Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Panel Discussion - Iran and China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Between Desirable and Feasible
2021-02-22 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Massachusetts
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speakers:Eyck Freymann, Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford UniversityNader Habibi, Professor of Practice, Brandeis UniversityDina Esfandiary, Senior Advisor, International Crisis Group
Moderators:Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis CenterJames Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
Experiencing another downturn in its relations with the West, Iran has been more actively “looking to the East” to pursue stronger political and economic cooperation with China. Tehran remains an enthusiastic supporter of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), despite the withdrawal of Chinese companies from a number of projects due to U.S. sanctions. Iran still hopes to benefit from investments, technologies and new connectivity routes promoted under the BRI umbrella. This roundtable will discuss the prospects of Iran becoming a node of the BRI, and the promises and challenges of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy.
Eyck Freymann is a doctoral candidate at Balliol College, Oxford. He was previously research assistant to Graham Allison, Niall Ferguson, and Shi Zhiqin at Harvard, Stanford, and Tsinghua Universities. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Henry Scholar; an AM in Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he won the Joseph Fletcher Memorial Prize for best thesis; and an AB in East Asian History with highest honors from Harvard College. His research and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard Asia Center Press, November 2020).
Nader Habibi is the Henry J. Leir Professor of Practice in the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Before joining Brandeis University in June 2007, he served as managing director of economic forecasting and risk analysis for Middle East and North Africa in Global Insight Ltd. Mr. Habibi has worked in academic and research institutions in Iran, Turkey and the United States since 1987. He earned his PhD in Economics from Michigan State University. His most recent research projects include an analysis of the excess supply of college graduates in Middle Eastern countries, impact of economic sanctions on Iranian economy and the impact of Arab Spring uprisings on economic conditions of the affected countries. Habibi also served as director of Islamic and Middle East Studies at Brandeis University (August 2014-August 2019). He has published a work of fiction about Middle East geopolitics titled: Three Stories One Middle East (2014). Links to his publications are available at https://naderhabibi.blogspot.com/.
Dina Esfandiary is Senior Advisor in the Middle East and North Africa department of the International Crisis Group (ICG). Previously, she was a Fellow in the Middle East department of The Century Foundation (TCF), an International Security Program Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and an Adjunct Fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Middle East Program. Prior to this, she worked at the Centre for Science and Security Studies (CSSS) in the War Studies Department at King’s College London from February 2015, and in the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London from October 2009. Dina has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Guardian, the Washington Post, International Affairs, the National Interest, Arms Control Today, and The Washington Quarterly. Dina is the co-author of Triple-Axis: Iran’s Relations with Russia and China (I.B Taurus, 2018), and Living on the Edge: Iran and the Practice of Nuclear Hedging (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She holds a PhD in the War Studies department at King’s College London and Masters Degrees from Kings College London and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
This event is co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
This event is part of a new seminar hosted by the Fairbank Center and the Davis Center. This seminar aims to foster vibrant, comprehensive, and fruitful discussion about the ongoing transformations in geopolitics and governance resulting from China’s Belt Road Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Deborah Brautigam - Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics: Sri Lanka, Angola, and Beyond
2021-02-17 12:30 - 13:45
Reading the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Deborah Brautigam, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Fairbank Center Director's Seminar Series featuring David Yang - AI-tocracy: the Political Economy of AI
2021-02-16 12:30 - 13:30
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: David Yang, Assistant Professor Economics, Harvard University
The conventional wisdom suggests a misalignment between autocracy and technological innovation. In this project, we examine whether there exists a political and economic alignment between the monitoring aims of autocracies and the innovative aims of AI firms. We gather comprehensive data on ﬁrms and government procurement contracts in China’s facial recognition AI industry. We find two results. First, autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government demands for public security AI, and increased AI investment suppresses subsequent unrest. Second, AI sector benefits from the autocrats: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results indicate a stable equilibrium between the autocrats and the AI sector. Using a directed technical change model, we show that autocrats’ demand for AI not only could enhance its stability, but may also sustain growth and bias innovation towards data-intensive sector when economies of scope from government data are sufficiently large.
David Yang is an Assistant Professor of Economics. His research focuses on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, economic history, and cultural economics. In particular, David studies the forces of stability and forces of changes in authoritarian regimes, drawing lessons from historical and contemporary China. David received a B.A. in Statistics and B.S. in Business Administration from University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Stanford.
Part of the Fairbank Center Director’s Seminar Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Harvard-Yenching Library Bibliographic Orientation Session
2021-02-16 11:00 - 12:00
The Harvard-Yenching Library is offering virtual bibliographic orientation sessions via Zoom to introduce you to the most important Chinese language resources.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMvcuqsqjkqHtAFzbIKdd4b6f9r-qxzNdrn

Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig - From Sudinna to the Sangha Sutra: Classical and Contemporary Buddhist Responses to Sexual Misconduct
2021-02-15 16:00 - 17:30
Speakers:
Amy Langenberg, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Eckerd College
Ann Gleig, Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Central Florida
Since the 1980s, American Buddhist convert communities have been the site of reoccurring cases of sexual abuse and misconduct. This two-part presentation will reflect on how some contemporary practitioners have responded, in particular identifying “generative responses” that combine Buddhist and non-Buddhist frameworks to generate new forms of Buddhist thought, community, and practice. Taking a constructive rather than a corrective approach, it will then consider these responses in relationship to the Buddhist sexual ethics found in classical sources, focusing especially on the ideas of consent and intention.
Amy Langenberg is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Eckerd College. She is author of Birth in Buddhism: the Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (Routledge, 2017). Ann Gleig is an associate professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. She is author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019). They are currently working on a co-written book project on sexual violations in American convert Buddhism, which is under advance contract with Yale University Press.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEkduiurjsvG9PmwRaDUydAC-oK7RPe5z7L

Modern China Lecture Series featuring Eddy U - A New Approach to Studying the Chinese Intellectual
2021-02-09 16:00 - 18:00
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Eddy U, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis
No 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.
Eddy 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.
Part of the Modern China Lecture Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Philippe LeCorre - EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment: Did Beijing Steal the Show?
2021-02-04 14:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Philippe Le Corre, Research Fellow, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Presented via Zoom
Register at:https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9rPP_9PsTgizqjl-rRhxrA

Wei-chieh Tsai - Settler Nativization in the Inner Eurasian Borderlands of the Qing and Russian Empires
2021-02-03 13:15 - 15:00
Speaker: Wei-chieh Tsai, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Shenzhen University
Settler nativization is an important issue, yet insufficiently studied in colonial histories of early modern Eurasian empires. In the early modern era, the Qing and Russian empires both penetrated the heartland of Inner Eurasia. Military subjugation and conquest was followed by a migration of people and colonization toward the Inner Eurasian borderlands. Both regimes faced similar problems, and settler nativization was one of them. Those Han Chinese and Russian settlers were mostly poor, lowly educated, and single men working as farmers and merchants. They migrated into the Inner Eurasian borderlands seeking arable lands and trade opportunities. To survive in the strange lands, those settlers and their offspring as minorities had to work with indigenous peoples and gradually acquired indigenous cultures and identities. This paper explores the similarity and difference between the nativization of Han Chinese and Russian settlers and the responses of the states. This paper argues that the difference of autonomy and local authority of native peoples in both empires should contribute to the consequence of settler nativization in the Qing and Russian empires.
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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring David M. Lampton - Biden Deals with China Amidst Multiple Crises, Domestic and International
2021-02-03 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: David M. Lampton, Hyman Professor Emeritus Johns Hopkins—SAIS; Senior Fellow, SAIS Foreign Policy Institute
David M. Lampton is Senior Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins—SAIS. Immediately prior to his current post he was Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2019-2020. For more than two decades prior to that he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Lampton is former Chairman of the The Asia Foundation, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS. Among many written works, academic and popular is his most recent book (with Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik), Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an undergraduate student, he was a firefighter. Lampton has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies. He is a Life Trustee on the Board of Trustees of Colorado College and was in the US Army Reserve in the enlisted and commissioned ranks.
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Paul Blustein - Schism 2.0: China and America’s Trade Conflict in the Biden Administration
2020-12-09 20:00 - 21:00
Speaker: Paul Blustein, Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation; Senior Associate (non-resident), Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS)
Moderator: Christina Davis, Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Professor of Government; and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
This seminar is part of the Special Series on Japanese Economic Statecraft.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsceqgpzkrGNEAFn38qSoW0IPdKOCzWgwZ

Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring James A. Millward - History of the Crisis in the Uyghur Autonomous Region: Trends in Development and Assimilation
2020-12-09 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: James A. Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
James A. Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He also teaches as invited professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy. Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ”Silk Roads” series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: a History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His most recent album, recorded with the band By & By, is Songs for this Old Heart. His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Global Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.
Event Slides: CCP Policies towards Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Indigenous People
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Song Lihong - Trauma and Transcendence: The Shadow of the Holocaust on an Israeli Sinologist
2020-12-07 20:30 - 22:00
Speaker: Song Lihong, Professor, Department of Religious Studies and Glazer Institute of Jewish and Israel Studies, Nanjing University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2020-21
Chair/discussant: David Stern, Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
The late Irene Eber (1929-2019), professor of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a long-time affiliate of the Fairbank Center of Harvard, is arguably the scholar on the intercultural and transnational encounters between Jews and modern China. She is also a Holocaust survivor who wrote an inimitable memoir, The Choice: Poland, 1939-1945. It offered an unparalleled chance to unravel how China is construed by a Jewish Sinologist haunted by an all-pervasive mood of subdued obsession and inner wrestling with her memories of the Holocaust. This talk, sitting on the intersection of China studies, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies, will examine the nexus between her Jewish identity and her academic vocation, and discuss how this tormented scholar made a variety of personal and academic choices and managed to find her position in this world of imponderables.
https://www.harvard-yenching.org/events/trauma-and-transcendence/
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_brAA3a7e79Sj6D3

Special Event - China and the United States in 2021 and Beyond: Paths Forward
2020-12-07 19:30 - 21:00
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speakers:
Fred Hu, Founder and Chairman, Primavera Capital Group
Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College
David Daokui Li, Founding Dean of the Schwarzman Scholars program, Mansfield Freeman Professor of Economics, and Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE), Tsinghua University
Yuan Ming, Dean of Yenching Academy, Peking University
Moderator: William Kirby, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University; Chairman, Harvard China Fund
Introductions by: Winnie (Chi-Man) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard-China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Presented via Zoom Webinar

From 30 Million to Zero Malaria Cases in China: Lessons Learned for Malaria- Eliminating Countries in Africa
2020-12-07 07:00 - 2020-12-08 09:45
On December 7–8, 2020, Harvard University will partner with National Institute for Parasitic Diseases (NIPD), Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Health Organization to convene a special scientific symposium titled, “From 30 Million to Zero Malaria Cases in China: Lessons Learned for Malaria-Eliminating Countries in Africa.”
Participants will gain insights on China’s successful integration of sophisticated genetic technologies with ongoing malaria surveillance efforts for improved malaria policy decision-making for eradication and also gain insights as experts discuss the progress and challenges of malaria elimination in middle- to high-burden countries.
More information here.
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Michael Szonyi - Did Chinese Peasants Have a Revolution? Perspectives from the Long Twentieth-Century
2020-12-03 19:00 - 20:30
Speaker: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Discussant: Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History, University of California – Santa Cruz
Moderator: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of Califorina – Irvine
For much of the last seventy years the answer to the question “Did Chinese peasants have a revolution?” has seemed self-evident. But from our vantage point in 2020, it is equally self-evident that rural people did not have the revolution they were promised or that they expected, and that their experience of revolution was highly distinctive. In this presentation, Professor Michael Szonyi first explores some of the ways that focusing on the experience of rural people may help us rethink our understandings of both modern Chinese history and the challenges facing contemporary China. Then he turns to discuss how one aspect of rural life – the household development cycle – has impacted the experience of revolutionary change in rural China.
Presented via Zoom
Registration required
Register at: https://uci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fM-yryoyRxqGMIiJRRHAWg

Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Edward Cunningham - Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time
2020-12-02 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and of the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Meng Gao - The Essential Role of Vertical Profile Observations of Atmospheric Composition in China
2020-12-02 10:00 - 11:00
**PLEASE NOTE THE DATE OF THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED FROM NOVEMBER 18 TO DECEMBER 2**
Speaker: Meng Gao, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University; Associate, Harvard-China Project
Monitoring and modeling/predicting air pollution are crucial to understanding the links between emissions and air pollution levels, to supporting air quality management, and to reducing human exposure. Yet, current monitoring networks and modeling capabilities are unfortunately inadequate to understand the physical and chemical processes above ground, and to support attribution of sources. Vertical observations of atmospheric composition would be essential to reduce uncertainties, and to advance diagnostic understanding and prediction of air pollution. In this talk, three major issues of air quality research in China will be exemplified: (1) current observation networks provide only partial view of air pollution, and this can lead to misleading air quality management actions; (2) satellite retrievals of air pollutants are widely used in air pollution studies, such as health risk assessment, but too often users do not acknowledge that they have large uncertainties, which can be reduced with measurements of vertical profiles; (3) air quality modeling and forecasting require vertical observational constraints.
Meng Gao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University and Associate, Harvard-China Project. He earned a B.Sc degree in atmospheric physics from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and an M.Sc and Ph.D in chemical engineering from the University of Iowa. Dr. Gao Meng’s research focuses on air pollution in highly polluted regions (China and India) and its interactions with health and climate. He uses a coupled meteorology-chemistry model to investigate in detail the chemical and physical processes leading to severe particulate matter and ozone pollution in Asia. He has demonstrated that aerosol interactions with radiation and clouds contribute in important ways to intensification of aerosol enhancements. He has shown how the assimilation of PM2.5 in winter haze periods can improve model predictions and that these improved predictions can reduce significantly the uncertainties in estimates of health impacts and aerosol radiative forcing. He has also shown how ocean temperature in autumn can be used effectively to predict the severity of Indian winter haze, which can help guide pollution control planning at least a season in advance.
Presented via Zoom.
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctduyqpzwiGNWMZt42nWYMuuC1aBGxxdHN

