Ian MacCormack explains how replicas of Tibet’s world-famous Potala Palace exemplify Buddhist understandings of what it means to be an “original” or a “copy,” and how one of these copies nearly became the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
History
Ruodi Duan — Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department — explains how Chinese depictions of African American internationalism and social movements help us better understand racial nationalism in the Cold War.
Keisha A. Brown, Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University, describes how traveling in China inspired her to research how blackness was historically perceived in modern China.
Heng Du — Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Literature and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate —describes how Twitter #hashtags emulate the narrative setting of philosophical texts during China’s Warring States period.
This book, an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.
This book, the first of its kind in English, examines the reinvention of loyalism in colonial Taiwan through the lens of literature.
Nathan Vedal, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, explains how a Hollywood blockbuster about earth’s first contact with aliens echoes Neo-Confucian debates in the Ming Dynasty.
Xin Wen, Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, describes manuscripts discovered in the Dunhuang caves that tell us about one man’s personal experience of the fall of the Tang Dynasty.
Guangchen Chen, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and 2016–17 Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, describes an event that signaled the start of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors and led to a suicide.
David Porter, Ph.D. Candidate and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, describes Zhao Quan’s unsuccessful attempts to earn money from banner status in the Qing Dynasty.