Lyle Goldstein and Vitaly Kozyrev — From a ‘Marriage of Convenience’ to the ‘Axis of Authoritarianism’: Evaluating the Russia-China Relationship in the 21st Century
2020-10-22 12:30 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
Speakers:
Lyle Goldstein, Research Professor, China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI), Naval War College
Vitaly Kozyrev, Professor, Political Science and International Studies, Endicott College

Watch live on YouTube.

Examining contemporary Russia-China relations, assessments by Western scholars yield a wide variety of perspectives and conclusions. Some view the relationship as inherently brittle, lacking in genuine substance and shot through with historical mistrust. At the other end of the spectrum, some hold that the relationship represents the most ominous possible threat to Western-style democracies. This presentation will summarize and attempt to categorize these wide-ranging conclusions, demonstrating that realists, liberals and constructivists have all developed distinct interpretations of the Russia-China relationship and its meaning for global security. Employing a case study approach, this research makes detailed probes into Russia-China cooperation in five specific domains, including Central Asia, the Korean Peninsula, the Arctic, the Middle East, and in the military domain more generally. These case studies offer preliminary conclusions for a larger book-length study that aims to be one of the first truly comprehensive studies of this complex and consequential bilateral relationship. Results to date illustrate a path between the two analytical extremes. The relationship has already produced some very significant results in the given case studies. On the other hand, the threat of further developing Russia-China relations should not be exaggerated, even as the subject demands increased scholarly attention.
More info: https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/%E2%80%98marriage-convenience%E2%80%99-%E2%80%98axis-authoritarianism%E2%80%99-evaluating-russia-china-relationship-21st

Environment in Asia Lecture Series Featuring David Fedman and Ian M. Miller - East Asian Forestry and Empires
2020-10-23 12:00 - 13:30
Read the transcript of the event here.

Speakers:
David Fedman, Assistant Professor of History,University of California, Irvine
Ian M. Miller, Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University
Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College

David Fedman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020). His other publications include “The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Article Prize.
Ian M. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at St. John’s University in New York. He is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020). His current research is on the role of lineage organizations in regulating village environments, provisionally titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in South China.
Part of the Environment in Asia Lecture Series
Presented Via Zoom Webinar

Left-Wing South
2020-10-24 09:00 - 11:00
Co-hosts:
David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
Letty Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
Special Guests:
Wang Anyi, Fudan University
Ng Kim Chew, National Chi Nan University
Presenters:
Tu Hang, Harvard University
Jessica Tan, Harvard University
Kang Ling, Fudan University
Nicholas Wong, Hong Kong University
Po-hsi Chen, Yale University
Chung Chih-wei, National Taiwan University
Join us for an online workshop on the rich legacies of left-wing thoughts and practices in the Sinophone South (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.). Young scholars from across the world will present on their most recent research, and two renowned writers—Wang Anyi and Ng Kim Chew—will join our discussion. The workshop will be held in Chinese.
The workshop is sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
Registration required: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0oduiqpzgpH920iAXTi-t1N3OAYMIOblc0

Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Fei-Hsien Wang - Everybody Loves Qianlong: Vernacular Fantasies, Cultural Consumption, and the “Prosperous Age” in Post-Imperial China
2020-10-27 16:00 - 18:00
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Fei-Hsien Wang, Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington
Examining a wide range of cultural products and genres from the late nineteenth century to the present, this talk traces the evolution of the vernacular myths and popular fantasies about Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). As China’s cultural economy and political climate transforms overtime, new stories and myths about Qianlong emerge to satisfy the changing desires of the audience as well as the political authorities. These popular cultural products have gradually shaped a common historical memory that takes the place of Qing “history” in most (Han) Chinese audience’s minds, despite generations of specialists’ effort to debunk it. The voracious fascination with this most accomplished Manchu emperor, however, has been an uneasy one. At the core of the vernacular fantasies of Qianlong lies the unsolved tension between the modern Han/Chinese nationalism and the legacy of a non-Han “prosperous age” (shengshi). The unofficial endorsement by the PRC leaders of using High Qing to talk about a great China further prolongs the career of the vernacular Qianlong.
Fei-Hsien Wang is a historian of modern China, with a particular interest in how information, ideas, and practices were produced, transmitted, and consumed across different societies in East Asia. Fei-Hsien Wang’s research has revolved around the relations between knowledge, commerce, and political authority after 1800.
Co-sponsored by the Joint Center for History and Economics.
Part of the Modern China Lecture Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Arnika Fuhrmann - In the Mood for Texture: Bangkok as a Chinese City
2020-10-28 10:00 - 11:00
Speaker: Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University.
What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This project explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived across the cinemas, new media, hospitality venues, and other material sites of East and Southeast Asia. Examining the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under, but always exceeded, conditions of colonial and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels, bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal Chinese modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China Rising,” the People’s Republic’s own Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically different desires than those of current policy.
Arnika Fuhrmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her work on contexts in Southeast Asia is informed by affect, gender, urban and media theory. Her book Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016) examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality, personhood, and notions of collectivity in contemporary Thai cinema and political rhetoric. She is currently working on a project called Digital Futures: South/east Asian Media Temporalities and the Expansion of the Sphere of Politics.
The talk is part of the ongoing East Asian Media Ecologies lecture series. Following a ten-minute presentation by Professor Fuhrmann are an extended conversation with the moderators and a Q&A with the attendees.
A zoom link will be posted closer to the event.

