Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945
2023-03-20 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | CGIS South Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Register For Hybrid Zoom Attendance

Speaker: Seiji Shirane, Assistant Professor, Department of History; Affiliated Faculty Member, Asian Studies Program, The City College of New York (CUNY)

Moderator: Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature; Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.

Also via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvcOqqqDIjGtLcXCPwI7QkCVzzXnuF2FBL

Venue

Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China
2023-03-20 12:00 - 13:15 | Wexner W-434 A.B, 19 Eliot St, Cambridge, 02138, United States
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Speaker: Jérôme Doyon, Junior Professor at SciencesPo; author of Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao ChinaRespondent: Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute,

Working for the administration remains one of the most coveted career paths for young Chinese. “Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China” seeks to understand what motivates young and educated Chinese to commit to a long-term career in the party-state and how this question is central to the Chinese regime’s ability to maintain its cohesion and survive. Jérôme Doyon draws upon extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis in order to illuminate the undogmatic commitment recruitment techniques and other methods the state has taken to develop a diffuse allegiance to the party-state in the post-Mao era. He then analyzes recruitment and political professionalization in the Communist Party’s youth organizations and shows how experiences in the Chinese Communist Youth League transform recruits and feed their political commitment as they are gradually inducted into the world of officials. As the first in-depth study of the Communist Youth League’s role in recruitment, this book challenges the assumption that merit is the main criteria for advancement within the party-state, an argument with deep implications for understanding Chinese politics today.

Lunch will be served for in-person attendees.

Registration is required for both online and in-person attendees. Register at: https://hksexeced.tfaforms.net/f/event-registration?s=a1n4V000006EM8BQAW&c=7014V000002IyegQAC

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Wealth and Politics in Asia: HYI Annual Roundtable
2023-03-22 16:00 - 18:00 | Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall, Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Panelists:Yuen Yuen Ang, Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy, Johns Hopkins UniversityYasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management, MIT Sloan School of ManagementDevesh Kapur, Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)Pasuk Phongpaichit, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, Chulalongkorn UniversityBridget Welsh, Honorary Research Associate, University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute Malaysia

Moderator:Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

How does the recent rise of a super-rich stratum across much of Asia affect the politics of different countries? Are the ultra-affluent more likely to wield influence in democracies or in authoritarian regimes? Through what means and to what ends? An inter-disciplinary panel of experts on China, India and Southeast Asia will share observations and insights on this timely issue.

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Harvard Visual China Inaugural Graduate Symposium--"Luminosity in Chinese Art & Culture"
2023-03-24 11:00 - 17:30 | Sackler Building Auditorium, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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From Prometheus the Fire-Bringer to myths of cosmogony, light and luminosity is an enduring metaphor in human history. In modern science, light and luminosity are understood as matters of wavelength and energy. Yet in the Chinese context, luminosity is not confined to issues of the visual and visibility. In fact, luminosity had long been associated with consciousness and vitality beyond the expiration of the physical body, especially in connections with certain materials and objects. The Harvard Visual China Inaugural Graduate Symposium presents three panels on this topic: Panel 1: Visualizing Luminosity; Panel 2: Painting Luminosity; Panel 3: Luminous Jewels.

More information and registration: https://www.harvardvisualchina.com/hvc-2023-symposium-info-registration.

This event is sponsored by the Department of History of Art & Architecture, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Innovation Fund, and Harvard FAS CAMLab.

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Urban China Series featuring Adam Liu: Small Banks, Big Politics: The Cause and Consequences of Bank Proliferation in China
2023-03-27 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
zoom meeting link

Speaker: Adam Liu, National University of Singapore

The Henan bank protest, the Evergrande crisis, and the perennial local government debt issue in China all point to one thing: there’s something wrong with the country’s banking system and Beijing needs to fix it. In particular, it needs to better regulate the numerous small banks that are now so intimately intertwined with much of China’s economic challenges. Beijing is working on it but it’s hard to do. This talk explains why. First, the exponential proliferation of small banks in the past three decades is hardly a natural phenomenon of economic/financial development; it is the outcome of a grand historical central-local bargain that’s difficult for current central leaders to upend. Second, and relatedly, many small banks have become the dominant players in local banking markets and are thus a crucial pillar of local economic development. Tight regulation and excessive punishment will therefore hurt local growth further in this difficult time. Beijing will have to juggle.

