Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies: Recent Episodes
Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
The Fairbank Center is a world-leading center on China at Harvard University. Listen to interviews on our "Harvard on China" podcast, recordings from our public events, and audio from our archives.
Over the past three decades, China has become a major trade partner and investor for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. The region is also an important component of the BRI New Eurasian Land Bridge, providing alternative access to Western Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shaking up China’s plans and prospects in this part of Eurasia. With the closing of borders between Russia and the EU, China’s long-term interests are arguably at risk. The war is also resulting in geopolitical shifts and hardening divisions between the West on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. This panel discusses China’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the impact that today’s dramatic developments will have on China’s presence in Eastern Europe and its BRI plans.
Panelists: Jinghan Zeng Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University and Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute
Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, Asia Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs
Jeremy Garlick Director of the J. Masaryk Centre of International Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations and China Studies at Prague University of Economics and Business
Arseny Sivitsky Co-Founder and Director of Minsk-based Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies
Moderators: Nargis Kassenova Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
James Gethyn Evans Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
This event is sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Speaker: Stephen Kaplan, Associate Professor of Political Science and Economic Affairs, George Washington University Discussant: Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
This book explores how China’s state-led capitalism affects national level governance. China, as the world’s largest saver, has more than doubled its overseas banking presence since the 2008 global financial crisis. Compared to the West’s private-sector capital, China’s overseas financing is a distinct form of patient capital that marshals the country’s vast domestic financial resources to create commercial opportunities internationally. Its long-term horizon, high risk tolerance, and lack of policy conditionality have allowed developing economies to sidestep the fiscal austerity tendencies of Western markets and multilaterals. Employing a multi-method research strategy that includes statistical tests and extensive field research from across China and Latin America, this book finds that China’s patient capital endows national governments more room to maneuver in formulating their domestic economic policies. This book also evaluates the potential costs of Chinese financing, raising the question of how Chinese lenders will deal with developing nations’ ongoing struggles with debt and dependency.
Globalizing Patient Capital is targeted toward a broad audience within political science, economics, Latin American politics, and Asian studies but is especially relevant for scholars of the political economy of finance, globalization and development, the politics of economic policymaking, and US-China relations. By disaggregating the structure of international finance, this book also offers new insights about globalization and development, demonstrating that the type of international capital (state vs. market) can influence the extent of national-level policy discretion.
This event is part of the China Economy Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Meg Rithmire.
Speaker: Cheng Li, Director, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution Moderator/Discussant: Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the opens in a new windowHarvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University
Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change, the Chinese middle class, and technological development in China.
Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, he came to the United States, where he received a master’s in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. From 1993 to 1995, he worked in China as a fellow sponsored by the Institute of Current World Affairs in the U.S., observing grassroots changes in his native country. Based on this experience, he published a nationally acclaimed book, “Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform” (1997).
Li is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including “China’s Leaders: The New Generation” (2001), “Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange 1978-2003” (2005), “China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy” (2008), “China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation” (2010), “The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress” (in Chinese, 2012), “The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign” (2012), “China’s Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives” (2014), “Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership” (2016), “The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China” (2017), and “Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement” (Spring 2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title “Xi Jinping’s Protégés: Rising Elite Groups in the Chinese Leadership”. He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. This event is introduced and moderated by Professor Elizabeth J. Perry.
Speakers: Ashley Esarey, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta Joanna Lewis, Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA),Georgetown University Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology and School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington
Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College
Ashley Esarey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and was An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His research concerns political communication in China, elite politics, renewable energy policy, and Taiwanese politics. He was co-author (with Lu Hsiu-lien) of My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman’s Journey from Prison to Power. His co-edited books include Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization and Greening East Asia: The Rise of the Eco-Developmental State, both published by the University of Washington Press in 2020.
Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research examines political and technical determinants of energy and climate policy, particularly in China. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.
Mary Alice Haddad is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. A Fulbright and Harvard Academy scholar, she is the author of Effective Advocacy: Lessons from East Asia’s Environmentalists (MIT press, forthcoming 2021), Building Democracy in Japan (Cambridge, 2012) and Politics and Volunteering in Japan (Cambridge, 2007), and she co-edits the new Elements in Politics and Society in East Asia series from Cambridge University Press. Her current work concerns environmental politics in East Asia, as well as how urban diplomacy is connecting and transforming policy around the world.
Stevan Harrell retired in 2017 from the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. A special issue of Human Ecology on Social-Ecological System Resilience in China, co-edited with Denise M. Glover and Jack Patrick Hayes, will appear in February. He is writing an ecological history of modern China, provisionally entitled either Intensification and its Discontents or The Great Un-Buffering. He also edits the University of Washington Press series, Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.
This event is part of the Environment in Asia public lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, organized by Professor Ling Zhang.
Speaker: Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University
Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective.She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is currently working on two new projects. The first project examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban governance in six countries, including China, the United States, Canada, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. The second project compares culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities, with Detroit, Harbin, and Turin as case studies. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (2021-2023). She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.
This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations, Georgetown University
Evan S. Medeiros is a professor and Penner family chair in Asia studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has published several books and articles on East Asia, U.S.-China relations, and China’s foreign and national security policies. He regularly provides advice and commentary to global corporations and international media in his current role as Senior Advisor with The Asia Group.
Dr. Medeiros’ background is a unique blend of regional expertise and government experience. He served for six years on the staff of the National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and then as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia. In the latter role, Dr. Medeiros was President Barack Obama’s top advisor on the Asia-Pacific and was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific across areas of diplomacy, defense policy, economic policy, and intelligence. Prior to joining the White House, Medeiros worked for seven years as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. From 2007 to 2008, he also served as policy advisor to Secretary Hank Paulson Jr., working on the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Dr. Medeiros holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.Phil in international relations from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in China studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a B.A. in analytic philosophy from Bates College.
Dr. Medeiros is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a member of the International Advisory Board of Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Bernadette Meehan, and they have a daughter, Amelia.
This lecture is the 2021 Annual Neuhauser Lecture, presented at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats. Xiangmao soap was featured in the first ever trademark litigation trial in China held in 1889. In that trial, it became evident that the emerging global trademark regime was premised on an Orientalist understanding of the Chinese character as ideograph. A second case in 1919 that also featured the alleged counterfeiting of the Xiangmao brand then reveals how the homophonic nature of Chinese and the issue of dialect were often the basis of wordplay and punning in Chinese trademarks, and that international trademark law was unable to accommodate these practices. The key legal premise that an offending trademark rested on its function to deceive the public prevented the system from recognizing (and thus, successfully prosecuting) marks that while likely to have been emulative, turned precisely on a knowing audience, willing to purchase the “counterfeit” because of the witty pun or wordplay at work. Both bring to the fore how the emerging trademark regime was premised on romance languages and failed to appreciate the complexity of both the Chinese language and the nature of the Chinese consumer market. Hardly marks that purposefully deceived in acts of “passing off,” so-called “spurious” marks aided (and arguably abetted) knowledgeable and appreciative consumers in their wily acts of consumption and were part of a larger market of rogue knock-offs in China that eluded the emerging trademark regime in the early twentieth-century and that continue to elude the global IP today.
Eugenia Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, affect studies and gender, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press, 2007) which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association.
Professor Lean’s second book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in theMaking of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the manufacturing, commercial and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early twentieth century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing and was marked by heterogeneous, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work.
This event is part of the Modern China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.
China is constantly in the global media limelight due to its growing presence and influence throughout the world. Journalists reporting on this rising superpower play a crucial role in explaining the complexities of its domestic developments and international activities to local publics. This is a formidable task, made even more difficult by the increasingly constrained environment in China forcing most critical journalists leave the country and work from outside its borders. This panel brings together reporters from different parts of the world to discuss how they see their role in shaping and challenging narratives on China and how they approach challenges that they face in conducting their work.
Speakers: Ananth Krishnan China Correspondent, The Hindu Newspaper
Hui (Lulu) Ning Senior International News Journalist, Initium Media
Alexander Gabuev Senior Fellow and Chair, Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program, Carnegie Moscow Center
Moderator: Lucy Hornby Visiting Scholar, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Organizers: Nargis Kassenova Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
James Gethyn Evans Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
This event was co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Joan Judge, Professor, Department of History, York University
What can we learn from intellectual detritus? Focusing on cheap print, vernacular daily-use knowledge, and common readers in the Long Republic (1895-1955), this talk argues that the books an age discards as slipshod and unscientific, and the readers it disparages as superstitious and ignorant, comprise the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change is actualized. Premised on the notion that what we currently know about China’s iconic 20th-century revolutions does not explain enough, it shifts our attention from innovation to ingenuity, from “knowledge what” to “knowledge how,” from the momentous to the mundane—without losing sight of the momentous. The talk first introduces a project on “China’s Mundane Revolution” that is based on some 500, largely unstudied, daily-use texts, together with material gathered from the interstices of various archives. It then zeros in on one of the “how to” topics in the study: “how to treat a cholera infection.” Examining the ways individual common readers might have approached “the most spectacular ‘new’ disease of the nineteenth century,” the example highlights the dynamic processes of scientizing vernacular and vernacularizing scientific forms of knowledge. It also raises questions about the ways these processes align—or misalign—with the various iterations of mass politics in this critical period.
Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada.She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project, China’s Mundane Revolution: Cheap Print, Vernacular Knowledge, and Common Reading in the Long Republic, 1894–1955.
This presentation is part of the Modern China Lecture Series, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.
Speaker: Scott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford University
Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.
His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.
This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Speaker: Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Notre Dame
On July 30, 1979, Deng Xiaoping addressed the fourth national conference of Chinese writers and artists. Towards the end of his speech he stated, to collective sighs of relief, that “the Party’s leadership of literature and the arts does not mean issuing orders, nor requiring writers and artists to make themselves subservient to […] political tasks.” In doing so, he redefined the relationship between CCP ideologues and creative producers, which had become increasingly politicized during the first thirty years of Communist rule. He also set the template for later “important speeches” on art and literature by Party leaders, which have been a core component of Chinese cultural policy ever since. Looking at leaders’ speeches as a genre of cultural production, I show how each leader after Deng tried to confirm the post-1979 consensus that promised more freedom to cultural producers, while at the same time indicating where the limits to that freedom might lie. The talk will engage with these speeches against three discrete backgrounds: the ongoing dismantlement of what was once the “socialist literary system,” the claims made about Chinese censorship and “self-censorship” in American and European public opinion, and the theoretical debates about structural censorship in the field of New Censorship Studies.
Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His monograph Internet Literature in China was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.” His current book project focuses on literary and cultural censorship in modern China from the early twentieth century to the present. Hockx studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he earned his Ph.D., and at Liaoning and Peking universities in China. From 1996-2016 he taught at SOAS, University of London. In addition to his scholarly work he has also been active as a translator of modern Chinese literature into his native Dutch.
This lecture is part of the Modern Chinese Humanities lecture series, hosted by Professors Jie Li and David Der-wei Wang.
Speaker: Naima Green-Riley, Ph.D. Candidate and Raymond Vernon Fellow, Department of Government, Harvard University; Former Consular Officer, US. Consulate General, Guangzhou, China
This event is part of our Critical Issues Confronting China public lecture series.
China’s Hengtong Group—leading a consortium of telecom companies from Hong Kong, Pakistan, and East Africa—will soon complete installation of the Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable. Spanning the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, this cable will connect the three most populous continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, or what Halford Mackinder described as the “World Island.” The cable aims to provide these previously under-serviced regions with the shortest latency between routes and high-quality Internet, but what are China’s aims with the project and what benefits will it bring to partners in South Asia and Africa? This roundtable will discuss the technical, economic, and geopolitical implications of this flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Speakers: Motolani Agbebi University teacher, Faculty of Management and Business, University of Tampere (Finland)
Tayyab Safdar Post-Doctoral Researcher, East Asia Centre & Department of Politics, University of Virginia
Roxana Vatanparast Affiliate, Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia Law School
Moderators: James Gethyn Evans, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Nargis Kassenova, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Center for African Studies at Harvard University.
The Stone and the Wireless: Lyrical Media and Bad Models of the Feeling Women
Ma Shaoling is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, and spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in academic journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Configurations, Mediations, and positions. Her first book manuscript, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 is published in June 2021 by Duke University Press as part of the ‘Sign, Storage, Transmission’ series.
This lecture is part of the Modern Chinese Humanities lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. The series is organized by Professor David Der-wei Wang and Jie Li.
Speaker: Bill Bikales, Principal and Lead Economist, Kunlun Associates
Bill is a Harvard-trained economist and Asia specialist and has worked at the most senior level of government in Mongolia on comprehensive fiscal reform and restructuring insolvent bank and power sectors, and at grass roots level in rural China on increasing poor women’s uptake of maternal health services.
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Fang Xiaoping, Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
During the 1961-1965 period, a cholera pandemic ravaged the southeastern coastal areas of Mao’s China which was already suffering from lingering starvation, class struggles, political campaigns and geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. This lecture focuses on the first global pandemic that had plagued China after 1949 and the resulting large-scale but clandestine emergency response. Based on rare archival documents and in-depth interviews with the ever-dwindling witnesses of the pandemic, this lecture examines the dynamics between disease and politics when the Communist Party was committed to restructuring society between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The speaker argues that disease and its control were not only affected by the social restructuring that began in the 1950s and strengthened since 1961, but also integral components of this. Quarantine, mass inoculation, epidemic surveillance and information control functionalised social control and political discipline, and therefore significantly contributed to the rise of an emergency disciplinary state, which exerted far-reaching impacts on its sociopolitical system and emergency response since Mao’s China, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xiaoping Fang is an assistant professor of history at the School of Humanities of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his PhD in History from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he majored in modern China and the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia from 2002 to 2008. He studied and worked at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK (2005-2006), the Asia Research Institute of the NUS (2008), the China Research Centre of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (2009-2013), and the National Humanities Center, USA (2019-2020). His research interests focus on the history of medicine, health, and disease in twentieth-century China and the socio-political history of Mao’s China after 1949. He is the author of Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012) and China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
The lecture is part of the Modern China lecture at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.
Speaker: Kellee Tsai, Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The structural transformation of China over the past several decades has given rise to a fundamental tension between the pursuit of social stability and authoritarian resilience. On the one hand, repressive strategies enable the party-state to maintain its monopoly of political power (authoritarianism). On the other hand, the quality of governance is enhanced when the state adopts softer modes of engagement with society (resilience). This dilemma lies at the core of evolutionary governance under authoritarianism. This talk engages the vast “authoritarianism with adjectives” literature in the study of contemporary China and presents case studies of state-society interactions to offer insight into the circumstances under which the party-state exerts its coercive power versus engaging in more flexible responses or policy adaptations.
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard Univeristy.
There is an intense debate among experts over the likelihood of a near-term Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Senior US military officers have warned that a PRC military action could take place in the next six years. Such dire predictions are largely based on estimates of PLA capabilities. But even if China can seize and control Taiwan, will it do so? Assessing the potential for such an attack also requires an understanding of Xi Jinping’s strategy toward Taiwan and his risk/benefit calculus. The policies of the United States and Taiwan, and how they are viewed in Beijing, also need to be taken into account.
Speaker: Bonnie Glaser, Director, Asia Program, German Marshall Fund of the United States
Bonnie S. Glaser is director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was previously senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ms. Glaser is concomitantly a nonresident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a senior associate with the Pacific Forum. For more than three decades, Ms. Glaser has worked at the intersection of Asia-Pacific geopolitics and U.S. policy.
Speaker: Jeffrey Lehman, Vice Chancellor and Professor of Law, NYU Shanghai
Jeffrey Lehman is the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, where he oversees all academic and administrative operations. Lehman is an internationally acclaimed leader in higher education, having served as dean of the University of Michigan Law School, the 11th president of Cornell University, and the founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law.
Prior to joining the University of Michigan Law School, Lehman served as a law clerk to Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. He then spent four years at Caplin & Drysdale, a Washington, DC law firm. Throughout his professional and academic career, Lehman has volunteered his time and energy to nonprofit organizations that share his commitments in the fields of higher education, law, and technology.
Lehman received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cornell University, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a JD from the University of Michigan Law School. He is a multi-award winner for his work both in the United States and abroad, including the Friendship Award, which is China’s highest honor for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress.” Lehman is also a recipient of an honorary doctorate from Peking University.
Speaker: Pang Laikwan, Professor of Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper focuses on the wide popularity of the meme and buzzword jiucai, garlic chives, on China’s internet to investigate the cultural and political subjectivity of the ordinary Chinese citizens in a time of fierce competition simply to survive, largely known as neijuan, involution. Through this investigation of the garlic chives meme, the paper also updates Foucault’s theory of the biopolitics by investigating the deeply intertwined relation between the biological, the economic, and the political in contemporary Chinese governmentality. While the post-socialist PRC has developed a sophisticated economic rationality to legitimize its state sovereignty, this economic sovereignty also strains the ordinary subjects so much that it begins to pose serious challenge to this legitimacy.
PANG Laikwan is Professor of Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of a few books, including, more recently, The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement (U of Michigan, 2021), The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (Verso, 2017), andCreativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Duke UP, 2012). She will be a CASBS fellow at Stanford University in the academic year of 2021-2022.
Speaker: Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization – but struggled over how to go about it.
Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
Isabella M. Weber is a political economist working on China, global trade and the history of economic thought. She is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Speaker: Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh
This talk showcases Ruth Mostern’s new book: The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021). The Yellow River explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times. The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a history of water, and that some of the most important episodes in Yellow River history transpired on the semi-arid lands of the Loess Plateau, far from the riverbed itself. Using GIS and data analysis as well as close readings of historical sources, the book reveals that although the Yellow River floodplain was sometimes a site of frequent and devastating disasters, this was only the case at times of certain decisions about public policy and infrastructure design.
Ruth Mostern is Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE) (Harvard Asia Center, 2011) and the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016). Her current book, Following the Tracks of Yu: The Imperial and Ecological Worlds of the Yellow River is in contract at Yale University Press. She is currently PI on two NEH grants: one to develop content and infrastructure for an ecosystem of digital historical gazetteers, and one to design and launch an interdisciplinary curriculum about water in Central Asia.
Speaker: Yeiling Tan, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon
Professor Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet current economic tensions between the US and China indicate that this integration process has run into trouble. To what extent has the liberal internationalist promise of the WTO been fulfilled? To answer this question, this study breaks open the black box of the massive Chinese state and unpacks the economic strategies that central economic agencies as well as subnational authorities adopted in response to WTO rules demanding far-reaching modifications to China’s domestic institutions. The study explains why, rather than imposing constraints, WTO entry provoked divergent policy responses from different actors within the Chinese state, in ways neither expected nor desired by the architects of the WTO.
Yeiling Tan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and a non-resident scholar at the opens in a new windowUC San Diego 21st Century China Center. From 2017-2020, she was a fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Future of International Trade and Investment. From 2017-2019, she was a member of the opens in a new windowGeorgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. In 2017-18, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the opens in a new windowPrinceton-Harvard China and the World Program in Princeton University.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with an emphasis on China and the developing world. Two broad questions define her research agenda. First: how do the rules of globalization affect politics within authoritarian regimes such as China, given that these rules require increasingly far-reaching modifications to domestic institutions? Second, how do authoritarian regimes affect rule-making at the international level?
She holds a PhD in Public Policy from opens in a new windowHarvard University (2017), an MPA in International Development from the opens in a new windowJohn F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011) and a BA (Honors, Distinction) in International Relations and Economics from opens in a new windowStanford University (2002). Apart from research on globalization and China, she has also worked in the public and non-governmental sectors on a range of issues including economic development, international security policy, global governance and governance innovations.
Panel Participants: Sara L. Friedman, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University Russell King, Professor of Geography, University of Sussex Sarah Lamb, Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University Andrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University Nicole Newendorp, Associate Director and Lecturer, Social Studies, Harvard University Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University
Nearly 4.3 million immigrants in the United States are age sixty-five and over. Research predicts that the number of nonwhite elderly immigrants will continue to grow, doubling to 36 percent of the senior population by 2050. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the lives of older migrants, the familial and social networks in which they are embedded remain in place and can translate into important protective resources. At the same time, Chinese societies – e.g., mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong – have experienced rapid and large-scale social and cultural transformation over the past few decades, resulting in complex feelings and competing perspectives by older migrants on their homeland(s). In this workshop, six scholars in the fields of migration, aging, and Chinese studies grapple with the new frontier of studies on migration and life transition by focusing on two recent ethnographies about transnational aging in the Chinese diaspora. One highlights Chinese immigrants who relocate to the US at a later life stage; the other examines long-term Taiwanese immigrants who spent decades navigating life in American society and transnationally. Through our conversation, we seek to collaboratively rethink major issues and the understudied dimensions of aging and migration.
Speaker: Laurence Coderre, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, New York University
Whereas the contemporary era in China is often depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) is typically cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. I instead argue that the Cultural Revolution media environment and the ways in which its constituent elements engaged contemporaneous discourses of materiality and political economy anticipated the widespread commodification now so closely associated with the Reform Period (1978-present).
To that end, this talk offers a brief history of the “newborn socialist thing” (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu), which, as a technical term originating in the 1950s, refers to a harbinger of a progressive future emerging in the present. Not only did newborn things, always at odds with “old things,” help define socialism as a transitional stage of development prior to communism, they also promised to integrate the material and the social under one conceptual roof. I develop a historical methodology inspired by the relational nature of the newborn thing, which traces fugitive constellations of objects, bodies, institutions, and social formations pertaining to the Cultural Revolution’s media environment. Of particular interest are the forms of mediation enacted by and through these constellations and the dialectic they were often said to create with the commodity-form.
Laurence Coderre is an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. She received her PhD in Chinese from UC Berkeley in 2015. Prior to moving to NYU, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. Coderre’s work focuses on Chinese socialist and postsocialist cultural production. She is the author of Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke, 2021), which examines the material culture of the Cultural Revolution. Her research has appeared in Comparative Studies of Society and History, Journal of Material Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas, as well as numerous edited volumes. She is currently embarking on a new project on theory and the everyday in the late Mao era.
Speaker: Zhang Meng, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
Part of the Environment in Asia lecture series
In the Qing period, China’s population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation. The reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Timber and Forestry traces the expansion of an interregional trade network to cover the entire basin of the Yangzi River. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? Delving into rare archives to reconstruct property rights systems and business histories, the book considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. This case from China has important implications for world-historical conversations on resource management, commercialization, and sustainable development.
Meng Zhang (張萌) is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in economics from Peking University (2010) and Ph.D. in history from UCLA (2017). Zhang is a historian of late imperial China, with particular interests in economic and environmental transformations and transnational dynamics in the rise of global capitalism. Her first book, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (University of Washington Press, 2021), reveals the complex reality of timber trade and resource management during the flurry of commercial development in Qing China. She is working on a second project that follows the social life of edible bird’s nests through the transnational construction of knowledge, desire, trade, and credit across early modern China and Southeast Asia.
How significant were the events of June 1989 in the broader span of recent Chinese history? How does the aftermath of the Beijing massacre help to explain events since then, including what is happening in Hong Kong today? How deep is the state-imposed amnesia about Tiananmen? What is the future of June Fourth Studies? Join authors Jeremy Brown and Louisa Lim for a discussion about these and other questions.
Jeremy Brown is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 and City Versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide.
Dr. Louisa Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. She was a correspondent for NPR and BBC based in China for a decade. Her new book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong will be published in April 2022.
Part of the Modern China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, five men have principally shaped the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the nation: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. David Shambaugh analyzes the personal and professional experiences that shaped each leader and argues that their distinct leadership styles had profound influences on Chinese politics.
David Shambaugh is Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science, & International Affairs and the founding director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Before joining the GW faculty, Professor Shambaugh taught Chinese politics at the University of London’s School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and was editor of The China Quarterly.
He also worked at the U.S. Department of State and National Security Council. He served on the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Asia-Pacific Council, and other public policy and scholarly organizations. A frequent commentator in the international media, he sits on numerous editorial boards, and has been a consultant to governments, research institutions, foundations, universities, corporations, banks, and investment funds. Professor Shambaugh has published more than 30 books and 300 articles. His latest book, China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now(Polity Press, 2021), is now available in hardback.
The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted and produced by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Research for this episode was provided by Connor Giersch, and the episode was edited by Mike Pascarella.
Panelists Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine
Discussant Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan
This roundtable discussion brings together past and present Hou Family Doctoral Fellows in Taiwan Studies at the Fairbank Center, to discuss current methodological approaches and emerging thematic directions in the study of Taiwanese history, society, and politics. Bridging across disciplinary fields such as media studies, history, and political science, the panelists will share their research experiences amid resurging interest in Taiwan, and envision how this renewed conversation can help jumpstart the next generation of Taiwan studies.
How did the People's Republic of China popularize basic legal knowledge after its founding in 1949? Jennifer Altehenger, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History and Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Oxford, explains how China's party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.
Professor Altehenger is a historian of modern and contemporary China, in particular the history of materials and industrial design in Chinese politics and everyday life, the history of law, propaganda and information under Communist Party governance, and the history of political language and cultural production. Her first book, "Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1989" (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) is now available in paperback: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983854
The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Speaker: Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies
At a time when many are fixated on US-China strategic competition, how will China’s relations with the rest of the world shape its future power? From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its “Made in China 2025” strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to its significant economic reach into Africa and Latin America, China appears primed to become the world’s dominant superpower. But China also faces considerable new risks and challenges. Drawing on studies of selected countries in East Africa, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia, Luke Patey will discuss how many countries are recognizing that relations with China can undermine their independence and competitiveness and are working together to recalibrate their engagement
Dr. Luke Patey is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Lead Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, University of Oxford. He is the author of the new book, How China Loses: The Pushback Against China’s Global Ambitions (Oxford University Press, 2021). His work focuses on the intersection of China’s trade, investment, and finance with its foreign and security policy. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Hindu, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. He holds a doctorate and MSc from the Copenhagen Business School and a bachelor's degree from Queen’s University. Patey’s last book was The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (Hurst, 2014).