Daniel S. Markey and Andrew Small — China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia
2020-10-28 10:00 - 11:00
Speakers:
Daniel S. Markey, Senior Research Professor, International Relations, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), John Hopkins University
Andrew Small, Senior Transatlantic Fellow, Asia Program, The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Moderator: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center; Associate Professor, KIMEP University

Watch live on YouTube.

Under the ambitious leadership of President Xi Jinping, China is transforming its wealth and economic power into potent tools of global political influence. But its foreign policy initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, are shaped and redefined as they confront the ground realities of local and regional politics outside China. Daniel S. Markey, in his new book China’s Western Horizon, describes and analyzes these complex processes in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, he provides the in-depth studies of the dynamics that China’s involvement in Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Iran has created. Markey anticipates that China’s expanding influence will not bring greater stability and peace to this difficult part of the world, and might exacerbate conflicts within and among Eurasian states. He argues that U.S. policy makers should have a clear grasp of local histories, interests and relationships to effectively advance America’s specific diplomatic, economic, and security interests in Eurasia, whether in common cause with Beijing or when working at cross purposes. At this event, Daniel S. Markey will present some of the key arguments of his book. Andrew Small will discuss the book and provide an overview of the European perspectives on China’s engagement in Eurasia. Policy options for U.S. and European policy makers will be explored.
More info: https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/china%E2%80%99s-western-horizon-beijing-and-new-geopolitics-eurasia

Critical Issues Confronting China Series Featuring William Overholt - The Logic & Illogic of China-US Decoupling
2020-10-28 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Hsiang-an Wang - The Academia Sinica Digital Humanities Research Platform
2020-10-29 20:30 - 21:30
Speaker: Hsiang-an Wang, Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures
Launched in October 2018, the Academia Sinica Digital Humanities Research Platform (https://idh.ascdc.sinica.edu.tw/member/) is an one-stop platform of source materials, digital tools, and collaboration that enables big data analysis for innovative research. Combining open access and crowd collaboration, it enables search, keyword tagging, statistical analysis, text comparison, etc. for over 47,000 Chinese digital texts (~7.6 billion words) from Academia Sinica, Kyoto University, and more. The English version of the platform was added in 2020, allowing big data analysis of English texts. In the October webinar of the East Asian Digital Scholarship series, Dr. Wang Hsiang-an will introduce the platform to us.
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.
Presented via Zoom.
Registration Required
Register at https://link.ws/eads-oct20.
The presentation will not be recorded.

Fairbank Center Inaugural Director's Seminar: Impact of COVID-19 on China’s Economy
2020-10-30 08:30 - 09:30
Read a summary of the event here.
Moderator and Commentator: 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.