This event series is made possible by the generous support of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

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How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food—2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night One, "Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in the High Qing Period"
2023-03-28 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Read our blog post on this series of lectures: What Soy Sauce Can Tell Us About History, Politics—and Chinese Identity

The lecture series examines the cultural and political meaning of soy sauce by tracing its long trajectory from an obscure elite condiment to a mundane, everyday food in the modern period. The condiment acquired in the process the unique power of forging shared identities – familial, communitarian, regional and national, becoming more recently a heritage food in different Chinese societies today. Its status as a popular, necessary daily food endowed it with social and economic values that have made its production an integral part of state building for successive regimes – Qing, Republican, Socialist, post-Socialist. Since the early 20th century, soy sauce has been crafted with changing knowledge and techniques, by experts in evolving institutions and enterprises, and marketed to satisfy consumers’ shifting imaginations of their time, community, and environment.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 4:30pm Lecture 1: Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in the High Qing PeriodThe explosion of soy sauce’s popularity as an everyday food in China is explained in the context of the mid-eighteenth-century integration of Manchuria, which would become the world’s biggest soybean producer, into the Qing Empire at the zenith of its political power. The development changed urban landscapes, shaped everyday life and forged new urban identities.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 2: The Power of a Malleable Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China Soy sauce as a super connector gained enormous power in the 19th and early 20th centuries: It was made and offered to tighten bonds within lineages, strengthen native place relationships, and diplomatic ties. It symbolized communitarian and national solidarity, hospitality and pride. Such immense power imbued the condiment with significant economic value.

Thursday, March 30, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 3: Soy Sauce in Crisis: China’s First Engagement with Technoscience Under deteriorating governance and facing the influx of industrial Japanese products, Chinese soy sauce production was to be transformed as part of the state program of industrial modernization. The process produced a first generation of food scientists and technocrats navigating between codified scientific knowledge and traditional practices based on embodied skills, an approach still valid in the 21st century when heritage sauces are being constructed.

Angela Ki Che Leung is Chair Professor of History, Joseph Needham-Philip Mao Professor in Chinese History, Science and Civilization at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong since 2011. After obtaining her doctoral degree at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she became a researcher at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 1982, and taught history at UCLA, National Taiwan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was elected Academician of the Academia Sinica in 2010. She has published in Chinese, English and French on the history of Chinese philanthropy and history of medicine and health. Her books in English include Leprosy in China: A History (2009), Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia (2010, co-edited with Charlotte Furth); Gender, Health and History in East Asia (2017, co-edited with Izumi Nakayama); Moral Foods: The Construction of Health Regimes in Modern Asia (2019, co-edited with Melissa Caldwell). She led a Hong Kong government funded collaborative project on everyday technologies in modern East Asia from 2017-2022, and is preparing an edited volume on Food Technoscience in East Asia and a monograph on the history of Chinese soy sauce.Also available via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uaNtmwT2SPiUyNxzpzF40w

YouTube recording of “How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food—2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night One, “Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in the High Qing Period””

Venue

Critical Issues Confronting China - Challenges Confronting China’s Healthcare System Post-COVID: A conversation between Winnie Yip and William Hsiao
2023-03-29 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Read our blog post on the event: How a Slowing Economy—and Big Hospitals—Are Challenging Healthcare Reform in China

Speaker: 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

Discussant: William Hsiao, K.T. Li Professor of Economics, Emeritus, in Department of Health Policy and Management and Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Also available on Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iRwh1x7UQ5G-OFRAGQXp0w

YouTube recording of “Critical Issues Confronting China – Challenges Confronting China’s Healthcare System Post-COVID: A conversation between Winnie Yip and William Hsiao”

Venue

How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food—2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night Two, "The Power of a Malleable Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China"
2023-03-29 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Read our blog post on this series of lectures: What Soy Sauce Can Tell Us About History, Politics—and Chinese Identity