Speaker: Wang Jisi, Professor in the School of International Studies and president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University
Wang Jisi is a professor in the School of International Studies and president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies(IISS), Peking University(PKU). He is honorary president of the Chinese Association for American Studies, and was a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of China’s Foreign Ministry in 2008-2016.
After working as a laborer in the Chinese countryside in 1968-78, Wang Jisi entered Peking University and obtained an MA degree there in 1983. He taught in Peking University’s Department of International Politics (1983-91), and then served as director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences until 2005. From 2005 to 2013, Wang Jisi served as dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University. He was concurrently director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China from 2001 to 2009.
Wang Jisi was a visiting fellow or visiting professor at Oxford University (1982-83), University of California at Berkeley (1984-85), University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1990-91), and Claremont McKenna College in California (2001). He was invited as a Global Scholar by Princeton University in 2011-15 and spent 9 months in total there with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has served as an adviser to a number of international institutions and journals, including the Asia Society Policy Institute, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, the journal The American Interest, and the journal Global Asia.
Professor Wang’s scholarly interests cover U.S. foreign policy, China’s foreign relations, Asian security, and global politics in general. He has published numerous works in these fields.
Speaker: Xiaotong Feng, Ph.D. Candidate, Communication University of China; Fairbank Center Visiting Scholar
Discussant/Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
In the past few years, even the most optimistic scholars will not deny that China’s relations with Western countries have encountered big difficulties. Whether China accepts this willingly or not, the external conditions needed to maintain China’s past economic growth model are now absent. The “Rural Revitalization” strategy promoted by Xi Jinping is generally regarded as an internal social governance issue, aimed at promoting social equity, balancing urban-rural differences, and protecting the natural environment. However, can “Rural Revitalization” also be seen as a strategy to help China cope with “competition” from Western countries? Can it reduce China’s dependence on the US dollar? Does it represent a new and unprecedented development model?
Speaker: Jessica Chen Weiss, Associate Professor of Government, Cornell University
How does China’s domestic governance shape its foreign policy? What role do nationalism and ideology play in Beijing’s regional and global ambitions? The Chinese leadership has been at once a revisionist, defender, reformer, and free-rider in the international system—insisting rigidly on issues that are central to its domestic survival while showing flexibility on issues that are more peripheral. To illuminate this variation and prospects for conflict and cooperation, Weiss will discuss her new book project, which theorizes and illustrates the domestic-international linkages in Beijing’s approach to issues ranging from sovereignty and homeland disputes to climate change and COVID-19.
Jessica Chen Weiss is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). The dissertation on which it is based won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Security Studiesopens pdf file. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Cornell Einaudi Center, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Uppsala University, Princeton-Harvard China & The World Program, Bradley Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Weiss received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Before joining Cornell, she was an assistant professor at Yale University (2009-2015) and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford University. Learn more about her research and writing at www.jessicachenweiss.com.
Speaker: Martin K. Whyte, John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus, and former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
As the People’s Republic of China has pursued economic development over the decades, a central dilemma concerns how to treat its massive rural population, and the extent to which its rural-origin citizens can contribute to, and benefit from, economic growth. In different time periods, there have been dramatic changes in the nature of rural-urban relations, often with paradoxical consequences for prospects for economic growth. The talk will examine the nature of rural-urban relations in different time periods, with a focus on post-1978 changes. The initial reforms, by freeing peasants from the “socialist serfdom” of the communes and allowing geographic mobility while maintaining the hukou system and systematic discrimination against those of rural origin, produced the primary engine of China’s post-1978 economic boom. However, by maintaining pernicious discrimination based upon hukou status, particularly regarding the educational opportunities of rural youths, China now faces a major human capital deficit that it is struggling to overcome. The talk concludes with a discussion of why it has been so hard to reform and eliminate hukou-based discrimination, and what more needs to be done for China to escape the “middle income trap” and continue its economic rise.
Speaker: Angela Zhang, Director of the Center for Chinese Law and Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong
In this webinar, Angela Zhang will discuss her new book Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation (Oxford University Press). This book examines the unique ways in which China regulates and is regulated by foreign countries, revealing a ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ that is reshaping global antitrust regulation. Angela will provide a deep dive into Chinese bureaucratic politics while analyzing the power imbalances between businesses and the government in China. In addition to examining the challenges foreign multinationals have faced in complying with Chinese antitrust law, she will also explore the difficulties Chinese firms have encountered as U.S. and E.U. antitrust regulators tighten their scrutiny over Chinese businesses. Angela will conclude with her book’s implications for future Sino-American relations, as well as the recent events surrounding Ant Group’s IPO debacle and the Chinese regulation of big tech.
Angela Zhang is an associate professor of law and the director of the Centre for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. An award-winning legal scholar, Angela is a highly sought-after commentator on Chinese antitrust issues. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, Angela taught at King’s College London and practiced law for six years in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Angela received her LLB from Peking University and her LLM, JD, and JSD from the University of Chicago Law School. She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Judge Richard A. Posner. To learn more about Angela, please visit angelazhang.net.
Part of the China Economy Series
Presented via Zoom Webinar
Speaker: Taomo Zhou, Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China’s most successful Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People’s Republic’s adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This talk examines prototypes of the SEZ in Bao’an County, the precursor of Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949-1976). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao’an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown Colony. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, communist cadres in Bao’an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the very hallmark of Deng Xiaoping’s economic statecraft.
Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), was selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Taomo is working on a new research project on Shenzhen—the first Special Economic Zone of China—and its connections with the Export Processing Zones and free ports across Southeast Asia. This research is funded by a Tier 1 grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore.
Speaker: Eswar Prasad, Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy, Cornell University; Senior Fellow and New Century Chair in International Economics, Brookings Institution; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research.
This lecture will discuss China’s economic prospects, policies, and reforms, and their implications for its role in international finance. The lecture will cover China’s economy, financial markets, and the renminbi, and also touch upon the country’s new digital currency.
Speaker: David Dollar, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Global Economy and Development, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
China has gotten COVID-19 under control and is poised to bounce back strongly with 8% growth in 2021. But in the medium term, it faces daunting domestic and external challenges. On the domestic side, demographic shifts will result in a declining labor force and put a premium on geographic mobility, especially rural-urban migration. Also, over-reliance on investment has led to an alarming rise in debt to GDP, risking a financial crisis. To grow well while managing these issues of labor and investment will require more innovation as a source of growth. On the external side, the trade war with the U.S. is not likely to be resolved quickly with the new Biden administration. China’s recent agreements with Asian partners and Europe, however, provide new opportunities that complement domestic reforms.
David Dollar is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, Dollar&Sense. He is a leading expert on China’s economy and U.S.-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s economic and financial emissary to China, based in Beijing, facilitating the macroeconomic and financial policy dialogue between the United States and China. Prior to joining Treasury, Dollar worked 20 years for the World Bank, serving as country director for China and Mongolia, based in Beijing (2004-2009). His other World Bank assignments focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. Dollar also worked in the World Bank’s research department. His publications focus on economic reform in China, globalization, and economic growth. He also taught economics at University of California Los Angeles, during which time he spent a semester in Beijing at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1986. He has a doctorate in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.
Speaker: Chang-Tai Hsieh, Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor of Economics and PCL Faculty Scholar, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
We use administrative registration records with information on the owners of all Chinese firms to document the importance of “connected” investors, defined as state-owned firms or private owners with equity ties with state-owned firms, in the businesses of private owners. We document a hierarchy of private owners: the largest private owners have direct investments from state-owned firms, the next largest private owners have equity investments from private owners that themselves have equity ties with state owners, and the smallest private owners do not have any ties with state owners. The network of connected private owners has expanded over the last two decades. The share of registered capital of connected private owners increased by almost 20 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, driven by two trends. First, state-owned firms have increased their investments in joint ventures with private owners. Second, private owners with equity ties to state owners also increasingly invest in joint ventures with other (smaller) private owners. The expansion in the “span” of connected owners from these investments with private owners may have increased the aggregate output of the private sector by 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2019.
Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development. His published papers include “The Life-Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity,” in the American Economic Review; “Can Free Entry be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry,” in the Journal of Political Economy; “What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence from the Factor Markets,” in the American Economic Review; “The Allocation of Talent and US Economic Growth,” in Econometrica; “How Destructive is Innovation?” in Econometrica; and “Special Deals with Chinese Characteristics,” in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual.
Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank’s Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London.
He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Elected Member of Academia Sinica, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy.
Speaker: Sheena Greitens, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School, as well as a faculty fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law.
Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, authoritarian politics, and foreign policy. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security.
She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.
Speaker: M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moderator: Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute
M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes, (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other publications have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Studies Review, The China Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Current History, Asian Survey, Asian Security, China Leadership Monitor, and Contemporary Southeast Asia.
