Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Environment in Asia Series featuring Zhang Meng - Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market
2021-09-21 13:45 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
Speaker: Zhang Meng, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
Part of the Environment in Asia lecture series

In the Qing period, China’s population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation. The reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Timber and Forestry traces the expansion of an interregional trade network to cover the entire basin of the Yangzi River. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? Delving into rare archives to reconstruct property rights systems and business histories, the book considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. This case from China has important implications for world-historical conversations on resource management, commercialization, and sustainable development.
Meng Zhang (張萌) is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in economics from Peking University (2010) and Ph.D. in history from UCLA (2017). Zhang is a historian of late imperial China, with particular interests in economic and environmental transformations and transnational dynamics in the rise of global capitalism. Her first book, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (University of Washington Press, 2021), reveals the complex reality of timber trade and resource management during the flurry of commercial development in Qing China. She is working on a second project that follows the social life of edible bird’s nests through the transnational construction of knowledge, desire, trade, and credit across early modern China and Southeast Asia.

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Investment Screening and Supply Chain Security: Japanese, EU, and U.S. Perspectives on China
2021-09-27 12:00 - 13:00
Panelists:
Sarah Bauerle-Danzman, Assistant Professor, Department of International Studies, Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
Sophie Meunier Aitsahalia, Senior Research Scholar, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Co-Director, European Union Program at Princeton, Princeton University
Kristin Vekasi, Academic Associate, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University; Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and School of Policy & International Affairs, University of Maine
Moderator: Christina L. Davis, Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Professor of Government; Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
For more information, please visit: https://programs.wcfia.harvard.edu/us-japan/panel-9-27-21
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkcOiuqTIrHtGDut-qpTKogX-dwA9OLZXC

Yangyang Cheng - Those Who Fall Behind Get Beaten Up: Can Science Build a Strong China?
2021-09-28 10:30 - 11:45
Speaker: Yangyang Cheng, Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale Law School; Columnist at SupChina.
From the last Chinese empire to the current People’s Republic, generations of politicians and intellectuals have sought advanced science and technology to build a strong China. They pondered the relationship between East and West, tradition and modernity, national allegiance and cosmopolitan ideals. Their efforts have shaped the path of China’s development and mapped the contours of Chinese identity.
In this talk, I will trace their accomplishments and regrets, as well as lessons for today, through the lives of two men from my hometown of Hefei, born a century apart. One was late Qing’s most revered statesman. The other is one of the first two Nobel laureates from China. As the role of science and technology becomes one of the most contentious issues in U.S.-China relations, their stories teach about the forces that propelled China’s rise, the ways lives can be squeezed by geopolitics, and the risks of using science for state power.
Yangyang Cheng is a particle physicist and essayist. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, and ChinaFile, among other publications. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School and a columnist at SupChina.|
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://asiacenter.harvard.edu/events/those-who-fallbehind-get-beaten-up-can-science-build-a-strong-china-1454
Part of the Science and Technology in Asia Seminar Series

Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Bonnie Glaser - How Great is the Risk of War Over Taiwan?
2021-09-29 12:30 - 13:45
There is an intense debate among experts over the likelihood of a near-term Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Senior US military officers have warned that a PRC military action could take place in the next six years. Such dire predictions are largely based on estimates of PLA capabilities. But even if China can seize and control Taiwan, will it do so? Assessing the potential for such an attack also requires an understanding of Xi Jinping’s strategy toward Taiwan and his risk/benefit calculus. The policies of the United States and Taiwan, and how they are viewed in Beijing, also need to be taken into account.
Speaker: Bonnie Glaser, Director, Asia Program, German Marshall Fund of the United States

Bonnie S. Glaser is director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was previously senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ms. Glaser is concomitantly a nonresident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a senior associate with the Pacific Forum. For more than three decades, Ms. Glaser has worked at the intersection of Asia-Pacific geopolitics and U.S. policy.

