” (2018). Using a wide variety of primary sources\, including Shanghai’s municipal and district archives and oral history\, “Curating Revolution” depicts displays of revolution and history\, politics and class\, and art and science. Analyzing China’s “socialist museums” and “new exhibitions\,” Ho demonstrates how Mao-era exhibitionary culture both reflected and made revolution. \nDenise Y. Ho is an historian of modern China\, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). She is also interested in urban history\, the study of information and propaganda\, and material culture. Ho teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary China\, the history of Shanghai\, the uses of the past in modern China\, and the historiography of the Republican era and the PRC.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/denise-ho-modern-china-lecture-series/
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:20181002T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181002T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T175607Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7401-1538496000-1538503200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Tansen Sen - India\, China\, and the World: A Connected History
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Tansen Sen\, New York University Shanghai \nBy focusing on the early material exchanges\, transmissions of knowledge and technologies between ancient India and ancient China; the networks of exchange during the colonial period; and some of the less-known facets of interactions between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China\, this presentation argues that the analysis of India-China connections must extend beyond the traditional frameworks of nation-states or bilateralism. Instead\, it is proposed that that a wide canvas of space\, people\, objects\, sources\, and timeframe is needed to fully comprehend the interactions between India and China in the past and during the contemporary period. It is argued that these interactions were multidirectional\, involved people from diverse parts of the world\, and were not constrained by the entities called “India” and “China.” The presentation also examines the ideas of “connected histories\,” “circulatory connections\,” “convergence\,” “contact zones\,” and “disjuncture” as the conceptual methods for studying transregional and transcultural connections and exchanges. \nTansen Sen is Professor of history and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai\, and Global Network Professor at New York University. Previously he was a faculty at the City University of New York and the founding head of the Nalanda Sriwijaya Center at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies\, Singapore. He is the author of Buddhism\, Diplomacy\, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations\, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India\, China\, and the World: A Connected History (2017; 2018). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (2012)\, edited Buddhism across Asia: Networks of Material\, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (2014)\, and co-edited (with Burkhard Schnepel) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World (under review). He is currently working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean\, volume 1.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/tansen-sen-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180926T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180926T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T175335Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154941Z
UID:7400-1537977600-1537984800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Fabio Lanza - Liberation through Labor? The Urban Commune Experiment in Beijing
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Fabio Lanza\, University of Arizona \nIn the years between 1958 and 1962\, the Urban Commune movement was promoted as a radical effort to change the daily lives of city residents. By inserting women into the “productive” life of factory work\, the movement also aimed at achieving a new form of everyday\, based on a true equality of gender relationships\, one achieved through the shared creativity of manual labor. While the movement failed\, it nonetheless brought to the fore some of the crucial tensions that marred the search for a socialist everyday: between participatory democracy and state hierarchy\, between production and liberation\, and between labor and gender equality.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/fabio-lanza-modern-china-lecture-series/
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:20180925T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180925T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T175201Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154942Z
UID:7398-1537891200-1537898400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Panel Discussion: The End of Concern: Maoist China\, Activism\, and Asian Studies
DESCRIPTION:Panelists:\nFabio Lanza\, University of Arizona\nEllen Schrecker\, Yeshiva University\nAndrew Gordon\, Harvard University\nJoseph Esherick\, University of California San Diego\nSugata Bose\, Harvard University\nLien-Hang Nguyen\, Columbia University\nBruce Cumings\, University of Chicago \nModerator: Karen Thornber\, Harvard University Asia Center \nOrganized by: Arunabh Ghosh\, Harvard University \nCo-Sponsored by:\nFairbank Center for Chinese Studies\nHarvard University Asia Center\nReischauer Institute for Japanese Studies\nKorea Institute\nMittal South Asia Institute \nListen again on Soundcloud:
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/panel-discussion-the-end-of-concern-maoist-china-activism-and-asian-studies/
LOCATION:CGIS South\, Tsai Auditorium (S010)\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Co-Sponsored Lectures,Conference and Workshops,Events of Interest,Modern China Lecture,Special Event
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180911T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180911T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20180801T174419Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154942Z
UID:7396-1536681600-1536688800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Jennifer Altehenger - A History of Legal Lessons: law\, propaganda\, and the state in socialist China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jennifer Altehenger\, King’s College London \nIn 2016\, the PRC embarked on the seventh five-year plan for the popularization of law. Today\, the dissemination of basic legal knowledge is an established part of CCP governance\, closely associated with the extensive legal reforms that followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Yet people learned about laws under state auspices throughout the twentieth-century (and before). Following the establishment of the PRC in 1949\, the CCP carried out numerous campaigns to get people to study and implement key national laws such as the Marriage Law\, Election Law\, and state constitutions. Teaching and learning laws was part of mass line politics\, intended to make laws accessible and transform people into law-making and law-abiding socialist citizens who contributed to China’s liberation. This talk – part of research for a recent book – shows why the CCP cared about disseminating laws from early on\, how law propaganda was produced\, circulated\, and censored\, and how people responded to learning about laws. Far from a simple propaganda exercise\, law propaganda contributed to fostering a legal culture in China that bolstered and threatened CCP rule at the same time. \nJennifer Altehenger is a Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College London. She is the author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China\, 1949-1989 (Harvard University Asia Center\, 2018) and has also published on the history of propaganda production\, information\, lexicography\, political satire\, and on Communist China’s links to other socialist countries before 1989. Funded by the British Academy and an Arts and Humanities Research Council leadership fellowship\, her current work examines the social\, economic\, and cultural history of everyday material culture and industrial design in China after 1949.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/jennifer-altehenger-modern-china-lecture-series/
LOCATION:CGIS South S020\, Belfer Case Study Room\, 1730 Cambridge St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170508T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170508T180000
DTSTAMP:20260512T141734
CREATED:20170111T174144Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250130T154942Z
UID:4663-1494259200-1494266400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Can Computation Change the Study of Chinese Culture and History?
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Richard Jean So\, University of Chicago \nThe emergence of large corpora of digitized cultural and historical texts and new methods in text mining and analysis have made possible a new form of computational analysis for the humanities and China Studies. The question and challenge is whether these new methods and “data” will enrich our study of Chinese culture and history or simply “tell us what we already know.” In this talk\, I utilize a large corpus of Republican-era Chinese cultural and political journals and methods in Natural Language Processing to demonstrate that indeed\, computation can not only reframe and challenge existing scholarship in China Studies\, but produce radically new interpretations and arguments\, as well as entire new conceptual frameworks for the study of modern China. I specifically develop a case study focused on the evolution and transformation of the era’s cultural discourse in relation to other significant discourses\, such as politics and media. \n 
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-richard-so/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
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