Modern China Lecture

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  • Modern China Lecture: Varieties of Chinese Utopianism, 1900-1940

    Speaker: Peter Zarrow, University of Connecticut Utopianism was a major motif in early twentieth century Chinese political thought.  Utopianism was not only widespread, it became constitutive of political thought.  Utopianism did so in the form of the utopian impulse rather than full-fledged utopianism.  The “utopian impulse” is revealed in the context of generally non-utopian ideas.  While not

  • The First World War and the Idea of “China”

    CGIS Knafel, K050 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    This lecture will focus on the meaning of the First World War to China and China's role in the Great War. It will pay special attention to the issue how the Great War and its aftermath provided a momentum for the Chinese and the world to think about the ideas of China and Chineseness. Most importantly, this talk will explain why and how the Chinese seized the Great

  • Doubts about the Chinese current of “doubting antiquity” and its critics

    CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: Rudolf G. Wagner Fairbank Center Associate at Harvard University, and Cluster Asia and Europe Associate at Heidelberg University, Germany. This is a study of the background, impact, and cost of the “doubting antiquity,” or yigu, current associated with the Gushi bian collection that followed a strong political agenda of undoing the authority of the orthodox view

  • Modern China Lecture Series: The Significance of the Frontier in Twentieth Century Chinese History

    CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: 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 States

    Speaker: 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 States

    Speaker: 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 States

    Panelists: 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 States

    Speaker: 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