Taylor is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Taylor is a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves as the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Awareness Project.
Speaker: E. Elena Songster, Professor of History, History Department, Saint Mary’s College of California
The giant panda stumbled into ambassador work. Profoundly successful, its diplomatic roles multiplied and evolved, but its persistent existence as an animal repeatedly reframed its role as a diplomat and beyond. Songster discusses findings from her book, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon (Oxford UP), examining the history of the emergence of the giant panda as a national icon and the impact it has had on foreign policy and the natural environment.
Elena Songster’s research focuses on the environmental history of modern China. She is currently researching medicinals found in nature through an historical lens. Other research projects include the history of snow leopard conservation and forestry history. Elena Songster teaches classes on Chinese History, Japanese History, Asian History, and World History. She has also taught in the Collegiate Seminar Program, and JanTerm and serves on the Advisory Board for the Global and Regional Studies Program.
Speaker: Anne-Marie Brady, Professor, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Professor Brady is a specialist of Chinese politics (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty scholarly papers. She has written op eds for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Financial Times. Her research has a strong policy focus.
In 2017, Professor Brady put her conference paper “Magic Weapons: CCP Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping” online, as the topic was of public interest. The paper has been downloaded more 160, 000 times and has helped spark a debate in New Zealand, as well as internationally, that resulted in a Parliamentary Inquiry into Foreign Interference in New Zealand. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping
Professor Brady is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. In 2014 she was appointed to a two-year term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Action Council on the Arctic. Her recent books include: Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), China’s Thought Management (Routledge, 2012), The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge, 2013), China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press and Wilson Press, 2017), and Small States and the Changing Global Order: New Zealand Faces the Future (Springer, 2019).
Speaker: Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Department of Political Science; Director, Stanford China Program, Stanford University
China’s rapidly growing local government debt (LGD) is now branded a “grey rhino,” a known threat that has received little attention. Why did Beijing let LGD get so out of hand? What are the sources of LGD? There is evidence to suggest that no matter how honest and law-abiding local cadres might be, localities are likely to have local government debt. Prof. Oi will argue that LGD stems from a grand bargain between the center and the localities that were made to secure support for the 1994 fiscals reforms. This series of policy decisions institutionalized backdoor financing, creating a “win-win” solution that recentralized tax revenues to Beijing while countering the downsides of fiscal recentralization for the localities. The cost, however, was that China’s economic growth model was increasingly undergirded by mounting LGD, with little transparency and control by the center.
Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor on Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi also is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.
A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the department of government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.
Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on China’s political economy and institutions in the process of reform. Fiscal politics and central-local relations in China are at the center of Oi’s research. Recent work delves inside local-level institutions to sheds new light on China’s authoritarian resilience by exploring how county governments through adaptive governance have been able to cope as the economy has grown exponentially and demands and needs from an increasingly complex society put more strains on resources and the political system. Most recently, she co-edited a volume that highlights the challenges China now faces after reaping record-breaking growth in the last 40 years by only tweaking the institutions that it inherited from the Mao period. Current leaders continue to kick the can down the road rather than tackle the most politically difficult part of the reform process. Instead, leaders seem to be “going back to the future,” relying on a playbook not seen since the Mao period.
Current projects focus on growing local government debt in China and why there is so much when the law prohibits localities from borrowing and budget deficits. Moving beyond her earlier work, Oi also has begun a project to empirically assess the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Oi takes an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests.
Speaker: Kerry Ratigan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Amherst College
China is widely known for its strong central government, but the center needs the provinces to implement policies using their knowledge of local conditions. However, provincial priorities sometimes conflict with those of the center. Drawing on research conducted for her forthcoming book, Let Some Get Healthy First: How Local Politics Shaped Social Policy in China, Ratigan shows how local politics have impacted social policy implementation in China. While some provinces tend to closely follow central directives, others resist central policy, sometimes subverting the goals of the central government. Although decentralization in contemporary China peaked in the early 2000s, the impact of local government is still salient despite recent efforts to reign in local actors.
Dr. Kerry Ratigan is an assistant professor of Political Science at Amherst College where she currently teaches courses on Chinese politics and social movements. Her research has focused on Chinese politics, social policy, and state-society relations, including extensive work on health policy adoption and implementation in rural China. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Political Science and Spanish from Haverford College.
Speakers: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, New Silk Road Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs Björn Jerdén, Director, Knowledge Centre on China , Swedish Institute of International Affairs Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Foreign Policy and Diplomacy, Danish Institute for International Studies
Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
Nordic and Baltic countries have struggled to develop well-calibrated approaches to cooperation with China and its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Economic incentives or disincentives, human rights, the EU dynamics, security arrangements, and global governance consideration have pulled the agendas of Northern European states in different directions. This panel will discuss the current state of affairs and the prospect of a coordinated Nordic-Baltic policy with regard to the BRI.
Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Some states have always maintained a sense that they have a mission in the world well beyond the maintenance of domestic order, the United States, France and Britain among them. Japan, China and the Koreas also inherited a strong sense of purpose in the modern era, from Meiji modernization to Mao’s “Three Worlds” and the Belt and Road Initiative, ideas drawing on the longer past – yet the definition of that purpose has been in constant flux. What defines East Asia’s sense of purpose today, can we speak of it in regional terms, and how does it relate to its long history of aspiration to be an intellectual and moral exemplar?
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.
Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford
Discussant: Jie Li, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
LECTURE 2 OF 3: AN ERA OF EMOTION? One factor that defines Chinese engagement with the world today is its highly emotional character, in terms of self-presentation that can move from saccharine to shrill at remarkable speed. But emotion is not new – the use of the registers from exhilaration to depression defines the way that China, Japan and the Koreas have chosen to present themselves over the past century, whether through (often highly gendered) lenses of Asianism, revolution, martiality, discourses of “national humiliation,” or of global citizenship. How much of this draws on emotional registers defined by modernity, and how much from a repertoire shaped by a culture with much longer roots?
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.
Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford
Discussant: Odd Arne Westad, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University
LECTURE 1 OF 3: HOW NEW IS THE NEW ERA?
China’s leaders speak today of a “new era” – but East Asia has seen a range of “new eras” in the modern age, defined by Japan, China, and outsiders who encountered both. What defines that novelty and how familiar are the elements that form part of it? The mid-twentieth century saw war, social change and changing global encounters defined as moments when both China and Japan entered a “new” or “special” era in a global context. What continuities and contrasts are there between the past and the present, and what defines that “newness”?
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is a three-part annual lecture series on East Asia at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center.
Speaker: Andrew B. Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University
Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.
Andrew B. Liu is assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where his research focuses on China, transnational Asia, political economy, and comparative history.
This event co-sponsored by The Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University.
Speaker: Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Portrayals of China’s political economy tend to be divided, with one side depicting it as a Confucian-style meritocracy, and the other arguing that the regime is a kleptocracy. In fact, neither view is correct: in the Chinese officialdom, competence and corruption can go hand in hand. Drawing on her new book, China’s Gilded Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Ang underscores that paradoxes define China’s political economy. Chinese growth is speedy yet risky and imbalanced. Corrupt officials worship the pursuit of prosperity. China’s regime is authoritarian yet its regions are decentralized and highly competitive. Understanding China requires that we grasp these seeming paradoxes, which will persist well into the next decade.
Yuen Yuen Ang is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.” She is also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship [on] the most pressing issues of our times.” Her first, award-winning book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), is acclaimed as “game changing” and “field shifting.” The sequel to this book, China’s Gilded Age: the Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption, is released in 2020. She writes for a broad audience in Foreign Affairs and Project Syndicate. Ang is a graduate of Colorado College and Stanford University, and a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee of US-China Relations.
Speaker: Andrea Ghiselli, Assistant Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University Moderator: Robert Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate
The securitization of non-traditional security issues is a scarcely discussed and, yet, extremely powerful force that shapes the evolution of Chinese foreign and security policy. The lecture will show how this tortuous process deeply shaped China’s approach to the protection of the life and assets of Chinese nationals overseas, an aspect of Chinese foreign policy that is already and will become increasingly important over time. This became evident as, especially after the evacuation of 36,000 Chinese nationals from Libya in 2011, Chinese institutions evolved and issued new regulations that are also aimed at supporting the possible use of the military overseas.
Dr. Andrea Ghiselli is an assistant professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He is also the Head of Research of the ChinaMed Project, a research project on China’s role in the wider Mediterranean region sponsored by the University of Torino’s TOChina Hub. Andrea’s research interests include Chinese foreign policy, China-Middle East relations, and foreign policy analysis. Besides his book Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy published by Oxford University Press, his research on Chinese foreign policy has been published in peer-reviewed journals like the China Quarterly, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Contemporary China, and Armed Forces & Society.