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The Taliban Takeover and Central Asian Security: What Will Russia and China Do?
2021-09-30 09:30 - 10:45
Speakers:
Andrey Kortunov, Director General, Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC)
Yun Sun, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the China Program, Stimson Center
Zuhra Halimova, Independent Consultant, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Akram Umarov, Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh; Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow, University of World Economy and Diplomacy
Moderators:
Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Edward Lemon, President & CEO, The Oxus Society
The withdrawal of U.S. forces and the speedy collapse of the Afghan government are creating a new security situation and transforming the geopolitical setting of Central Asia. Fears and concerns in the region are on the rise. What will Russia, the traditional security provider, and China, the emerging provider, do? How will they deal with these new challenges and opportunities? What are the choices facing Central Asian states, and how much room for maneuver do they have? This roundtable will discuss the current policies of Russia, China and Central Asian states, and possible scenarios for future developments and their implications for the region and Eurasia at large.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
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Fairbank Center Panel Discussion - Transnational Aging in the Chinese Diaspora
2021-09-30 16:00 - 18:00
Panel Participants:Sara L. Friedman, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana UniversityRussell King, Professor of Geography, University of SussexSarah Lamb, Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis UniversityAndrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State UniversityNicole Newendorp, Associate Director and Lecturer, Social Studies, Harvard UniversityKen Chih-Yan Sun, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University
Nearly 4.3 million immigrants in the United States are age sixty-five and over. Research predicts that the number of nonwhite elderly immigrants will continue to grow, doubling to 36 percent of the senior population by 2050. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the lives of older migrants, the familial and social networks in which they are embedded remain in place and can translate into important protective resources. At the same time, Chinese societies – e.g., mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong – have experienced rapid and large-scale social and cultural transformation over the past few decades, resulting in complex feelings and competing perspectives by older migrants on their homeland(s). In this workshop, six scholars in the fields of migration, aging, and Chinese studies grapple with the new frontier of studies on migration and life transition by focusing on two recent ethnographies about transnational aging in the Chinese diaspora. One highlights Chinese immigrants who relocate to the US at a later life stage; the other examines long-term Taiwanese immigrants who spent decades navigating life in American society and transnationally. Through our conversation, we seek to collaboratively rethink major issues and the understudied dimensions of aging and migration.

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China Humanities Seminar Featuring Stephanie Balkwill - Another Cakravartin Ruler?: Feminist History and the History of Buddhism in Early Medieval China
2021-10-04 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Stephanie Balkwill, Assistant Professor, Buddhist Studies, UCLA
Northern Wei 北魏 (386–534 CE) Empress Dowager Ling 靈 (d. 529) is commonly regarded as the last independent ruler of her dynasty, which descended into terminal internecine war during her regency. As a ruler, she inherited a deeply divided state. The move of the capital from Pingcheng to Luoyang in 494 created severe economic alienation for the northern peoples who had traditionally supported the rise of the dynasty, just as it made them cultural outsiders to elite politics in the new capital. Although the Empress Dowager exacerbated such geographic and ethnic tensions in her time, what is less known about her is that she also shaped Buddhist modalities of statecraft to legitimate her reign and, seemingly, attempt to manage her difficult empire. In this talk, I will analyze the Empress Dowager’s program of state Buddhism and argue that like her famous contemporary in the South, Emperor Wu 武 (r. 502–549) of the Liang 梁 (502–557), she, too, positioned herself as a universal Buddhist monarch in medieval China. In so doing, I engage the question of how our understanding of Buddhist history changes when we put women into it and I propose a series of new questions, which, based in the study of women, serve to elevate our understanding of the ways in which Buddhism became a dominant social force in early medieval China.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYuc-6vqjkjE9yzodSy0HtBA_edh2R_Xdx3

Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Isabella Weber - How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate
2021-10-05 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
China 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.
Should 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.
Isabella 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.
Presented via Zoom Webinar

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Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Jeffrey S. Lehman - What Does U.S. Business Really Want From China?
2021-10-06 09:00 - 10:15
Speaker: Jeffrey Lehman, Vice Chancellor and Professor of Law, NYU Shanghai
Jeffrey Lehman is the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, where he oversees all academic and administrative operations. Lehman is an internationally acclaimed leader in higher education, having served as dean of the University of Michigan Law School, the 11th president of Cornell University, and the founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law.
Prior to joining the University of Michigan Law School, Lehman served as a law clerk to Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. He then spent four years at Caplin & Drysdale, a Washington, DC law firm. Throughout his professional and academic career, Lehman has volunteered his time and energy to nonprofit organizations that share his commitments in the fields of higher education, law, and technology.
Lehman received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cornell University, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a JD from the University of Michigan Law School. He is a multi-award winner for his work both in the United States and abroad, including the Friendship Award, which is China’s highest honor for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress.” Lehman is also a recipient of an honorary doctorate from Peking University.
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Presented via Zoom Webinar