The lecture series examines the cultural and political meaning of soy sauce by tracing its long trajectory from an obscure elite condiment to a mundane, everyday food in the modern period. The condiment acquired in the process the unique power of forging shared identities – familial, communitarian, regional and national, becoming more recently a heritage food in different Chinese societies today. Its status as a popular, necessary daily food endowed it with social and economic values that have made its production an integral part of state building for successive regimes – Qing, Republican, Socialist, post-Socialist. Since the early 20th century, soy sauce has been crafted with changing knowledge and techniques, by experts in evolving institutions and enterprises, and marketed to satisfy consumers’ shifting imaginations of their time, community, and environment.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 4:30pm Lecture 1: Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in the High Qing PeriodThe explosion of soy sauce’s popularity as an everyday food in China is explained in the context of the mid-eighteenth-century integration of Manchuria, which would become the world’s biggest soybean producer, into the Qing Empire at the zenith of its political power. The development changed urban landscapes, shaped everyday life and forged new urban identities.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 2: The Power of a Malleable Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China Soy sauce as a super connector gained enormous power in the 19th and early 20th centuries: It was made and offered to tighten bonds within lineages, strengthen native place relationships, and diplomatic ties. It symbolized communitarian and national solidarity, hospitality and pride. Such immense power imbued the condiment with significant economic value.

Thursday, March 30, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 3: Soy Sauce in Crisis: China’s First Engagement with Technoscience Under deteriorating governance and facing the influx of industrial Japanese products, Chinese soy sauce production was to be transformed as part of the state program of industrial modernization. The process produced a first generation of food scientists and technocrats navigating between codified scientific knowledge and traditional practices based on embodied skills, an approach still valid in the 21st century when heritage sauces are being constructed.

Angela Ki Che Leung is Chair Professor of History, Joseph Needham-Philip Mao Professor in Chinese History, Science and Civilization at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong since 2011. After obtaining her doctoral degree at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she became a researcher at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 1982, and taught history at UCLA, National Taiwan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was elected Academician of the Academia Sinica in 2010. She has published in Chinese, English and French on the history of Chinese philanthropy and history of medicine and health. Her books in English include Leprosy in China: A History (2009), Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia (2010, co-edited with Charlotte Furth); Gender, Health and History in East Asia (2017, co-edited with Izumi Nakayama); Moral Foods: The Construction of Health Regimes in Modern Asia (2019, co-edited with Melissa Caldwell). She led a Hong Kong government funded collaborative project on everyday technologies in modern East Asia from 2017-2022, and is preparing an edited volume on Food Technoscience in East Asia and a monograph on the history of Chinese soy sauce.Also available via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gr9J4wRjRlST0KeJYWLTgg

YouTube recording of “How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food—2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night Two, “The Power of a Malleable Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China””

Venue

Alexis Brown - Time and Narrative in the Rasavāhinī: A Literary Theoretical Approach to Reading a Theravada Buddhist Text
2023-03-29 17:00 - 19:00 | Barker Center, Thompson Room, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138
Speaker: Alexis Brown, Harvard University

Venue

How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food - 2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night Three, "Soy Sauce in Crisis: China’s First Engagement with Technoscience"
2023-03-30 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Read our blog post on this series of lectures: What Soy Sauce Can Tell Us About History, Politics—and Chinese Identity

The lecture series examines the cultural and political meaning of soy sauce by tracing its long trajectory from an obscure elite condiment to a mundane, everyday food in the modern period. The condiment acquired in the process the unique power of forging shared identities – familial, communitarian, regional and national, becoming more recently a heritage food in different Chinese societies today. Its status as a popular, necessary daily food endowed it with social and economic values that have made its production an integral part of state building for successive regimes – Qing, Republican, Socialist, post-Socialist. Since the early 20th century, soy sauce has been crafted with changing knowledge and techniques, by experts in evolving institutions and enterprises, and marketed to satisfy consumers’ shifting imaginations of their time, community, and environment.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 4:30pm Lecture 1: Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in the High Qing PeriodThe explosion of soy sauce’s popularity as an everyday food in China is explained in the context of the mid-eighteenth-century integration of Manchuria, which would become the world’s biggest soybean producer, into the Qing Empire at the zenith of its political power. The development changed urban landscapes, shaped everyday life and forged new urban identities.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 2: The Power of a Malleable Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China Soy sauce as a super connector gained enormous power in the 19th and early 20th centuries: It was made and offered to tighten bonds within lineages, strengthen native place relationships, and diplomatic ties. It symbolized communitarian and national solidarity, hospitality and pride. Such immense power imbued the condiment with significant economic value.