Cheng Yu-yu - Revolution in the Nation of Poetry: Physical and Linguistic Perspectives since 1919 (詩國革命的「漢語」脈絡)
2020-11-30 20:00 - 22:00
Speaker: Cheng Yu-yu, National Taiwan University
This talk will be given in Mandarin.
Once Chinese poetry becomes “modern poetry,” its so-called modernity must be discussed in the context of the modernity of “Chinese language” itself. From the late Qing and early Republican periods on, when confronted with the invasion of such things as new lexicon, new academic disciplines, alphabetic languages, and English grammar, the Chinese language, Chinese characters, and the cultural tradition to which it belongs have never ceased responding to and reflecting upon such foreign forces. In examining this “modernizing” process of Chinese poetry, which progressed from the question of “how to speak to the new world” to that of “how to reestablish a new relationship with the world,” one cannot overlook the new ways of thinking of the Chinese language that emerged from and were constructed by various disciplines, including grammatology, philology, phonology, psychology, and rhetoric studies. And in discussing “modern poetry,” one should not disregard how figures such as Ma Jianzhong, Liu Shipei, Huang Ren, Huang Kan, Tang Yue, Hu Pu’an, Chen Wangdao, and Li Anzhai, as well as Chen Shih-Hsiang and Kao Yu-kung, have consciously sought the basis upon which the Chinese language and Chinese characters depend for their existence and adaption to change. What lie at the very core of this basis are the “speakability” and the “manifestability” of the Chinese language. These concepts were engaged in a tug-of-war with the tumultuous modern vision prevalent since the late Qing, exhibiting a well-matched rivalry that cannot be ignored.
當漢語詩成為「『現代』詩」，這所謂「現代質地」（modernity）還是必須回到「漢語」的現代性來討論。晚清民初以來，面對新語詞、新學科、拼音文字、英語文法這些如同外來侵襲的事物，漢語、漢字及其所在的文化系統，從未停止回應與思考；從「如何向新世界開口發聲」到「如何重建與世界的新關係」，漢語詩「現代化」的進程裡，不應該忽視當時由語法學、文字學、音韻學、心理學、修辭學等不同領域出發而建構的漢語新思維，討論「現代詩」不應該忽略如馬建忠、劉師培、黃人、黃侃、唐鉞、胡樸安、陳望道、李安宅，以至於陳世驤或高友工等人，是如何自覺的去發現漢語、漢字所以存有與應變的依據，而其中允為核心的是漢語的「可發聲性」與「可體現性」，正與晚清以來高張喧騰的現代視線相互拉鋸，呈現不可輕忽的抗衡態勢。
Professor Yu-yu Cheng, Academician of Academia Sinica, the Chair Professor of Chinese literature at National Taiwan University, is devoted to developing pioneering and interdisciplinary interpretations of Chinese classical literature by combining the Eastern and Western humanistic thoughts. She enjoys an international reputation for her contribution to the discourses of space, body, and Chinese lyrical tradition. Cheng has published numerous books, including “Literary Ch’i” in Six Dynasties Literary Theory, The Situation Aesthetics in Six Dynasties, Gender and Nation: Discourses of Encountering Sorrow in Han and Jin Rhapsodies, The Poet in Text and Landscape: Mutual Definition of Self and Landscape, Metaphor: Crossing Categorical Boundaries in Ancient Chinese Literature, and Gesture and Language: A New Approach to the Revolution of a Poetic Tradition, etc.
Presented via Zoom.
Registration required.
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYkd-GtqDosHtFLLK39YRE6hU_gP7MyM9sX

Tahir Hamut Izgil and Rana Yashar Aybala - Uyghur Poetry in Translation
2020-11-24 12:00 - 13:15
Join us for the opportunity to hear from Tahir Hamut Izgil and Rana Yashar Aybala, two of the foremost poets writing in Uyghur today. The event will feature opening remarks by Mark Elliott, Harvard’s Vice Provost of International Affairs, followed by presentations from both poets. We will also have the opportunity to hear from Dr Gülnar Eziz, Harvard Preceptor in Uyghur and Chaghatay and Dr. Joshua Freeman of Princeton’s Society of Fellows, on their translation work.
This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Hillel, Uyghur Academy-USA, the Human Rights Working Group, and the Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom.
Open to the public.
Registration is required.
Register here: https://guestlist.co/events/666291
Proceeds from the event will fund books and supplies for Uyghur Academy-USA and the Boston Uyghur School.

Xingyi Wang - Boundary of the Body: The Monastic Robe and Revival of the Vinaya in Medieval China and Japan
2020-11-23 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: Xingyi Wang, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Modern scholarship often compares Buddhist monastic rules to legal codes or treats them mainly as nominal prescriptions. The reality, however, was more complex than what appeared on paper. I propose a new understanding of the Vinaya which sees it as vital device and site for the formation of a religious self, in tandem with the habitual cultivation of the human body in everyday monastic living. Given that the body of a monastic is almost always clothed, the apparently disproportionately large number of rules in the Vinaya about monastic robes should not be surprising. This talk focuses on the practice of robing monastics in the Vinaya revival in Song China and Kamakura Japan. The formative power of the Vinaya on the individual body and on the collective community hinges on the mediacy of the robe. By tracing the trajectory of the commentarial tradition and material culture of the Vinaya from Song China to Kamakura Japan, I show how Buddhists negotiated the tension between fidelity to the Vinaya and their localized ephemeral social reality.
Presented via Zoom.
Registration required.
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUtfuyupzwtGN1AU-KhH1IScyoXKjlLHD-r