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China Economy Lecture Series featuring Yeling Tan - Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order
2021-10-07 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Yeiling Tan, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon
Professor Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet current economic tensions between the US and China indicate that this integration process has run into trouble. To what extent has the liberal internationalist promise of the WTO been fulfilled? To answer this question, this study breaks open the black box of the massive Chinese state and unpacks the economic strategies that central economic agencies as well as subnational authorities adopted in response to WTO rules demanding far-reaching modifications to China’s domestic institutions. The study explains why, rather than imposing constraints, WTO entry provoked divergent policy responses from different actors within the Chinese state, in ways neither expected nor desired by the architects of the WTO.
Yeiling Tan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and a non-resident scholar at the UC San Diego 21st Century China Center. From 2017-2020, she was a fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Future of International Trade and Investment. From 2017-2019, she was a member of the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. In 2017-18, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program in Princeton University.
​Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with an emphasis on China and the developing world. Two broad questions define her research agenda. First: how do the rules of globalization affect politics within authoritarian regimes such as China, given that these rules require increasingly far-reaching modifications to domestic institutions? Second, how do authoritarian regimes affect rule-making at the international level?
She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University (2017), an MPA in International Development from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011) and a BA (Honors, Distinction) in International Relations and Economics from Stanford University (2002). Apart from research on globalization and China, she has also worked in the public and non-governmental sectors on a range of issues including economic development, international security policy, global governance and governance innovations.
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Presented via Zoom Webinar

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Modern Chinese Humanities Seminar Featuring Pang Laikwan - Economic Sovereignty in Contemporary China: The Biopolitical Subject as Garlic Chive
2021-10-07 20:00 - 21:30
Speaker: Pang Laikwan, Professor of Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper focuses on the wide popularity of the meme and buzzword jiucai, garlic chives, on China’s internet to investigate the cultural and political subjectivity of the ordinary Chinese citizens in a time of fierce competition simply to survive, largely known as neijuan, involution. Through this investigation of the garlic chives meme, the paper also updates Foucault’s theory of the biopolitics by investigating the deeply intertwined relation between the biological, the economic, and the political in contemporary Chinese governmentality. While the post-socialist PRC has developed a sophisticated economic rationality to legitimize its state sovereignty, this economic sovereignty also strains the ordinary subjects so much that it begins to pose serious challenge to this legitimacy.
PANG Laikwan is Professor of Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of a few books, including, more recently, The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement (U of Michigan, 2021), The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (Verso, 2017), andCreativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Duke UP, 2012). She will be a CASBS fellow at Stanford University in the academic year of 2021-2022.
Presented via Zoom Webinar

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Weixia Gu - Dispute Resolution in China: Litigation, Arbitration, Mediation and their Interactions
2021-10-07 20:30 - 22:00
Speaker: Weixia Gu, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
For more details, including a Zoom link, please visit http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/eals/events.html.

David Cheng Chang - Escaping From the Communists and Then From the Anti-Communists: A Prisoner’s Odyssey From Southwest China to Korea, India, and Argentina
2021-10-13 10:00 - 11:30
Speaker: David Cheng Chang, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; HYI-Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2021-22
Chair/discussant: Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor of History, Harvard University
By the end of the Korean War, only 88 out of more than 150,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war (POWs) refused to return to either side of their divided countries; instead, they sought asylum in neutral nations. Using oral history interviews and archival documents from the United States, Taiwan, and India, this talk charts the life history of Cheng Liren: from his education as a police academy cadet during the civil war and his first job as a police officer in his home province Guizhou in the final days of the Nationalist regime, to his desperate enlistment in the Communist army, desertion in Korea, rise and fall as an anti-Communist POW leader on Koje and Cheju Islands, his daring escape from fellow anti-Communist POWs at Panmunjom, to his two-year sojourn in India, and his final settlement and business success in Argentina.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItd-qurD8rGNJBFrr8tS6X1695eSvlSswX
More info: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/events/escaping-from-the-communists-and-then-from-the-anti-communists-a-prisoners-odyssey-from-southwest-china-to-korea-india-and-argentina/