Thursday, March 30, 2023, 4:30pmLecture 3: Soy Sauce in Crisis: China’s First Engagement with Technoscience Under deteriorating governance and facing the influx of industrial Japanese products, Chinese soy sauce production was to be transformed as part of the state program of industrial modernization. The process produced a first generation of food scientists and technocrats navigating between codified scientific knowledge and traditional practices based on embodied skills, an approach still valid in the 21st century when heritage sauces are being constructed.

Angela Ki Che Leung is Chair Professor of History, Joseph Needham-Philip Mao Professor in Chinese History, Science and Civilization at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong since 2011. After obtaining her doctoral degree at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she became a researcher at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 1982, and taught history at UCLA, National Taiwan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was elected Academician of the Academia Sinica in 2010. She has published in Chinese, English and French on the history of Chinese philanthropy and history of medicine and health. Her books in English include Leprosy in China: A History (2009), Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia (2010, co-edited with Charlotte Furth); Gender, Health and History in East Asia (2017, co-edited with Izumi Nakayama); Moral Foods: The Construction of Health Regimes in Modern Asia (2019, co-edited with Melissa Caldwell). She led a Hong Kong government funded collaborative project on everyday technologies in modern East Asia from 2017-2022, and is preparing an edited volume on Food Technoscience in East Asia and a monograph on the history of Chinese soy sauce.Also available via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nIxWlsf8TlakxRYAt9OOgA

YouTube recording of “How Soy Sauce Shapes Modern China: The Power of an Everyday Food – 2023 Fairbank Center Reischauer Lecture Series featuring Angela KC Leung, Night Three, “Soy Sauce in Crisis: China’s First Engagement with Technoscience””

Venue

China Economy Lecture featuring Henry Gao - China, State Capitalism and the World Trading System
2023-03-31 12:30 - 14:00 | CGIS South Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Henry Gao, Professor of Law, Singapore Management University; Senior Fellow, CIGI

Henry Gao is Professor of Law at Singapore Management University and Senior Fellow at CIGI. With law degrees from three continents, he started his career as the first Chinese lawyer at the WTO Secretariat. He has been an advisor on trade issues to many national governments as well as the WTO, UN, World Bank, ADB, APEC, ASEAN and the World Economic Forum. Widely published on China and WTO and digital trade issues, he sits on the Advisory Board of the WTO Chairs Program, as well as the editorial boards of the Journal of International Economic Law and Journal of Financial Regulation. He was recently interviewed by the Economist for its Money Talks podcast episode on “How globalisation gave way”, and his new paper analyzing China’s changing perspectives on the WTO was quoted as an “invaluable” paper by the Financial Times in its feature article on China’s 20th anniversary in the WTO. His new book “Between Market Economy and State Capitalism: China’s State-Owned Enterprises and the World Trading System” was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2022.

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2023 China Law Symposium: Reacquainting with China through Common Interests - Discussing Disability Law in China
2023-04-03 12:15 - 13:15 | WCC 2012, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Register now

2023 China Law Symposium: Reacquainting with China through Common InterestsThe Harvard Law School China Law Association (CLA) will host its annual China Law Symposium, “Reacquainting with China through Common Interests,” over the first two weeks of April. This year, we are highlighting topics of common interest to China and the United States, ranging across the public and private sectors. The panels will feature issues on disability law, education in China, US-China climate change collaborations, antitrust law, and blockchain technology.This Symposium is cosponsored by the Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Department, the Harvard Antitrust Association, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Food/snacks will be provided at each speaker event. RSVP: bit.ly/CLA2023Symposium