East Asian Digital Scholarship Community Hour
2020-11-20 20:30 - 21:30
Read the transcript of the event here.

The East Asian Digital Scholarship Community Hour is an experimental and casual community-building event. It aims to provide a platform for scholars, graduate students, in particular, to share their ideas, skills, big and small projects, and learn from each other.
Examples of presentation topics include but are not limited to the following:

Your use cases of datasets, databases, tools, and software with East Asian foci;
A digital tool or workflow you built;
An on-going digital project that need suggestions and comments;
A potential collaboration that needs more hands on deck.

The event is sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

Environment in Asia Lecture Series - Infectious Diseases and Public Health Management in China: From Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
2020-11-20 12:00 - 13:30
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speakers:
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Duke University
Mary Augusta Brazelton, The University of Cambridge
Miriam Gross, The University of Oklahoma
Elanah Uretsky, Brandeis University
Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945, an open access e-book published by the University of California Press in 2018 that received the 2019 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2020 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She researches history of medicine, women, and gender in twentieth-century China.
Mary Augusta Brazelton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge. Her book Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the history of mass immunization in twentieth-century China. It suggests that the origins of the vaccination policies that eradicated smallpox and controlled other infectious diseases in the 1950s, providing an important basis for the emergence of Chinese health policy as a model for global health, can be traced to research and development in southwest China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She has also published work on the history of penicillin development and tuberculosis control in China, as well as the history of Peking Union Medical College, and is the 2019 recipient of the Zhu Kezhen Senior Award from the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. Her research interests lie broadly in historical intersections of science, technology, and medicine in China and around the world. At Cambridge, she is an affiliated lecturer in East Asian Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a member of the World History Subject Group in the Faculty of History, as well as a Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute. She received her PhD at Yale and has taught at Tufts University.
Miriam Gross is an Associate Professor in the Departments’ of History and of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. She received her Masters of International Affairs from Columbia University in 2002, and her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese history from the University of California, San Diego in 2010, under the direction of Professors’ Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz. Her first book, Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China, was published by the University of California Press in 2016. Her research focuses on the popularization, politicization, and contestation of science and medicine in the countryside in modern China as well as China’s medical diplomacy abroad. Currently she is writing a book on COVID-19 that explores its roots in China and analyzes comparative global management and control strategies.
Elanah Uretsky is an Associate Professor of International and Global Studies at Brandeis University where she teaches courses on global health, China and East Asia, and human rights. Trained as a medical anthropologist of China, Professor Uretsky has twenty years of experience conducting research on the impact of gender, sexuality, and governance on HIV/AIDS and chronic disease in China. Her first book, Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business and HIV/AIDS in Post-Mao China, discusses the impact that China’s culture of male networking practices has had on the development, trajectory, and administration of China’s HIV epidemic. Professor Uretsky has also examined China’s increasing involvement in the global health field and has conducted research on the health of African migrants living in the city of Guangzhou. Prior to teaching at Brandeis, Professor Uretsky taught in the Department of Global Health at George Washington University. Professor Uretsky holds a PhD in sociomedical science from Columbia University and did postdoctoral training at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in AIDS at Yale University.
Part of the Environment in Asia Lecture Series
Presented Via Zoom Webinar

