Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Poetry Evaluation and Gender Portrayal in Early Medieval Chinese Texts: Two Case Studies Using Language Models
2026-05-06 10:30 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Room K354, CGIS Knafel, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Wenyi Shang, Assistant Professor, School of Information Science & Learning Technologies, University of MissouriEarly medieval Chinese texts are known for their interpretive richness, inviting a wide range of sometimes conflicting readings. The development of Transformer-based language models allows us to revisit these texts and examine them comparatively within a shared semantic space. This presentation introduces two case studies: one on poetry evaluation in the work of literary criticism Shipin 詩品 (Poetry Gradings), composed in the early sixth century, and the other on gender portrayal in epitaph verses from the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 C.E.). The results reveal nuanced yet consistent patterns in both cases, which become most visible within a relational space by simultaneously comparing a large corpus of texts, an endeavor made possible through computational methods.

Wenyi Shang is an assistant professor in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. He received his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in 2019, and his Ph.D. in information sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024. His research focuses on digital humanities, where he both works as a humanities scholar specializing in medieval China, applying computational methods to revisit longstanding questions in the social, political, cultural, and literary history of the period, and works with humanities scholars as a methodologist and disciplinary translator, engaging in topics across humanities disciplines.

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Electric Vehicle–Power System Interactions: Potential, Impacts, and Economics
2026-05-06 15:30 - 16:30 | Pierce Hall 100F, 29 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: ZHAO Yang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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EV-grid integration (VGI) has the potential to manage the power demand from EVs and utilize EV batteries as distributed storage to support power-system balancing. Challenges remain in planning the long-term development of EV-grid integration, as the system value of VGI is often insufficiently understood in the context of coupled power-system expansion and EV growth. Recent studies have explored the impact of VGI on solar-rich power systems, where noon-time charging is predominantly promoted. However, many coastal high-growth regions are well suited to EV adoption but face land constraints on utility-scale solar and wind generation, making the role of VGI unclear. Here, we develop an integrated optimization model linking EV operating patterns with least-cost power-system expansion under VGI. We apply it to Guangdong, China’s leading province in both EV stock and electricity demand, through 2050 under different decarbonization scenarios. Our results show how VGI interacts with rooftop PV, offshore wind, and fossil-fuel-fired power plants with CCS under different decarbonization scenarios. We further evaluate the avoided system costs of unidirectional and bidirectional VGI in long-run power-system expansion.

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How to Cultivate a Moral Human: A Conversation with Michael Puett and Amy Zhang
2026-05-07 11:00 - 12:30 | CGIS South, Room S153, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Michael Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History; Director, Harvard University Asia CenterAmy Zhang, Master’s Student, Harvard Graduate School of EducationWhat can ancient Confucian philosophy offer for how we design education and live well in the AI age?Mencius argued that moral life begins not with rules but with cultivating the “four sprouts,” the seeds of moral life, through ritual, relationship, and care. Join Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology and author of The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, and Amy Zhang, graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former producer of Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, for a reflection on their fall independent study on ritual and Mencius on moral development.

Enjoy Chinese tea in this casual talk and salon as we bring together philosophers, artists, and educators to ask what it means to design from this non-Western ontology.

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Michael Puett (普鸣) is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion and the Director of the Harvard University Asia Center. He is also a non-resident long-term fellow for programs in anthropological and historical sciences and the languages and civilizations of East Asia at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala.

Puett joined the Harvard faculty in 1994 after earning his M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1994) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His interests focus on the inter-relations between religion, anthropology, history, and philosophy. In his research, Puett aims to bring the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He has published many articles on early Chinese history (c. 1200 B.C. – c. 755 A.D.), and on classical Chinese ritual, social, and political theory.Amy Zhang is a writer, artist, and educator creating narratives and methods that ask how we live, learn, and become human, drawing from non-Western philosophies and ways of being. As a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she is developing the right to become human — an applied framework across children’s rights and pluriversal philosophy — along with companion theatrical work (Out of Time) and pedagogy (Awake, a summer camp for teens to redesign their lives in the attention age).Previously, she produced global stories for Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and worked in documentary theater at Pink Fang (formerly Ping Chong + Company). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Dial, and Joyland Magazine, where her short story on Chinese international students won the 2022 Open Borders Prize. Born in Beijing and raised in Hong Kong, she graduated with honors in anthropology from Wesleyan University and is a descendant of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhang Zai.www.amy-zhang.com

With support from the HGSE Dean’s Office Student AI Initiative Fund

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Film Screening and Discussion: Daughter of the Light with the Filmmaker
2026-06-12 18:00 - 20:15 | Hall A, Science Center, 1 Oxford St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Khashem Gyal, Filmmaker; Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of the Arts, and Asia in Action Fellow, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Daughter of the Light is a deeply moving feature documentary about thirteen-year-old Metok Karpo who lives in a Tibetan boarding school for orphans. The film follows Metok as she navigates the emotional complexities of her parents’ divorce in a rural town on the Tibetan plateau, set against the backdrop of generational and social change.