Schedule:

Discussing Disability Law in ChinaMon, April 3, 12:15–1:15 pm ET | WCC 2012

Antitrust in China: Debunking the Myth and Unravelling the IntricaciesTues, April 4, 12:15–1:15 pm ET | WCC 2012Double Reduction Policy in China: An Educational Double-Edged Sword?Tues, April 4, 8:00–9:00 pm ET | WCC 1015Blockchain from a Chinese PerspectiveMon, April 10, 12:15–1:15 pm ET | WCC 2004Collaborating on Climate ChangeWed, April 12, 12:15–1:15 pm ET | WCC 2009

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Film Screening: "The Schools Out of City," Featuring Discussion with Executive Director (PEER), Hong Liu and Co-producer, Xinran Liang
2023-04-03 18:30 - 21:00 | CGIS South, Room S050, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speakers:Hong Liu, Executive Director of PEER, an NGO dedicated to promoting educational equity in rural China Xinran Liang, Co-producer of the documentary Menghan Shen, Associate Professor of Government, Sun Yat-Sen University; Research Fellow, HKS

Rural China. Mysterious, distant, silent. What does it mean to address rural-urban educational inequality in China as an individual and a volunteer? What does it mean to promote ‘quality education’ in rural county high schools, inside out? What does it mean to be ‘on the ground’? The Schools Out of City (沉默的县中) follows the footsteps of long-term volunteers in three high schools in rural Hunan and Guangxi and invites its audience to a world of bottom-up educational experiments. Following the screening, there will be a discussion with Hong Liu, executive director of the rural education NGO, PEER, Xinran Liang, co-producer of the documentary, and Menghan Shen, Associate Professor of Government at Sun Yat-Sen University and research fellow at HKS.

PEER is an NGO founded in 2007 by a group of Harvard alumni to promote educational equity in rural China. It has over a decade of experience of working with students and teachers from rural county schools. Please contact xiaorui_zhou@g.harvard.edu for more information.

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Urban China Series featuring Cai Meina - Legal Discrimination, Contention Pyramid, and Land Takings in China
2023-04-03 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
Zoom meeting link

Speaker: Cai Meina, University of Connecticut

How do land-dispossessed villagers protect their interests in a context where the legal framework discriminates against them? Contrary to the existing research that focuses on protests, this research identifies negotiations as a strategy of the dispossessed to engage with local governments and improve their compensation arrangement. Negotiations are more frequent than petitions, which are in turn more frequent than protests and violence. These negotiations focus on tailored local arrangements that are not specified in formal compensation policy – what I term “non-programmatic compensation.” Negotiations over non-programmatic compensation create a fragmented compensation policy regime that combines low, stagnant, and less locally diversified formal compensation standards with dynamic, locality-specific, and negotiated informal non-programmatic compensation. These findings draw on extensive fieldwork in 5 provinces (Chongqing, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Hebei), an original dataset of local land compensation policies, and surveys of rural households and elites.

Meina Cai is Associate Professor of Political Science with a joint appointment of Asian/Asian American Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests are political economy, institution and development, and land politics and urbanization with an area focus on China. Her recent articles appear in World Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Urban Studies, and Land Use Policy. Her urbanization projects have been funded by Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation among others.

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Jacob Eyferth - Agrarian Taylorism: Reorganizing the Rural Labor Process in Collective-Era China
2023-04-04 10:30 - 11:45 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Jacob Eyferth

Presented via Zoom. Register at: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

Venue

2023 China Law Symposium: Reacquainting with China through Common Interests - Antitrust in China: Debunking the Myth and Unravelling the Intricacies
2023-04-04 12:15 - 13:15 | WCC 2012, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States

Adrian Zenz - Xinjiang Update: What New Documents Tell Us About Beijing’s Evolving Internment Policy
2023-04-04 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS Knafel K262, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Read our blog post on the event: Xinjiang Update: Beijing’s Evolving Internment Policy

Speaker: Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Moderator: Mark C. Elliott, Vice Provost for International Affairs, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University