Tao Leigh Goffe - "My Mother Told Me I am Chinese": Afro-Asian Aesthetics in the Caribbean
2020-11-19 20:00 - 22:00
Speaker: Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Cornell University
In this talk, Professor Tao Leigh Goffe will discuss the aesthetic challenge ‘Chinese’ poses as a racial category in the Caribbean. The introduction of Chinese as a category of labor to the West Indian plantation (Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba) is a history she traces from 1803 to the present through the institution of “racial indenture” as a replacement from enslaved African labor, chiefly on sugar plantations. Identifying common aesthetic strands of Chinese cosmology in artwork by people of Chinese descent with roots in the Caribbean, Goffe asks questions about the Chinese haunting of the Caribbean plantation.
Made possible by the generous support of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Presented via Zoom
Join at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93136279659?pwd=[REDACTED]

Economy Lecture Series featuring Kristen Looney - Rural Development in China and East Asia
2020-11-19 16:00 - 18:00
Read the transcript of the event here.

Speaker: Kristen Looney, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government, Georgetown University

Moderator/Discussant: Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business of Administration, Harvard Business School

This talk tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. Looney’s research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China’s development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the research enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.
Kristen Looney is an assistant professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance and has previously appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. She is the author of Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). She holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
Part of the Economy Lecture Series
Presented Via Zoom Webinar

Panel Discussion - East Asia Responds to U.S. Election Results
2020-11-18 19:30 - 20:30
Presenters:
Toshihiro Nakayama, Professor of American Politics and Foreign Policy, Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University; Adjunct Fellow, Japan Institute of International Affairs
Shin-wha Lee, Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University
Wu Xinbo, Dean, Institute of International Studies; Director, Center for American Studies; Fudan University
Discussant: Ezra Vogel, Honorary Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, Harvard University
Moderator: Christina Davis, Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; Professor of Government; and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtcuuvqT0rHtU4M2pcRaMBZj73P1WwZXCh

Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Joseph Fewsmith - The Fifth Plenum: Implications for the Future
2020-11-18 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University Pardee School of International Relations and Political Science.
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Chinese Literature Across the Borderlands
2020-11-13 13:00 - 15:00
Convened by:
David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
Kyle Shernuk, Yale University
Miya Qiong Xie, Dartmouth University
This workshop aims to explore the shifting definitions of the borderland as a territorial gateway, a geopolitical space, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, and an imaginary portal. To this end, participants will explore the intersection of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and ecological dynamics that inform the cartography of the Chinese borderland, from the Northeast to the Southwest, from Inner Mongolia to Tibet, and from Nanyang to Nanmei. We will reflect on the recent, interdisciplinary growth in understanding the characteristics of borders and frontiers, including migration and settlement, cultural hybridity, and transnationalism, as well as take issues with the boundaries of literature as it manifests itself in multiple forms of media and mediation. This workshop is organized around a forthcoming special issue of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature.
Schedule:
13:00-14:00: Panelist Positions Papers (3-5 min/presenter)
14:00-14:45: Panelist Roundtable Discussion
14:45-15:00: Q&A w/ Zoom Attendees
Panel 1: “Bordering” National Imaginaries

Miya Xie (Dartmouth): “The Making and Unmaking of Nationalist Literature from the National Margin: Rereading Duanmu Hongliang’s The Korchin Banner Plains as Borderland Writing”
Yanshuo Zhang (Michigan): Shen Congwen’s Idealized Ethnic: Borderland, Ethnicity, and the Spiritual Enchantments of a Modern Master
Levi Gibbs (Dartmouth): “The Cultural Hybridity of Chineseness: Regional Transgression in Stories of Northern Shaanxi”

Panel 2: Ethnic Negotiations

Tuo Jianing (Sichuan University): “Sinophone Hui Literature in the Mengjiang Regime during the Second Sino-Japanese War”
Jerôme de Wit (University of Tübingen): “The Cultural Creation of the Ethnic Korean Minority in China: Focusing on the Portrayal of Local Landscape in post-1949 Korean-Chinese Literature”
Christopher Peacock (Columbia): “Unsavory Characters: Forced Bilingualism in the Tibetan Fiction of Tsering Döndrup”
E.K. Tan (Stony Brook University): “Conciliatory Amalgamation: The Politics of Survival in Sinophone Uyghur Writer Padi Guli’s A Hundred Years of Bloodline (2015)”
Mark Bender (Ohio State): “Treading Poetic Borders in Southwest China and Northeast India”