A discussion will follow the screening.

Free and open to public.

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Subversion and Seduction: China’s Economic Statecraft
2026-09-03 15:00 - 16:00 | Fainsod Room (324), Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Audrye Wong, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise InstituteChair: Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School

Even as the Chinese government intensifies supply-chain coercion, it continues to deepen the trade and investment linkages that sustain its global economic centrality. Audrye Wong’s new book, Subversion and Seduction: China’s Economic Statecraft, explores an underemphasized aspect of China’s economic influence: positive inducements. Through six case studies, extensive field research, and a survey experiment, Dr. Wong’s book explores what kinds of inducement strategies succeed at achieving Beijing’s foreign policy goals and under what conditions.

Understanding the mechanisms, successes, and limitations of China’s economic statecraft will be critical for leaders in the United States and abroad as they navigate a world where China increasingly wields its economic clout for geopolitical influence. Join Professor Rana Mitter and Dr. Audrye Wong for a discussion on this essential new book.

Audrye Wong is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where her work focuses on China’s foreign policy, economic statecraft, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and foreign influence operations. Previously, Dr. Wong was a professor at the University of Southern California and postdoctoral fellow at the Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft joint program of the Harvard Kennedy School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. She has also held affiliations with Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is fluent in Mandarin.

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Wang Mengqi — Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market
2026-09-08 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Mengqi Wang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Duke Kunshan University

This talk presents the vernacular concept of inflexible demand, known as 刚需/gangxu in Chinese, that people in contemporary urban China draw on to refer to—and construct—an absolute need for homeownership for all city dwellers. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a gangxu development at the urban periphery of east Nanjing from 2013 to 2015, this talk argues that the concept of “inflexible demand” works as an empty signifier bridging diverse value-making projects that are constitutive of China’s housing market. It argues that homeownership, in China, suggests not independence but a further inclusion of citizens within the state. The talk ends with a reflection on how recent changes of the market have rendered homeownership both a promise and a trap for migrants in urban China. The talk is developed from a new book titled Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market (Cornell University Press 2026).

Mengqi Wang is a cultural and economic anthropologist specialized in the study of housing and the urban environment. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University with fields of research covering economic anthropology, political economy, human geography, and critical infrastructure studies. Her book, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market (Cornell University Press, 2026), is an ethnographic monograph charting the discursive formation of the housing market at East Nanjing’s urban periphery from 2012 to 2015. Her research articles have appeared in journals such as Positions: Asia Critique, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Urban Studies.

Zoom Meeting Link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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Performing Enlightenment: Buddhism and Theater in Early Modern China
2026-09-23 12:00 - 13:15 | Zoom, Registration Required
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Speaker: Mengxiao Wang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern CaliforniaModerator: Thomas P. Kelly, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

In early modern China, a major revival of Buddhism coincided with a surging fascination with theater. Buddhist monastics and laypeople increasingly participated in viewing, discussing, and writing plays. Far from merely serving as a medium for conveying religious teachings and practices, drama became a source of deep concern for Buddhists due to the perceived tension between spiritual discipline and worldly entertainment.

In Performing Enlightenment, Mengxiao Wang examines how Buddhist clerics and laity engaged with and drove innovations in theater during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Drawing on an extensive range of sources—including clerical sermons, scriptural commentaries, temple gazetteers, morality books, literati prose, and dramatic texts and paratexts—Wang argues that Ming-Qing Buddhists resolved the conflict between religion and entertainment by transforming theater into a creative mode of devotional practice. Consequently, playwriting, stage performance, and theatergoing all emerged as legitimate pathways to spiritual enlightenment. This interdisciplinary work provides fresh insights into Chinese studies, Buddhist studies, and theater studies while offering a comparative perspective on the complex interplay between religion, literature, and performance across cultures.Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YdUlq3BDRaiOMqGl8fN9iA#/registration

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Insitute and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

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Everyday Occupation: American Soldiers and Chinese Civilians after World War II
2026-09-24 09:30 - 10:45 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Chunmei Du, Professor, Department of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Associate, Harvard University Asia Center

In this rich history of everyday encounters between US soldiers and Chinese civilians, Chunmei Du explores their entangled relations from the end of World War II to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Drawing upon official, popular and personal accounts from both countries, Du examines the sensorial, material, and symbolic exchanges that took place between GIs and ordinary Chinese people-stall vendors, pedestrians, rickshaw pullers, “Jeep girls,” and suspected thieves. Through the conceptual lens of the everyday, this book reveals how interactions such as traffic accidents, sexual relations, theft, and black-market dealings, impacted larger political dynamics during this pivotal era. Du shows how mundane struggles made imperialism and sovereignty tangible, fueling anti-American sentiment. Meanwhile, these encounters fostered informal diplomacy, shaping identities and forging new bonds that left a lasting imprint on both countries.