Presenter: Martin Raiser, World Bank Country Director for China and Mongolia

Commentators:
Dwight Perkins, Harold Hitchings Burbank Research Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University
Yang Yao, Professor and Director at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and Dean of the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University.
Host: Chi-Man (Winnie) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director of the Harvard China Health Partnership; Acting Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
COVID-19 has caused catastrophic economic, social and psychological costs that have far-reaching implications on human welfare. This session examines the effects of COVID-19 on the economy of China, the first country hit by COVID-19 and the first major economy that is gradually re-opening.
This discussion will reference the World Bank’s most recent findings on COVID’s effects on China’s economy. For highlights, or to download the full report, please visit the World Bank’s China Economic Update page.
Sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Co-sponsored by the Harvard China Health Partnership.
Part of the Fairbank Center Director’s Seminar Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Lucas R. Bender - The Eternal Frontier of China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: Changing Attitudes Towards Ethnocultural Others in Tang-Dynasty Texts
2020-11-02 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Lucas R. Bender, Yale University
The seventh and early-eighth centuries have often been considered the period of “China’s Cosmopolitan Empire” on account of their relative tolerance of religious and ideological diversity, their acceptance of significant “foreign” populations in the capital and on the borderlands, and their active recruitment of non-“Han” ethnicities into the military and civil ranks. At the same time, however, surviving texts from this period also evince attitudes no less xenophobic than those found in texts from the ninth through eleventh centuries, when scholars have often claimed that China became less open to ethnocultural others. This talk will argue that what changes between these periods are not, in fact, contemporary attitudes towards “the barbarians,” who were almost universally reviled in surviving texts from throughout the Tang. Instead, changing ideas about texts themselves, and about the ways that texts should ideally operate within the world, produced a transformation in how longstanding and relatively unchanging tropes about ethnocultural others were understood and deployed. The apparent decline of elite “cosmopolitan” attitudes from the seventh century to the tenth thus reflects, in significant part, a shift in literary theory.
Lucas Rambo Bender is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University. He graduated from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2016. His book on the great Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu is forthcoming in the summer of 2021 from the Harvard University Asia Center Press, and he is currently at work on a second project, about the oft-remarked but rarely-interrogated “pluralism” of the late Chinese middle ages.
Presented via Zoom.
Registration required.
Register at https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrc-yvrD8oH9KrvPpFFw9ytwB2Uicb5hlH.

Critical Issues Confronting China Series Featuring Jeffrey A. Bader: Implications of the Election for Policy toward China
2020-11-04 12:30 - 13:45
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Jeffrey Bader, Senior Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
Jeffrey Bader is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
From 2009 until 2011, Bader was special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs at the National Security Council. In that capacity, he was the principal advisor to President Obama on Asia.
Bader served from 2005 to 2009 as the director of the China Initiative and, subsequently, as the first director of the John L. Thornton China Center.
During his three decade career with the U.S. government, Bader was principally involved in U.S.-China relations at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In 2001, as assistant U.S. trade representative, he led the United States delegation in completing negotiations on the accession of China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization.
Bader served as a Foreign Service officer in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Namibia, Zambia, Congo, and the United States Mission to the United Nations. During the 1990s, he was deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia; director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council; and director of the State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs. He served as U.S. ambassador to Namibia from 1999 to 2001.
Bader is the author of “Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy,” published in 2012 by Brookings Institution Press. He is president and sole proprietor of Jeffrey Bader LLC, which provides assistance to companies with interests in Asia.
Bader received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s and doctorate in European history from Columbia University. He speaks Chinese and French.
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Jie Qiao - Impact of COVID-19 on Maternal and Child Health in China and Its Global Lessons
2020-11-05 08:00 - 09:00
A RECORDING OF THIS EVENT MAY BE FOUND AT: https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=110ef590-303f-41dd-b32d-ac6b00e637fb
Speaker: Jie Qiao, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, Director of Peking University Third Hospital
Discussants:
Michelle Williams, Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Ana Langer, Professor of the Practice of Public Health and Coordinator of the Dean’s Special Initiative on Women and Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Winnie Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
What can we learn from China’s experience in managing maternal and child care during the COVID-19 pandemic? Join us for a discussion of recent experience, global lessons, and potential areas for China-U.S. collaboration.
Jie Qiao is Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, Director of Peking University Third Hospital. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Qiao lead the Hubei medical aid team of Peking University which was responsible for critical and maternal care, and as early as February 2020, she wrote in The Lancet about the impact of COVID-19 on maternal and neonatal health (read here). Her own research focuses on the molecular mechanism of human gametogenesis and embryo development, infertility pathology and clinical treatments, the protection and preservation of female fertility, as well as developing new pre-implantation diagnosis methods. She has led teams to achieve a number of technical and theoretical breakthroughs in the systematic study of human embryonic development and has made many landmark contributions to the development of reproductive medicine.
This event is presented by the Harvard China Health Partnership as part of the ongoing series, China and Global Experience with COVID-19, and is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Presented via Zoom Webinar
Registration required
Register at https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oafy7vs8TRSxkeZoVmdsgA.