Panel 3: Sinophone and Xenophone Articulations

Brian Bernards (USC): “Sinophonic Detours and Trespasses in Colonial Burma: The Transborder Poetics of Ai Wu’s Travels in the South”
Jessica Tan (Harvard): “Unfinished Revolutions: Wei Beihua, Chairil Anwar and the Limits of Realism of Post-war Mahua Literature”
Kyle Shernuk (Yale): “Embracing the Xenophone: Siu Kam Wen and the Possibility of Spanish-language Chinese Literature

Presented via Zoom Webinar
Registration Required
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Nl2mg5FtTtydlP0t4pUbVg.

Javier Cha — The Big Data Turn in the Humanities: Sailing into Uncharted Waters
2020-11-13 10:00 - 11:00
Speaker: Javier Cha, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University; Visiting Scholar and Digital Historian-in-Residence, Department of History, Lingnan University
The total amount of data created by 2020, if stored in a stack of single-layer Blu-ray discs, would reach seven times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. In 2019 alone, content creators uploaded 30,000 years of video to YouTube, and Naver’s flagship data center, Kak, handles more information than ten thousand National Libraries of Korea combined. By 2025, big data will triple in size, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this growth. To meet this demand, China is aggressively increasing its data center capacity, as seen in Guizhou’s recent transformation into Big Data Valley and Alibaba Cloud’s expansion in Southeast Asia. What are the implications of this ongoing big data transformation of society in the humanities? In this talk, Javier Cha argues for the need to fundamentally rethink the humanities, from material bibliography to data analytics and cultural studies. What do we do when our sources consist of millions of servers rather than documents? How do we handle cultural artifacts that increasingly eschew text in favor of video, 3d point clouds, and holograms? Questions of this nature are at the heart of Cha’s Big Data Studies Lab at Seoul National University, which has invited librarians, historians, anthropologists, and computer scientists, among others, to search for the new normal in the humanities together. Our current proposal is to develop big data literacy and cultural data science curricula for the next generation of humanities scholars.
The East Asian Digital Scholarship Series, founded by Feng-en Tu and Sharon Yang, has been a monthly luncheon at Harvard-Yenching Library. This year, the Series will be conducted remotely and is sponsored by Harvard-Yenching Library with the support of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Korea Institute. The Series will cover a wide range of topics in East Asian digital scholarship.
The webinar will be conducted via Zoom. Participants will be required to register at https://link.ws/eads-nov20.

China Town Hall: Society & Culture
2020-11-12 19:00 - 20:00
Speakers:
Raymond Chang, Major League Baseball China
Lucas Sin, Junzi Kitchen
Janet Yang, Janet Yang Productions
Moderator: Alison Friedman, Performing Arts of West Kowloon Cultural District Authority
Starting with ping-pong diplomacy in 1971, cultural diplomacy has played a pivotal role in facilitating mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and China. This event will gather leading cultural figures to discuss how, despite sometimes turbulent political and economic relations, sports, food, and film continue to reveal our shared humanity and connect us through culture.
Presented via Zoom
Registration Required
Register at: https://www.tfaforms.com/4855337

Fairbank Center Director's Seminar - Myths and Realities in Sino-American Relations
2020-11-12 16:00 - 17:30
Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy SchoolModerator: Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University; Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton; Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama.
Introduction by: Winnie Chi-Man Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population; Faculty Director, Harvard China Health Partnership, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Interim Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, Harvard Kennedy School.
Part of the Fairbank Center Director’s Seminar Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Transcript: Download Transcript