Experiencing another downturn in its relations with the West, Iran has been more actively “looking to the East” to pursue stronger political and economic cooperation with China. Tehran remains an enthusiastic supporter of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), despite the withdrawal of Chinese companies from a number of projects due to U.S. sanctions. Iran still hopes to benefit from investments, technologies and new connectivity routes promoted under the BRI umbrella. This roundtable will discuss the prospects of Iran becoming a node of the BRI, and the promises and challenges of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy.
Speakers: Eyck Freymann, Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford University
Nader Habibi, Professor of Practice, Brandeis University
Dina Esfandiary, Senior Advisor, International Crisis Group
Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center
James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
This event is co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
This event is part of a new seminar hosted by the Fairbank Center and the Davis Center. This seminar aims to foster vibrant, comprehensive, and fruitful discussion about the ongoing transformations in geopolitics and governance resulting from China’s Belt Road Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Speaker: Deborah Brautigam, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: David Yang, Assistant Professor Economics, Harvard University
The conventional wisdom suggests a misalignment between autocracy and technological innovation. In this project, we examine whether there exists a political and economic alignment between the monitoring aims of autocracies and the innovative aims of AI firms. We gather comprehensive data on firms and government procurement contracts in China’s facial recognition AI industry. We find two results. First, autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government demands for public security AI, and increased AI investment suppresses subsequent unrest. Second, AI sector benefits from the autocrats: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results indicate a stable equilibrium between the autocrats and the AI sector. Using a directed technical change model, we show that autocrats’ demand for AI not only could enhance its stability, but may also sustain growth and bias innovation towards data-intensive sector when economies of scope from government data are sufficiently large.
David Yang is an Assistant Professor of Economics. His research focuses on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, economic history, and cultural economics. In particular, David studies the forces of stability and forces of changes in authoritarian regimes, drawing lessons from historical and contemporary China. David received a B.A. in Statistics and B.S. in Business Administration from University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Stanford.
Philip Thai is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China, with research interests in legal history, economic history, business history, and history of capitalism.
He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 (Columbia University Press and a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, published in 2018). The book examines the impact of smuggling and illicit trade in China from the late Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic.
The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Speaker: Eddy U, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis
No system of rule has objectified the intellectual as much as communist rule of the twentieth century. Communist regimes codified, identified, and governed part of the general population as intellectuals based on Marxist thought. This talk builds on my recently published book and illustrates how the “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) in China evolved from an obscure classification of people during the 1920s to embodied subjects locatable everywhere after the 1949 revolution. This transformation of the intellectual changed Chinese society, intensifying mass surveillance, political education, and other governing practices. My analytical approach moves the study of the intellectual in modern China into new terrains. I end with an interpretation of the current situation in Hong Kong.
Eddy U is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. His book, Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification (UC Press, 2019), won the Barrington Moore Book Award given by the American Sociological Association.
Speaker: David M. Lampton, Hyman Professor Emeritus Johns Hopkins—SAIS; Senior Fellow, SAIS Foreign Policy Institute
David M. Lampton is Senior Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins—SAIS. Immediately prior to his current post he was Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2019-2020. For more than two decades prior to that he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Lampton is former Chairman of The Asia Foundation, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS. Among many written works, academic and popular is his most recent book (with Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik), Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an undergraduate student, he was a firefighter. Lampton has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies. He is a Life Trustee on the Board of Trustees of Colorado College and was in the US Army Reserve in the enlisted and commissioned ranks.
Speaker: James A. Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Event Slides: CCP Policies towards Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Indigenous People
James A. Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He also teaches as invited professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy. Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ”Silk Roads” series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: a History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His most recent album, recorded with the band By & By, is Songs for this Old Heart. His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Global Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.
Speakers: Fred Hu, Founder and Chairman, Primavera Capital Group
Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College
David Daokui Li, Founding Dean of the Schwarzman Scholars program, Mansfield Freeman Professor of Economics, and Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE), Tsinghua University
Yuan Ming, Dean of Yenching Academy, Peking University
Moderator: William Kirby, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University; Chairman, Harvard China Fund
Introductions by: Winnie (Chi-Man) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard-China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Speaker: Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and of the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.
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.
Mary Augusta Brazelton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge.
Miriam Gross is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.
Elanah Uretsky is an Associate Professor of International and Global Studies at Brandeis University.
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.
Speaker: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University Pardee School of International Relations and Political Science.
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 Insitute.
Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School.
Moderator: 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.
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 of15 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.
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.
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 opens in a new windowJohn 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 opens in a new window“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.
Please note, Jeffrey A. Bader is not associated with the Joe Biden for President Campaign.
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.
This lecture is part of the Environment in Asia Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
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.
This lecture is part of the Modern China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School.
This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore
Wang Gungwu is University Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2007, and Emeritus Professor of Australian National University since 1988. He is Foreign Honorary Member of the History Division of the American Academy of Arts and Science and former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
He received his BA and MA from University of Malaya (UM) in Singapore, and PhD at SOAS, London. His early teaching career was in the UM History Department at Singapore and then at Kuala Lumpur, and held the History Chair at UM in KL (1963-1968). He was then appointed to the Chair of Far Eastern History at The Australian National University (1968-1986). From 1986 to 1995, he was Vice-Chancellor (President) of The University of Hong Kong. In Singapore, he was Director of the East Asian Institute till 2007.
His books include The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea. New Edition (1998); The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (2000); Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: war, trade, science and governance (2003); Divided China: Preparing for reunification, 883-947 (2007); Renewal: The Chinese State and the New Global History (2013); and Another China Cycle: Committing to Reform (2014).
Speaker: Suisheng (Sam) Zhao, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Speaker: Gina Anne Tam, Assistant Professor of History, Trinity University
Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, this talk will trace the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. It shows how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard 'variants' of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. I simultaneously highlight, on the other hand, the 1920s folksong collectors, communist-period playwrights, contemporary hip-hop artists and popular protestors in Hong Kong who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the present, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many - interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself.
This event is part of the Modern China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Presenters: Peter Bol (Harvard University, China Biographical Database) Grace Fong (McGill University, Ming-Qing Women’s Writings) Andrew Gordon (Harvard University, Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project) Helen Hardacre (Harvard University, Constitutional Revision Research Project)
It is difficult to start a digital scholarship project. Maintaining it for decades is even more difficult. In this year’s first forum of the East Asian Digital Scholarship Series, we invite the founders of four long-running North American-based projects. Peter Bol, Grace Fong, Andrew Gordon, and Helen Hardacre will share their experiences in building and leading digital scholarship projects.
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.
Speaker: Jorge Heine, Research Professor, Boston University; Former Ambassador of Chile to China (2014-2017), to India (2003-2007) and to South Africa ( 994-1999), and Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government
This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Rosemary Foot, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford; Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College; Research Associate of Oxford’s China Centre
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Robert S. Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate
Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series, hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Sören Urbanksy, Research Fellow, German Historical Institute Washington
The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, was special in many ways. It not only divided the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and sedentary people mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia and later the Soviet Union clashed with those of Qing and Republican China and Japan, and where the world’s two largest Communist regimes hailed their friendship and staged their enmity. In this talk, Sören Urbansky will discuss his recent book, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian border, which examines the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards.
Part of the Modern China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Lily Wu, Chief Investment Officer, China Prosper Group
In over 40 years of opening and reform (改革开放, foreign and domestic direct investment has been a critical economic growth driver, and change driver. However, both drivers face significant challenges today, which could limit their role or efficacy in the future. What is the state of China’s investment environment today, how did we get here, and what is the outlook?
Lily Wu is Chief Investment Officer Taiwan private equity investment company China Prosper Group. She has 30 years of investment research, and investment management experience in China, for various Taiwan investment companies and US brokerages Salomon Brothers and Bankers Trust. She graduated from Caltech with a BS in engineering, and attended Peking University for post-graduate work in history as a Thomas Watson Fellow in 1985.
This webinar is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series, hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
Speaker: Evan A. Feigenbaum, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Evan A. Feigenbaum is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research in Washington, Beijing and New Delhi on a dynamic region encompassing both East Asia and South Asia. He is also the 2019-20 James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Initially an academic with a PhD in Chinese politics from Stanford University, Feigenbaum’s career has spanned government service, think tanks, the private sector, and three major regions of Asia.
From 2001 to 2009, he served at the U.S. State Department as deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia (2007–2009), deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia (2006–2007), member of the policy planning staff with principal responsibility for East Asia and the Pacific (2001–2006), and an adviser on China to Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, with whom he worked closely in the development of the U.S.-China senior dialogue.
This webinar is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, hosted by Professor Ezra F. Vogel.
