Modern China Lecture
Modern China Lecture Series: The Significance of the Frontier in Twentieth Century Chinese History
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Shellen Wu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville The 1890s set off an unprecedented rush for the last remaining unclaimed lands around the world. Developments in the preceding century saw the social sciences and disciplines like geography and agronomy connecting Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The educated elite from around the world increasingly spoke a common […]
Modern China Lecture: Governing the Souls of Chinese Modernity
Speaker: Andrew Kipnis, Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University Philippe Descola argues that human societies can be categorized by the ways in which they utilize broad assumptions about interiority and physicality, where interiority refers to something similar to what Edward Tyler and James Frazer meant by […]
Modern China Lecture Series: Ryōdōraku (良導絡) in New China: Sino-Japanese Medical Exchange in the 1950s and the Role of Machines in East Asian Medical Modernity
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University In December of 1957, a medical delegation from the People’s Republic of China visited Japan as part of a decade-long series of semi-official cultural exchanges between the two former enemies. The delegation brought back a “Nakatani Ryōdōraku electrodermometer”—a scientific apparatus which, according to its inventor, Nakatani Yoshio, could be used […]
Can Computation Change the Study of Chinese Culture and History?
Speaker: Richard Jean So, University of Chicago The 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 […]
Jennifer Altehenger – A History of Legal Lessons: law, propaganda, and the state in socialist China
CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jennifer Altehenger, King's College London In 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 […]
Panel Discussion: The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies
CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010) 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesPanelists: Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University Andrew Gordon, Harvard University Joseph Esherick, University of California San Diego Sugata Bose, Harvard University Lien-Hang Nguyen, Columbia University Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago Moderator: Karen Thornber, Harvard University Asia Center Organized by: Arunabh Ghosh, Harvard University Co-Sponsored by: Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Harvard University Asia Center Reischauer Institute […]
Fabio Lanza – Liberation through Labor? The Urban Commune Experiment in Beijing
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona In 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 […]
Tansen Sen – India, China, and the World: A Connected History
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Tansen Sen, New York University Shanghai By 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 […]
Denise Ho – New Exhibitions and China’s Cultural Revolution: Rethinking Class, Material, Culture, and Propaganda
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Denise Y. Ho, Yale University Listen to our "Harvard on China" podcast interview with Denise Y. Ho. Download and read the transcript of this podcast interview. Denise 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 […]
Zuoyue Wang – Transnational Science in Modern China: From May Fourth to the Cold War and Beyond
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Zuoyue Wang, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona How 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 […]
Anne Reinhardt – Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China 1860-1937
Speaker: Anne Reinhardt, Williams College China’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. […]
Felix Boecking | Chinese trade wars in historical perspective— No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927-1945
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesListen 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. Speaker: Felix Boecking, University of Edinburgh No 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 […]