Environment in Asia Series Featuring Judith Shapiro and Yifei Li - Authoritarian Environmentalism and Chinese Ecological Civilization
2020-11-06 19:00 - 20:15
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speakers:
Judith Shapiro, Director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service, American University
Yifei Li, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai,Global Network Assistant Professor, New York University; Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich

Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. In the 2020-2021 academic year, he is also Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. His research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, and the China Times Cultural Foundation, among other extramural sources. He is coauthor (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. His recent work appears in Current Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, and other scholarly outlets. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bachelor’s from Fudan University.
Judith Shapiro is Director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service at American University and Chair of the Global Environmental Politics program. She was one of the first Americans to live in China after U.S.-China relations were normalized in 1979, and taught English at the Hunan Teachers’ College in Changsha, China. She has also taught at Villanova, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and the Southwest Agricultural University in Chongqing, China. She was a visiting professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. Professor Shapiro’s research and teaching focus on global environmental politics and policy, the environmental politics of Asia, and Chinese politics under Mao. She is the author, co-author or editor of nine books, including (with Yifei Li) China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity 2020), China’s Environmental Challenges (Polity 2016), Mao’s War against Nature (Cambridge University Press 2001), Son of the Revolution (with Liang Heng, Knopf 1983), After the Nightmare (with Liang Heng, Knopf 1987), Cold Winds, Warm Winds: Intellectual Life in China Today (with Liang Heng, Wesleyan University Press 1987), Debates on the Future of Communism (co-edited with Vladimir Tismaneanu, Palgrave 1991), and, together with her mother Joan Hatch Lennox, Lifechanges: How Women Can Make Courageous Choices (Random House, 1991). Dr. Shapiro earned her Ph.D. from American University’s School of International Service. She holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and another M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her B.A. from Princeton University is in Anthropology and East Asian Studies.
Part of the Environment in Asia Lecture Series
Presented Via Zoom Webinar

Eviatar Shulman - What is a Discourse (Sutta)? Reconsidering the Nature of Early Buddhist Scripture
2020-11-09 14:00 - 15:30
Speaker: Eviatar Shulman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
We commonly speak of the Buddha’s “discourses” – sutta, sūtra – knowing that they were not just spoken by him (or “him”) in this way, but nevertheless taking these texts as a clear category of authorized Buddhist speech, which scholars then ask to what degree they return to the Buddha himself; even if they are not historical utterances of the historical Buddha, they are the closet we can get to understanding his ideas and practices. While much of scholarly practice today still hopes to skin a discourse of its mythology and popular sentiments to reveal the earlier layers of the teaching, and while many scholars compare discourses in different languages in the quest for their original core, it is time to see these texts for what they are – literary masterpieces, which generate and channel rich patterns of Buddhist emotion and imagination, and that engage with the Buddha devotionally while contemplating his figure and hoping to feel his unique presence. This talk will focus on some of the literary, poetic, and contemplative dimensions of the texts, in an attempt to understand what a discourse was for the early Buddhists. Specifically, we will investigate the idea that the texts are, in certain cases, a meditative practice, so that the text is in itself the reflection upon the teaching, rather than being some formulized representation of them.
Presented Via Zoom.
Registration required.
Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqceyrqD0pGdW8y-zm51z1273EjYQsqisj%C2%A0