Speakers: Clark ALEJANDRINO, Trinity College Chris COURTNEY, Durham University Xiangli DING, Rhode Island School of Design Yan GAO, University of Memphis
Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College
About the Speakers:
Clark Alejandrino teaches at Trinity College. Clark finished a Ph.D. in East Asian Environmental History at Georgetown University. He specializes in the environmental history of China, especially its climate and animal history, covering the fifth to the twentieth century in his research. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on typhoons in the history of the South China coast and preparing to embark on a new project exploring the history of migratory birds in East Asia. At Trinity, he teaches courses on Chinese history, environmental history, world history, and Pacific history.
Chris Courtney teaches at Durham University (UK). Chris is a social and environmental historian of China, specializing on the history of Wuhan and its hinterland. His previous research focused upon the history of nature-induced disasters in the 19th and 20th centuries. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China examined the history of the 1931 Central China Flood. It was awarded the 2019 John K Fairbanks Prize. Chris has also published on topics including the history of environmental religion, fire disasters, and Maoist flood (mis)management. His current research focuses on the problem of heat in modern Chinese cities. Using a combination of archival and oral history he is examining how people coped with extreme temperatures through a period of rapid cultural, political and technological change. He explores how emergent technologies such as ice factories, electric fans, and air conditioning transformed the cultural and social landscape of urban China.
Xiangli Ding teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research interests focus on the confluence of nature, technologies, economy and political forces in modern China and how that confluence has changed Chinese people’s lives and their relationship with the natural environment. His first book project, Transforming Waters: Hydroelectricity, State Making and Social Changes in 20th-Century China, examines the rise of hydroelectricity in modern China and argues that political powers aided by hydro-technologies consumed not only the natural resources at an unprecedented pace and scale, but also marginalized local communities in the making of the modern hydropower regime.
Yan Gao teaches at the University of Memphis. Yan specializes in social and environmental history of late imperial and modern China, and her research focuses on water management of the central Yangzi region. She obtained her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and held a few research and teaching positions around the world. She was a Carson fellow at the Rachel Carson Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, a visiting post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Research Associate at the Global Asia Initiative of Duke University. She has published several scholarly articles. Yan is finalizing a book entitled “Yangzi Waters: Transforming the Water Regime in Late Imperial China.”
Part of the Environment in Asia series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Speakers: Jen-Hsiang Chuang, Deputy Director-General at Centers for Disease Control, Taiwan Steve Kuo, President, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Moderators: 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, China Health Partnership. William Hsiao, K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics in Department of Health Policy and Management and Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Organizer: Steven Goldstein, Sophia Smith Professor of Government, Emeritus, Smith College; Fairbank Center Associate
Speaker: Min Ye, Associate Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.
Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, pronounced by Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the “project of the century”, now faces the most uncertain fate in China and abroad. In this new research, Min Ye evaluates policy discourses, interest groups, and nascent BRI networks in China and concludes that domestic drivers for the BRI have not been altered by the Covid-19. However, the external environment and demand for BRI are predicted to change, and we are likely to see important shifts in the BRI implementation in the future.
Min Ye is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research situates in the nexus between domestic and global politics and the intersection of economics and security, with a focus on China, India, and the regional relations. Her publications include The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China 1998 — 2018 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). Min Ye has received grants and fellowship in the U.S and Asia, including a Smith Richardson Foundation grant (2016-2018), East Asia Peace, Prosperity, and Governance Fellowship (2013), Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program post-doctoral fellowship (2009-2010), and Millennium Education Scholarship in Japan (2006). In 2014-2016, the National Committee on the U.S-China Relations selects Min Ye as a Public Intellectual Program fellow. In 2020, Ye is selected as the Rosenberg Scholar of East Asian Studies at Suffolk University.
In 2009-2010, Min Ye was the China and the World post-doctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center. She has since been an active participant in programs at the Fairbank Center. In 2016-2018, she served in the Faculty Council of Harvard-Yenching Institute. She currently mentors visiting scholars at HYI. Min Ye is a National Committee on US-China Relations PIP fellow (PIP 4). Ye’s recently published a new book, “The Belt, Road and Beyond.”
This event was recorded on Zoom on Wednesday May 20, 2020.
Speaker: Chris Nielsen, Executive Director, Harvard China Project
Chris Nielsen is the executive director of the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment. Working with faculty at collaborating Chinese universities and across the schools of Harvard, he has managed and developed the interdisciplinary China Project from its inception.
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. The series is hosted by Professor Ezra F. Vogel. The event was recorded on Zoom, and does not include the Q&A.
Can Sino-Russian Territorial Dispute Settlement be an example for Russia and Japan?
Speakers: Alexander Lukin and Olga Puzanova, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Alexander Lukin is Head of the Department of International Relations at National Research University Higher School of Economics, Director of the Center for East Asian and Shanghai Cooperation Organization Studies at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and Chair Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University (China). He received his first degree from MGIMO University in 1984, a doctorate in politics from Oxford University in 1997, a doctorate in history from Russian Diplomatic Academy in 2007 and a professional development degree in theology from St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University in 2013. He is the author of The Political Culture of the Russian Democrats (Oxford University Press, 2000), The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations since the Eighteenth Century (M.E.Sharpe, 2003), Grasping Russia with your Mind (with Pavel Lukin, Ves’ Mir, 2015, in Russian), Pivot to Asia: Russia’s Foreign Policy Enters the 21st Century (Vij Books India, 2016), China and Russia: The New Rapprochement (Polity, 2018), Russia: A Thorny Transition from Communism (Vij Books India, 2019), as well as numerous articles and policy papers on international relations, Russian and Chinese politics.
Olga Puzanova is a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations and Researcher at the International Laboratory of World Order Studies and the New Regionalism at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She received her bachelor degree in international journalism from Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), M.Phil in Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford and is now in the final stage of her D.Phil studies at the University of Oxford. She is the author of several articles on Japanese media, politics and Russian-Japanese relations, which were published in leading international journals, including “Russia’s Policy toward Japan and Regional Security in the Asia‐Pacific,” Asian Politics and Policy. 2019. Vol. 10. No. 4. P. 677-692 and “Japan’s Eurasian diplomacy: Successes and failures (1997-2017)”, Journal of Eurasian Studies. 2018. Vol. 9. No. 2. P. 134-142 (with Oleg Paramonov). She also serves as a contributor to country reports of The Asan Forum (South Korea).
This event was recorded on Zoom as part of the Fairbank Center's Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series, hosted by Professor Ezra Vogel. The recording features the presentation, but not the Q&A.
Speaker: Carla Freeman, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies
This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series, hosted by Professor Ezra Vogel.
This event was recorded on Zoom.
Speaker: Scott Kennedy, Senior Adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
An American policy to economically decouple from China is a radical idea, and if adopted, would cause substantial damage to American interests. Policies based on “managed interdependence” would be more effective in protecting the economy, national security, values, and public health of the United States.
Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). A leading authority on Chinese economic policy, his specific areas of expertise include industrial policy, technology innovation, business lobbying, U.S.-China commercial relations, and global governance. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled, The Power of Innovation:The Strategic Importance of China’s High-Tech Drive.
This event was recorded over Zoom.
Speaker: James Mulvenon, Director of Intelligence Integration, SOSi Intelligence Solutions Group
James Mulvenon is Director of Intelligence Integration for SOSi’s Intelligence Solutions Group, where he has recruited and trained a team of nearly fifty Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and Urdu linguist-analysts performing research and analysis for US Government and corporate customers. A Chinese linguist by training, he is a leading international expert on Chinese cyber, technology transfer, espionage, and military issues. Dr. Mulvenon received his B.A. in China Studies from the University of Michigan, studied Communist Party History at Fudan University in Shanghai, and received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, published by ME Sharpe in 2001 under the title Soldiers of Fortune, details the rise and fall of the Chinese military’s international business empire. In 2013 he co-authored Chinese Industrial Espionage, which is the first full account of the complete range of China’s efforts to illicitly acquire foreign technology.
This webinar is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. The series is hosted by Professor Ezra F. Vogel and Dr. William Overholt.
Please note this recording does not include the public Q&A.
Dr. William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School, presents the first of the Fairbank Center's online lectures as part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series. This series is hosted by Professor Ezra F. Vogel.
William Overholt joined the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia in July 2008 and conducts research on development and governance issues. Previously, he served as a visiting scholar with the Institute for Asia and continues to be a frequent visitor and speaker at Harvard University. As the former director of RAND’s Center for Asia Pacific Policy, Overholt held a distinguished chair at the Center. He has long been an important analyst of Asia. Dr. Overholt is the author of America and Asia: The Coming Transformation of Asian Geopolitics (RAND, 2007), as well as The Rise of China (W.W. Norton, 1993), which won the Mainichi News/Asian Affairs Research Center Special Book Prize. He has also written or co-written, Political Risk (Euromoney, 1982), Strategic Planning and Forecasting, with William Ascher (John Wiley, 1983), and Asia’s Nuclear Future (Westview Press, 1976). In 1976, he founded the semi-annual Global Assessment, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, and edited it until 1988. He has also spent 21 years running research teams for investment banks, including Nomura Securities, Bankers Trust, and BankBoston, mostly in Hong Kong or Singapore. Prior to his banking career, he was at the Hudson Institute, directing planning studies.