Since the start of Beijing’s campaign of interning Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in its northwestern region of Xinjiang in re-education camps, the most pertinent evidence on the nature and impact of these policies has come from public and internal (classified) government documents. However, nearly all of this documentation was limited to latter (implementation-related) stages of the policy cycle, leaving scholars in the dark about crucial aspects of the deliberations and decision-making processes behind the policies. Between late 2021 and mid-2022, two important caches of new internal files have been made public, including classified speeches by Xi Jinping and by Zhao Kezhi, China’s former Minister of Public Security. This presentation seeks to elucidate what these new files can tell us about the evolution of Beijing’s policies in the region, the role of the central government in the process, and the potential scale of the campaign of mass internment.

Dr. Adrian Zenz is Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, D.C. (non-resident). His research focus is on China’s ethnic policy and Beijing’s campaign of mass internment, securitization and forced labor in Xinjiang, as well as ethnic minority education and labor programs in Tibet. Dr. Zenz is the author of Tibetanness under Threat and co-editor of Mapping Amdo: Dynamics of Change. He has played a leading role in the analysis of leaked Chinese government documents, including the “China Cables,” the “Karakax List,” the “Xinjiang Papers,” and the Xinjiang Police Files. Dr. Zenz has provided expert testimony to the governments of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. He is a member of the Association of Asian Studies. He has published opinion pieces with Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

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2023 China Law Symposium: Reacquainting with China through Common Interests - Double Reduction Policy in China: An Educational Double-Edged Sword?
2023-04-04 20:00 - 21:00 | WCC 1015, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States

Wangdao and Leadership: A Zoom Talk by Stan Shih
2023-04-04 20:30 - 21:45 | Presented via Zoom
Register now

Speaker: Stan Shih, Co-founder & Honorary Chairman, Acer Group

Presented via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1rO8EfocTC27eSYbRM7jaA

Venue

Chu Xiaobai - Jesus and Modernity in Republican China
2023-04-05 11:00 - 12:30 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Chu Xiaobai, Professor, Department of Chinese Literature and Culture, East China Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2022-23

Discussant: Chloë Starr, Professor of Asian Christianity and Theology, Yale Divinity School

Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar Talk

Seating is limited. Masks are required for all in-person audience members.

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Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Yan Xuetong - US-China Competition in the Coming Decade
2023-04-05 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Speaker: Yan Xuetong, Dean, Institute of International Relations, Tsinghua University

Discussant: Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Harvard University

Also available on Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_H0JzdYljR3i0m2jLjBgakQ

YouTube recording of “Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Yan Xuetong – US-China Competition in the Coming Decade”

Venue

Robert Ross: ​Wedge Strategies and Alliance Politics: Chinese Coercion and the U.S.-Philippine Alliance
2023-04-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Robert S. Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston CollegeModerator: James Robson, James C. Kralik, and Yunli Lou Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Harvard College Professor; Victor and William Fung Director, Asia Center, Harvard University

This talk examines China’s wedge strategy toward the U.S.-Philippine alliance during the presidency of Benigno Aquino III. Although the Philippine-China sovereignty dispute was the proximate cause of Chinese coercion, it does not explain Chinese policy. Chinese policy evolution and the writings of Chinese scholars and think-tank analysts make clear that China’s foremost concern was that the Philippine’s defense cooperation with the United States in support of its sovereignty claims contributed to the U.S. “pivot” to Asia and to U.S. “containment” of China. China used its military and economic capabilities to undermine Philippine confidence in U.S. support and to weaken the Philippine economy, thus driving a wedge between the Philippines and the United States and undermining the U.S. challenge to Chinese security. After the Philippines adjusted it alignment between China and the United States, China eased its coercion and it used economic “rewards” to consolidate Philippine realignment. The talk concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the Marcos, Jr., presidency for U.S.-China competition and regional affairs.

Presented via Zoom. Register at https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JX1Vr-46SSWjjb5gBD_sKg.