Fairbank Center Director's Seminar: Impact of COVID-19 on Mental Health in China, India, and the United States
2020-11-09 20:00 - 21:15
Read the transcript of the event here.
Moderator: Arthur Kleinman, Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Panelists:
Xiao Shuiyuan, Professor, Central South University, Xianya School of Public Health
Yifeng Xu, President, Shanghai Mental Health Center; Head & Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; Director, WHO/Shanghai Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Mental Health
Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Co-Founder and Member of Managing Committee, Sangath
Cindy Liu, Director, Developmental Risk and Cultural Resilience Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Host and Commentator: Winnie Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Sponsored by the Harvard China Health Partnership and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Cosponsored by the Mittal South Asia Institute.
Part of the Fairbank Center Director’s Seminar Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Covell Meyskens - Mao's Massive Military Industrial Campaign to Defend Cold War China
2020-11-10 16:00 - 18:00
Read the transcript of the event here.
Speaker: Covell Meyskens, Assistant Professor of Chinese History, Naval Postgraduate School
In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military-industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of 15 million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. Drawing on a rich collection of archival documents, memoirs, and oral interviews, Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change.
Covell Meyskens is Assistant Professor of Chinese history in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He works on capitalist and anti-capitalist development in modern China, especially as it relates to building big infrastructure projects. His first book, Mao’s Third Front: Militarization of Cold War China, published by Cambridge University Press, examines how the Chinese Communist Party industrialized inland regions in order to protect socialist China from American and Soviet threats. His second book project, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Hydraulic Engine for China, analyzes state-led efforts to transform China’s Three Gorges region into a hydraulic engine to power national development in the twentieth century. Currently, he is in the process of developing a third project on changing conceptions of national security in modern China. Dr. Meyskens also curates a website of images of everyday life in Maoist China. Meyskens is the author of articles and book chapters on Chinese railroads, the Three Gorges Dam, Sino-North Korean relations, Maoist visual culture, globalization, radio in Mao’s China, and racial violence in the Pacific War.
Part of the Modern China Lecture Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar

China and the World in the Post-COVID-19 Era
2020-11-11 20:00 - 23:15
What will the impact be of COVID-19 on the global economy and how will that impact global health and the potential for global collaboration for a healthier future? Join “China and the World in a Post-COVID-19 Era” to gain perspectives on the post-pandemic outlook for trade and investment, sustainable development, collaborations in public health, and mental and psychological health. With an in-person and Zoom-based audience of academics, policymakers, medical practitioners, and social entrepreneurs, the forum features keynote speakers Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia University) and Jeffrey Koplan (Emory University) as well as discussants from Chinese and U.S. universities, Chinese government officials, and social entrepreneurs.
Opening:

Qizhu Tang (唐其柱), Vice President, Wuhan University; Dean, Wuhan University School of Medicine
Juhua Xiao (肖菊华), Vice-Governor of Hubei Province
Honghui Chen (陈红辉), Vice-Mayor of Wuhan
Xiankang Dou (窦贤康), President, Wuhan University
Mark Elliott (欧立德), Vice-Provost for International Affairs, Harvard University; and Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Session I: Broader Implications on Global Health and Psycho-Social Impacts

Winnie Yip (叶志敏), Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Interim Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Jeffrey Koplan, Vice-President for Global Health, Emory University; Former Director, U.S. Centers for Disease Control
Barry Bloom, Joan and Jack Jacobson Research Professor of Public Health, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Former Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Ruiping Xiao (肖瑞平), Director, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Peking University; Associate Editor , New England Journal of Medicine
Shekar Saxena, Professor of Global Mental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Session II: The Future Under Global Economic Integration

Song Min (宋敏), Dean of School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University
Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor and Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University
Yao Yang (姚洋), Dean, National School of Development at Peking University
Bert Hofman (郝福满), Director of the East Asian Institute at National University of Singapore, Professor of Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School

Closing:

Wannian Liang (梁万年, Executive Associate Dean of Tsinghua University, Vanke School of Public Health; former Director-General of Healthcare Reform, National Health Commission of China
William Hsiao (萧庆伦), Emeritus Professor of Economics, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Dongsheng Chen (陈东升), Chairman of Dong Fureng Research Institute of Wuhan University; Founder, Chairman and CEO of Taikang Insurance Group

Organized by Wuhan University (School of Medicine, and School of Economics and Management), Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and sponsored by the Taikang Public Health and Epidemic Control Fund.
Resources:

Please see additional information in the program agenda here.
Registration required. Register here.

Chinese Language Resources
2020-11-12 11:00 - 12:00
The Harvard-Yenching Library is offering online bibliographic orientation sessions via Zoom to introduce you to the most important resources in Chinese, Japanese and Korean language resources.

When: Nov 12, 2020 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqdOyurjotGNQFReBoL3L0wpgjXm0IhIlk

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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]

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

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.

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

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.