Professor Du’s talk will be based on her book Everyday Occupation: American Soldiers and Chinese Civilians after World War II, published by Cambridge University Press (2026). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

To join the webinar, register here.

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Modern China Lecture Series featuring Xiaobo Lü — Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China’s Republican Era
2026-09-24 16:00 - 17:30 | CGIS South, Room S050, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Xiaobo Lü, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, BerkeleyXiaobo Lü is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the relationships between fiscal policies, party-building, and state-society relations in authoritarian regimes, particularly in China. He is particularly interested in the formation and functioning of political parties and institutions in authoritarian regimes across both historical and contemporary contexts. Xiaobo Lü earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2011.

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Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History
2026-10-07 18:30 - 20:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speakers: Emily Baum, Professor of History, University of California, IrvineAlbert Wu, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Chair: Michael Puett, Victor and William Fung Foundation Director, Harvard University Asia Center; Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology; Harvard College Professor

In the early twentieth century, scholars around the world believed that “superstition” belonged to a bygone era. Yet despite their confident predictions, superstitious beliefs have endured. Perhaps nowhere has the history of superstition been more prolonged and tumultuous than in China. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, intellectuals and politicians have denigrated practices like divination, ancestor worship, and geomancy as unbefitting of a modern nation, and governing regimes have launched a succession of campaigns to replace superstitious thinking with science and rationality. Efforts to eliminate such practices from public life, however, have regularly encountered resistance from people who continue to find meaning in them.

Uncanny Beliefs seeks to understand what “superstition” has meant in modern China—and questions why superstitious thinking has remained such an urgent target of state intervention. Through a range of temporal and thematic perspectives, the chapters in this volume link the study of superstition to the histories of science, religion, gender, state building, and popular culture. In doing so, they collectively broaden our understanding of modern Chinese history by revealing the complex entanglements of superstition with religion, modernity, authority, and everyday life.

Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ocqHDzihSR6jUAd6vpXK-w#/registration

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Modern China Lecture Series featuring Xu Guoqi
2026-10-22 16:00 - 17:30 | CGIS South Room S354, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Xu Guoqi, David H. Y. Chang Professor of Chinese History; Founding Director, Institute of Transnational History of China, University of Hong Kong

Professor Xu Guoqi was born in China and taught both in Asia and the USA before joining the University of Hong Kong’s History Department. He writes and has published widely in both Chinese and English on various topics.

Professor Xu is a leading authority of transnational and shared history of modern China and the world. His research topics include First World War Studies, roles of Sports in China and the world, history of US-China relations, the idea of China, among many others. He has served as a visiting professor at many prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Yale University, Cambridge University, the University of Melbourne, and King’s College London. He has received many awards such as the Shigemutsu Fellowship for scholarship in global cultural affairs from the Global Culture Center of the Japan Society of Boston and the best book award from the International Society of Olympic Historians.

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Treng Ta
2026-10-27 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Treng Ta, University of Maryland Baltimore County

More information coming soon!

Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Zhu Jin
2026-11-03 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Zhu Jin, Hong Kong University

More information coming soon!

Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Zhang Qingyong
2026-11-10 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Zhang Qingyong, Renmin University

More information coming soon!

Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Susan Whiting — Illiberal Law and Development: Property Rights and Conflict over Land in China
2026-11-17 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker:Susan Whiting, University of Washington

In Illiberal Law and Development, Susan H. Whiting advances institutional economic theory with original survey and fieldwork data, addressing two puzzles in Chinese political economy: how economic development has occurred despite insecure property rights and weak rule of law and how the Chinese state has maintained political control amid unrest. Whiting answers these questions by focusing on the role of illiberal law in reassigning property rights and redirecting grievances. The book reveals that, in the context of technological change, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of land rights to higher-value uses plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. This system simultaneously represses conflict and asserts legitimacy. Comparing China to post-Glorious Revolution England and contemporary India, Whiting presents a critical new argument that brings the Chinese case more directly into debates in comparative politics about the role of the state in specifying property rights and maintaining authoritarian rule.

Susan H. Whiting (Ph.D. University of Michigan, B.A. Yale University) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. She is the author two books, Illiberal Law and Development and Power and Wealth in Rural China, both published by Cambridge University Press. She specializes in Chinese and comparative politics, with an emphasis on the political economy of development. Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, China Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, and Voluntas, as well as in edited volumes such as Holding China Together and Trust and Governance.

Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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Urban China Lecture Series featuring Zhao Miaoxi
2026-11-24 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Zhao Miaoxi, South China University of Technology

More information coming soon!

Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94120080608

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