Environment in Asia Lecture Series featuring Ruth Mostern - The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History
2021-10-13 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh
This talk showcases Ruth Mostern’s new book: The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021). The Yellow River explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times. The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a history of water, and that some of the most important episodes in Yellow River history transpired on the semi-arid lands of the Loess Plateau, far from the riverbed itself. Using GIS and data analysis as well as close readings of historical sources, the book reveals that although the Yellow River floodplain was sometimes a site of frequent and devastating disasters, this was only the case at times of certain decisions about public policy and infrastructure design.
Ruth Mostern is Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE) (Harvard Asia Center, 2011) and the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016). Her current book, Following the Tracks of Yu: The Imperial and Ecological Worlds of the Yellow River is in contract at Yale University Press. She is currently PI on two NEH grants: one to develop content and infrastructure for an ecosystem of digital historical gazetteers, and one to design and launch an interdisciplinary curriculum about water in Central Asia.
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Presented via Zoom Webinar

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Panel Discussion - The Future of Africa-China Engagement/Relations
2021-10-15 11:15 - 12:30
Speakers:
Maria Adele Carrai, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Associate, Harvard University Asia Center
Folashadé Soulé, Senior Research Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Lina Benabdallah, Assistant Professor, Politics and International Affairs Department, Wake Forest University
Moderator: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies; Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies
Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center; Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Center for African Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Presented via Zoom Webinar.
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/4hs83am4

Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Fang Xiaoping - Pandemics and Politics in Mao’s China: The Rise of the Emergency Disciplinary State
2021-10-19 20:00 - 21:30
Speaker: Fang Xiaoping, Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
During 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.
Xiaoping 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).
Presented via Zoom

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Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Kellee Tsai - Evolutionary Governance under Authoritarianism in Contemporary China
2021-10-20 09:30 - 10:45
Speaker: Kellee Tsai, Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The structural transformation of China over the past several decades has given rise to a fundamental tension between the pursuit of social stability and authoritarian resilience. On the one hand, repressive strategies enable the party-state to maintain its monopoly of political power (authoritarianism). On the other hand, the quality of governance is enhanced when the state adopts softer modes of engagement with society (resilience). This dilemma lies at the core of evolutionary governance under authoritarianism. This talk engages the vast “authoritarianism with adjectives” literature in the study of contemporary China and presents case studies of state-society interactions to offer insight into the circumstances under which the party-state exerts its coercive power versus engaging in more flexible responses or policy adaptations.
Presented via Zoom Webinar

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China Humanities Seminar Featuring Scott Pearce - Looking Behind the Text: The Case of Northern Wei’s ‘Yuan Pi’
2021-10-25 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Scott Pearce, Western Washington University
All textual traditions are based on their own particular sets of assumptions and preoccupations. This was the case of the Chinese classical tradition as well, which having taken full shape under the Han empire, continued to be used as the only available language of written record by the very different regimes that controlled the Yellow River plains after Han collapse. One of these was Northern Wei (386-534), a new kind of empire in East Asia, of Inner Asian origin, whose leadership for generations continued to speak an Inner Asian language and conceptualized the world in terms apparently quite different from those embedded in the Literary Chinese that gives the only descriptions we have of these people and their actions. Here we use the case of a royal kinsman called in the text “Yuan Pi 元丕” (422-503) to examine various ways in which we might attempt to look behind (or through, or under) received text to get a glimpse at least of the actual man.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIoduGupzMuG9zxpckd860pztJ_rzIMCxse

Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum Featuring Aaron Proffitt - Buddha's Name as Mantra in Medieval Japan
2021-10-25 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Aaron Proffitt, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, University at Albany-SUNY

The recitation of the name of a buddha (nenbutsu) is often associated with deathbed practices and traditions commonly grouped under the rubric Pure Land Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Aaron Proffitt will consider this widely popular practice as understood by practitioners of mantra, focusing in particular upon the work of Dohan (1179-1252), an early-medieval Japanese scholar-monk and Esoteric Pure Land theorist. While Pure Land practices such as aspiring for rebirth in a purified buddha land are often seen to be at odds with the recitation of mantra for this-worldly benefits, in fact, in medieval Japan these approaches to the practice of Buddhism were often carried out in tandem. In some cases, the nenbutsu was understood as a mantra, and because many mantras are in fact the very name of a particular buddha, bodhisattva, or god, many mantras would technically qualify as “nenbutsu.” As we will see, Dohan’s “esoteric nenbutsu” theory reveals that for some medieval Japanese Buddhist practitioners, the so-called mystery of speech as a willed act, an act of “self power,” rests in its expression of the mystery of breath, as an unwilled act, an expression of “other power.” In this way, the nenbutsu as mantra is said to transcend and collapse perceived binaries between buddhas and beings, this world and the Pure Land.
Professor Aaron Proffitt is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University at Albany-SUNY. Proffitt received his PhD in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan, and his monograph, Esoteric Pure Land Buddhism, is currently in-press with University of Hawaii Press, Pure Land Buddhist Studies series.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuf-CsrDMvH9a02UR3MCAR_3t_83P_OpHa