Venue

Sinophone Southeast Asian Crossings:A Symposium on Nanyang Culture, History, and Memory
2023-04-06 14:00 - 17:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Panel 1: 2:00 – 3:20pmSpeaker: Chan Cheow Thia, National University of Singapore, Author of Malaysian CrossingsRespondent: Mei Nan Mingxue, Harvard UniversityPanel 2: 3:40-5pmSpeaker: Li Zishu, Author of The Age of GoodbyesRespondent: Jannis Jizhou Chen, Harvard UniversityAlso via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NC-Rw5ksTZiNT9H9_73F7w

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2023 China Law Symposium: Reacquainting with China through Common Interests - Blockchain from a Chinese Perspective
2023-04-10 12:15 - 13:15 | WCC 2004, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States

China Humanities Seminar featuring Nicholas Standaert - The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early Qing Dynasty
2023-04-10 16:00 - 18:00 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Nicolas Standaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

The Chinese gazette as a publicly available government publication was distributed in a variety of formats since the twelfth century. Little is known, however, about its form and content before 1800. By looking at European sources, this presentation shows how they offer a unique way of expanding the knowledge about the gazette of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its interconnected history illustrates how the Chinese gazette, as translated by European missionaries, became a major source for reflections on state and society by Enlightenment thinkers. It thus joined a global public much earlier than so far assumed.

Nicolas Standaert is Professor of Sinology at KU Leuven (Belgium) (1993-) and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium (2003-). His major research interest is the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this field he has led multiple research projects on rituality, visual culture, historiography, and print culture. He is the author of The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early and Mid-Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2022); The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts: Chinese and European Stories about Emperor Ku and His Concubines (Brill, 2016); Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012), among many others.

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Urban China Series featuring Su Xiaobo: Urbanization and the Political Economy of Border Control in China
2023-04-10 20:30 - 22:00 | Presented via Zoom
Zoom meeting link

Photo by 瑞丽江的河水 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70263825 (License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

Speaker: Su Xiaobo, University of Oregon

Border cities in hinterland China have been reshaped as hotbeds of investment ever since the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). They have become new economic centers to facilitate cross-border flows between China and neighboring countries. Meanwhile, border security remains a key political task to state authorities in these cities. Using Ruili in southern Yunnan as a case study, this paper examines urbanization at the edge of China’s national territory and how border control, transnational migrant management, and industrialization are integrated into this process. On the one hand, Ruili uses its geoeconomic advantages—proximity to Myanmar, and attractiveness to Myanmar migrant workers—to attract domestic investment from other Chinese cities for industrial production and cross-border trade. On the other hand, the Ruili municipal government is assigned responsibility for managing cross-border migrant flows and maintaining social stability. Economic development and border politics are intertwined to shape Ruili’s urbanization trajectory in which cross-border trade and border security play a significant role in shaping land use, development policies, and population management in border cities. Thus, an analysis of the political economy of border control can shed new light on China’s urbanization at the border.

​Xiaobo Su is Professor and Head in the Department of Geography, University of Oregon. His research interest is in border politics, urban entrepreneurialism, and transnational regionalization in China.

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Chinese Politics and Foreign Policy Series featuring Tyler Jost - Authoritarian Arming: Domestic Threats and the Origins of China’s Military Modernization
2023-04-11 16:00 - 17:30 | CGIS South Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Tyler Jost, Assistant Professor of Political Science, International & Public Affairs and Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies, Brown University.

Since the late 1980s, China has transformed the People’s Liberation Army by expanding its budget. Existing scholarship tends to attribute the expanding defense budget to China’s economic growth and external threats. This project instead explores the role of domestic politics. In order to guard against violent removal from power, autocrats use distributional and institutional concessions to win favor with coercive organizations, such as the military. As such, elevated threats to political survival — such as leader transitions or mass demonstrations — can lead to increases in defense budgets even in the absence of changes to economic growth or external threat. The project uses original data on China’s defense budgets since the late 1970s to evaluate candidate explanations. The preliminary analysis finds support for explanations emphasizing economic growth and domestic threats, but limited support that variation in external threats have systematically shaped China’s defense budgets.