Jie Li — Socialist Hot Noise: Loudspeakers and Open-Air Cinema in Mao’s China
2021-10-26 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Li Jie, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition. Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016). Her current book project, Cinematic Guerrillas: Maoist Propaganda as a Spirit Medium explores film exhibition and reception in socialist China, including movie theatres and open-air screenings, projectionists and audiences, as well as memories of revolutionary and foreign films. Her other research projects include a transnational film history of Manchuria and a cultural history of noise in modern China.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMtf-ypqDIqH9XHuHa5_h4qWkMI_Rlu1N1W

David Cheng Chang - Between Worlds: China’s WWII Interpreters and Their Divergent Fates in China, Taiwan, and the United States
2021-10-27 12:00 - 13:30
Speaker: David Cheng Chang, Associate Professor of Humanities; Associate Director, Global China Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
In this lecture, Professor Chang will talk about the use of interdisciplinary source materials to write a book that will weave together the personal histories of more than 3,000 Chinese interpreters for the American and British allied forces during World War II with the larger military, political, diplomatic, and social history of World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Cold War.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F4c12b7KRzq2Pzs40VUjqA

Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series featuring Bill Bikales - From Poverty Eradication to Common Prosperity: Reflections on Recent Poverty Achievements and Implications for the Next Phase of Development
2021-10-27 12:30 - 13:45
Speaker: Bill Bikales, Principal and Lead Economist, Kunlun Associates
Bill is a Harvard-trained economist and Asia specialist and has worked at the most senior level of government in Mongolia on comprehensive fiscal reform and restructuring insolvent bank and power sectors, and at grass roots level in rural China on increasing poor women’s uptake of maternal health services.
Presented via Zoom Webinar
Also streaming on YouTube

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Modern Chinese Humanities Seminar Featuring Ma Shaoling — The Stone and the Wireless: Lyrical Media and Bad Models of the Feeling Women
2021-10-28 20:00 - 21:30
Speaker: Ma Shaoling, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Yale-NUS College
Authors often talk about their books via the introduction or the conclusion, and sidestep what lies in the middle. The title of my book, The Stone and the Wireless, refers to two figures that bookend particular communicative imaginations of the late Qing in my study, but it is the properly intermediary chapter, one that both connects and divides the first and second halves of the book, which fully bears the weight of mediation that is my central argument. Media, simply put, mediate between representations of communicative devices and processes, and the machines “themselves.” Women and what was deemed as the proper transmission of their feelings were not only appropriated as figurative means to the grander end of political and social transformations; they also cohered as literal, technical mediums, as exemplary female conduits. At the turn of the twentieth century, photography, and the new hybrid form of photographed biographies and autobiographies of exemplary women dramatize the transformations brought about by new media technologies through various constructions of female sentimentality specific to their formal structures: poetry, through lyricism; photography, through the tension between the photographic index and the deixis; and the text-image relation in photographed biographies and autobiographies. The question is not whether women can represent their gendered consciousness “in” these new mediums but to radically posit gendered consciousness as a lyrical medium, whose sheer instrumentality paradoxically short-circuits the project of nation-building. By comparing Huang Zunxian’s technological exploits of feminine, lyrical sentimentality with Qiu Jin’s “Self-Inscription on a Photograph,” written on the back of her own photographic portrait, this intermediary chapter attempts to retrieve women’s relationships to technology in ways that have not been co-opted by masculine-nationalist ideologies.
Shaoling Ma is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore where she works at the intersections of global Chinese culture, media, and history, and literary and critical theory.
Presented via Zoom WebinarRegistration Required
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Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness
2021-10-28 20:00 - 21:30
Speakers:
Manfred Elfstrom, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia.
Yao Li, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, University of Florida
Moderator: Anthony Saich, Director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker–state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China’s are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems more generally.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/9016334418370/WN_kJ-DOLoORpel9R4nqRf0sg

Connecting the World-Island: What will China’s PEACE cable bring to Pakistan and East Africa?
2021-10-29 10:00 - 11:15
Speakers:
Motolani Agbebi, University teacher, Faculty of Management and Business, University of Tampere (Finland)
Tayyab Safdar, Post-Doctoral Researcher, East Asia Centre & Department of Politics, University of Virginia
Roxana Vatanparast, Affiliate, Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia Law School
Moderators:
Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
China’s Hengtong Group—leading a consortium of telecom companies from Hong Kong, Pakistan, and East Africa—will soon complete installation of the Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable. Spanning the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, this cable will connect the three most populous continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, or what Halford Mackinder described as the “World Island.” The cable aims to provide these previously under-serviced regions with the shortest latency between routes and high-quality Internet, but what are China’s aims with the project and what benefits will it bring to partners in South Asia and Africa? This roundtable will discuss the technical, economic, and geopolitical implications of this flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OCG6SSfGQFKmBk-_edjqzw
Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Panel Discussion: Overcoming Challenges in the Research Environment in China
2021-11-01 12:00 - 13:30
Read the summary of the event here.
Panelists:Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching InstituteDenise Ho, Assistant Professor of 20th Century Chinese History, Yale UniversityRobert Weller, Professor of Anthropology, Boston UniversityYuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History and Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
This panel discussion will focus on guidance and advice for late-stage graduate students who are experiencing challenges accessing archives, conducting interviews, or who otherwise face the types of barriers faced when conducting research in China but are now intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read the summary of the event here.
Presented via Zoom Webinar
***Note: This live discussion will NOT be simulcast on our YouTube channel nor available for viewing at a later date.***
Co-sponsored by:

Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Eugenia Lean - The Ideograph and a Cantonese Pun: Linguistic Divergence and Spurious Chinese Marks in Global Capitalism
2021-11-02 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of 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.
Eugenia 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.
Professor 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.
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Panel Discussion - Gaming with Chinese Characteristics
2021-11-04 09:00 - 11:00
Speakers:
Heather Inwood, Cambridge University
Nakamura Akinori, Ritsumeikan University
Deng Jian, Peking University
Special Guest:
Zhu Jiayin, Founder/Editor of Chuapp
Organizers:
David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
Yedong Sh-Chen, Harvard University
This panel is co-sponsored by the Harvard Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. It is a part of the “mediAsia: topics in media and area studies” event series.
Presented via Zoom
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_C63RM8E3QWCwC7Y4R5J7TQ

Environment in Asia Series Featuring Ying Jia Tan - War and the Reconfiguration of China’s Energy Geography
2021-11-05 12:30 - 14:00
Speaker: Ying Jia Tan, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University
In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 (Cornell University Press, 2021), Ying Jia Tan argues that, even in times of peace, the Chinese economy operated as though still at war, constructing power systems that met immediate demands but sacrificed efficiency and longevity. This talk explores the effects of China’s catastrophic loss of 97 percent of its power generating capacity during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It looks at how wartime mobilization accelerated China’s transition towards coal as the main fuel source for power generation, led to the creation of a homegrown electrical equipment manufacturing industry, and inspired a vision of national reconstruction driven by massive hydropower projects. Lessons from the electrification of wartime China reveals the strengths and limitations of state-driven initiatives aimed at alleviating power shortages, which in turn, offer insights into the common challenges facing China and Taiwan as they transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
Ying Jia Tan is assistant professor of history and East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. is a historian of science and technology with allied interests in environmental history and the history of cartography. He teaches traditional and modern Chinese history, as well as courses on maritime East Asia, cartography, and the Anthropocene.
Presented via Zoom WebinarRegistration RequiredRegister at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jRhu4N8RSqGioDgdMqvjOw
Note: this live lecture will not be simulcast on our YouTube channel nor available for viewing at a later date.

Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series featuring Naima Green-Riley - Pinyin and Paper Fans: China-Funded Education Programs in U.S. Schools
2021-11-10 12:30 - 13:45
Speaker: Naima Green-Riley, Ph.D. Candidate and Raymond Vernon Fellow, Department of Government, Harvard University; Former Consular Officer, US. Consulate General, Guangzhou, China
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