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Beijing Olympiad: First Time as Mass Spectacle, Second Time as Digital Ornament
2023-04-11 16:00 - 18:00 | CGIS Knafel K262, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Cassandra Xin Guan, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology

The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was notable for its spectacular deployment of the mass human ornament. In 2022, a second Olympic opening ceremony took place amidst a global pandemic and rising geopolitical tension between China and the US. This time around the hot and noisy masses that thrilled American television viewers with their coordinated precision have vanished from the scene of representation. In documentations of the two events: one hot, one cold; one crowded, one empty; one bursting with life, one eerily devoid of humanity—we see a thermal-aesthetic inversion that assigns representational values to an under-theorized historical interval between China’s first and second Olympic Games. This talk will tarry with the chronotopic form of this interval, with, that is, the time-space of historical figuration. Drawing attention to the emergence of a nationalist imaginary determined by the paradox of automation, I ask what global forces are responsible for the cooling of the mass spectacle’s hot noise, and what happens to the efficacy of the vitalized icon when the masses exit the mass ornament?

Cassandra Xin Guan is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. She holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and was Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Program of Science, Technology, Society (STS). She is currently working on two books in tandem: “Maladaptive Media: ‘Life’ and Other Works of Animation” and “Imagine There’s No Human: China in Animation.” Her writings have appeared in October, Screen, and Critical Inquiry.

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Yu-Yueh Tsai - Indigenous DNA as A Metaphor: Scientific Debate on the Rediscovery of Taiwanese Ancestry and Nation-Building
2023-04-12 11:00 - 12:30 | Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Yu-Yueh Tsai, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2022-23Chair: Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School

The development of genealogical science in the twenty-first century has important implications for national and racial/ethnic construction. In Taiwan, genetic research on the origins of Taiwanese has involved racial/ethnic issues but also the dispute over Taiwan’s national identity with the People’s Republic of China, which claims that “we have the same roots” or “blood is thicker than water.” After the end of martial law (1945-1987), scientific research on multi-origins and genetic makeup of Taiwanese emerged. In particular, Marie Lin, M.D., widely known as “the mother of the research on Taiwanese blood,” and her teams have been devoted to revealing the origins of the ethnic groups in Taiwan. My research pushes the concept of co-production between science and politics (Jasanoff, 2004) further by addressing the “nationalization of biomedicine” and the “biomedicalization of the nation”. I explore how Taiwan’s changing identity politics, including the emergence of the new categorization of four great ethnic groups, multiculturalism, and Taiwanese nationalism, has profoundly influenced genetic research on Taiwanese genealogy and how scientific findings produced in the lab have then spilled out into both Taiwan and the PRC through journals, media, history textbooks, and public disputes since the 1990s. For genealogical science to play a constructive role in identity-making, this research shows that we need to remain vigilant to genetic technology, scientific knowledge formation, and methodology by looking at scientists’ works and discourses through an STS perspective to extend the epistemological reflection.

Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar talk

Seating is limited. Masks are required for all in-person audience members.Info: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/events/indigenous-dna-as-a-metaphor-scientific-debate-on-the-rediscovery-of-taiwanese-ancestry-and-nation-building/

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Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Isaac Kardon - China's Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea
2023-04-12 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Read our blog post on the event: China’s New Maritime “Rules” in Asia Could Lead to Conflict

Speaker: Isaac Kardon, Senior Fellow, Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Discussant: Takuhiro Ikeda, Senior Fellow, Harvard University Asia Center; Former Vice Admiral, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force

Who makes “the rules” of international order? The international law of the sea is one of the oldest and most significant bodies of rules governing international relations — and also one of the most hotly contested. China’s maritime disputes are a crucible for the emerging international order of the 21st century. In these disputes, China is at odds with all of its regional neighbors over how the law of the sea should govern boundaries, resources, and dispute resolution. At the strategic level, disputes over navigational rules engage the United States and its allies and their interest in navigation on, above, and below the contested waters of East Asia. China’s claimed maritime rights and interests offer unique insights into China’s emerging vision for international rules, the role of state sovereignty in the international order, and the future of great power competition in the oceans and beyond.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center and the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center For International Affairs

Also via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CQmXvPNYRfuN9YBaYKMJ8w

YouTube recording of “Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Isaac Kardon – China’s Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea”

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