This event was recorded on Zoom on April 15, 2020. The recording features the lecture, but not the public Q&A.
Speakers: Barry Bloom, Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Research Professor of Public Health, Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Yanzhong Huang, Senior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations; Professor, Seton Hall University School of Diplomacy and International Relations
David S. Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, Harvard University
Elanah Uretsky, Assistant Professor, International and Global Studies and Anthropology, Brandeis University
Winnie Chi-Man Yip, Professor of the Practice of International Health Policy and Economics, Harvard Chan School of Public Health
Moderator: Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology; Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Co-sponsors: Harvard University Asia Center, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, China Health Partnership, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Speaker: Samantha Power U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 2013-2017 Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government William D. Zabel Professor of Practice in Human Rights, Harvard Law School
Ambassador Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the William D. Zabel Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Harvard Law School.
From 2013 to 2017 Power served as the 28th U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. In this role, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, helped build new international law to cripple ISIL’s financial networks, and supported President Obama’s path-breaking actions to end the Ebola crisis.
From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, where she focused on issues including atrocity prevention, UN reform, LGBT and women’s rights, the protection of religious minorities, and the prevention of human trafficking.
Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School.
Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. Power is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World (2008) and the editor, with Derek Chollet, of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011). Her most recent book, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019), was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller, and was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, NPR, and TIME. Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe and has twice been named to TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list.
Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of 9 and today lives in Concord, Massachusetts with her husband Cass Sunstein and their two young children.
The Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Read and download the transcript of this lecture on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/annual-neuhauser-lecture-featuring-ambassador-samantha-power-china-the-un-and-the-future-of-human-rights/
U.S./China relations have seen huge shifts over the past decade. Jane Perlez, former Beijing Bureau Chief for The New York Times, witnessed much of it during her seven years reporting from China.
On the Trail of Xi Jinping follows the rise of China’s current leader, and how the West got him so wrong. From clinking champagne glasses at the State Department to the lowest ebb in US China relations in 40 years, Perlez and a series of expert China watchers explain what’s happened.
On the Trail of Xi Jinping was produced and edited by Jeb Sharp Assistant producer: Helen Zhang Researcher: Luz Ding Sound design: Tina Tobey Mack.
Special thanks to the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, including Nancy Gibbs, Tom Patterson and Liz Schwartz.
Thanks also to Harvard’s Ash Center, the Fairbank Center and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for all your support.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Jay Varton, Howard Harper-Barnes, Heath Cantu, and Craft Case
https://shorensteincenter.org/podcast-on-the-trail-of-xi-jinping/
Speaker: Justin Yifu Lin, World Bank Chief Economist, 2008-2012 Dean, Institute of New Structural Economics Dean, Institute for South-South Cooperation and Development Professor and Honorary Dean National School of Development Peking University
Co-sponsored by: Harvard College Association of U.S.-China Relations Harvard College China Forum International Relations on Campus
Carroll Bogert (AB '83, AM '86) is president of The Marshall Project and previously deputy executive director at Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 1998, she spent twelve years as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek in China, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union.
She was awarded the 2019 Centennial Medal Citation by Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the highest honor bestowed by the school to alumni in recognition of outstanding contributions to society.
The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted and produced by James Evans, and edited by Liza Tarbell at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Download and read the transcript of this podcast interview on our website. https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/podcast-human-rights-in-china-and-the-united-states-with-carroll-bogert/
Speakers: Katherine Alexander, Assistant Professor of Chinese, University of Colorado at Boulder
Riley Brett-Roche, The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellow (2018); PhD Candidate in History, Stanford University
Xiaosong Gao, Director, The Za Library; Associate at the Department of EALC, Harvard University
Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Chair and Organizer: Xiaofei Tian, Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University
Please note that part of this recording is in Mandarin Chinese.
"No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945" (Harvard Asia Center, 2017), 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. It argues instead that during the second Sino-Japanese War, China’s international trade, the Nationalist government’s tariff revenues, and hence its fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed. Drawing on the historical lessons of my research, in this talk, I will also discuss the unintended consequences of protectionism, the difficulties of strategising trade wars, and the differences between trade wars and real wars.
Felix Boecking is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Economic and Political History at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Among his research interests are China’s political economy, the history of economics in the People’s Republic of China, and the history of China’s foreign relations. His current project at the Wilson Center is “Economics on the Edge: An Intellectual History of Economists in the PRC since 1949.”
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Read and download the transcript for this podcast on our website.https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/felix-boecking-modern-china-lecture-series/
Speaker: Craig Allen, President, US-China Business Council
This event is part of the "China Economy Lecture Series," hosted by Professor Meg Rithmire at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
On July 26, 2018, Craig Allen began his tenure in Washington, DC, as the sixth President of the United States-China Business Council (USCBC), a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 200 American companies doing business with China. Prior to joining USCBC, Craig had a long, distinguished career in US public service.
Craig began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA). He entered government as a Presidential Management Intern, rotating through the four branches of ITA. From 1986 to 1988, he was an international economist in ITA’s China Office.
In 1988, Craig transferred to the American Institute in Taiwan, where he served as Director of the American Trade Center in Taipei. He held this position until 1992, when he returned to the Department of Commerce for a three-year posting at the US Embassy in Beijing as Commercial Attaché.
In 1995, Craig was assigned to the US Embassy in Tokyo, where he served as a Commercial Attaché. In 1998, he was promoted to Deputy Senior Commercial Officer. In 1999, Craig became a member of the Senior Foreign Service.
From 2000, Craig served a two-year tour at the National Center for APEC in Seattle. While there, he worked on the APEC Summits in Brunei, China, and Mexico. In 2002, it was back to Beijing, where Craig served as the Senior Commercial Officer. In Beijing, Craig was promoted to the Minister Counselor rank of the Senior Foreign Service.
After a four-year tour in South Africa, Craig became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Craig was sworn in as the United States ambassador to Brunei Darussalam on December 19, 2014. He served there until July 2018, when he transitioned to President of the US-China Business Council.
Craig received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in Political Science and Asian Studies in 1979. He received a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 1985.
Speaker: Wilt L. Idema, Professor of Chinese Literature Emeritus, Harvard University
When the Precious Scroll of the Red Gauze was first introduced to the academic world, it was presented as the earliest work in the genre, as its edition was believed to date from the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368). By now it is acknowledged that this edition only dates from the sixteenth century. Both the contents of the story and the printing of the text, however, may well deserve a second look as they lead to intriguing questions about the origins of the genre and its early use.
Speaker: Ezra Vogel, Author; Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University
With brief presentations by: Richard Dyck, former President, Teredyne, Japan Paula Harrell, School of Continuing Studies, Georgetown University Moderator: Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute
Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center. Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard-Yenching Institute; the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations
Read and download the transcript for this event on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/ezra-vogel-china-and-japan-facing-history/
Why does law matter (and why wouldn't it) in Taiwan? Professor Margaret Lewis talks to the "Harvard on China" podcast about law in Taiwan, 'dinosaur judges,' public debates around same-sex marriage, law schools, and Taiwan's upcoming 2020 presidential election.
Professor Margaret Lewis’s research focuses on law in mainland China and Taiwan with an emphasis on criminal justice.
Professor Lewis has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at National Taiwan University, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation's US-Japan Leadership Program. Her publications have appeared in a number of academic journals including the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She also co-authored the book Challenge to China: How Taiwan Abolished its Version of Re-Education Through Labor with Jerome A. Cohen.
Professor Lewis has participated in the State Department’s Legal Experts Dialogue with China, has testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and is a consultant to the Ford Foundation.Before joining Seton Hall, Professor Lewis served as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute where she worked on criminal justice reforms in China. Following graduation from law school, she worked as an associate at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City. She then served as a law clerk for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. After clerking, she returned to NYU School of Law and was awarded a Furman Fellowship.
Professor Lewis received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif and was a member of Law Review. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University and also studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Download and read the transcript of this podcast on our website. https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/critical-issues-confronting-china-lecture-series-2-2018-10-31-2019-05-01/
2019 marks 30 years since the events at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in June 1989. The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University discusses the impact of the Tiananmen massacre 30 years later.
Speakers: Hao Jian, Professor, Beijing Film Academy Louisa Lim, Senior Lecturer, University of Melbourne; Author, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited Wang Dan, Founder and Executive Director of Dialogue China Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California Irvine
Moderator: Rowena Xiaoqing He, Current Member, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Author, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China
Read and download the transcript of this event on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/panel-discussion-tiananmen-at-30/
Mandopop: 40 Years of Chinese Popular Music and Culture
Speakers: GAO Xiaosong 高曉松 FANG Wenshan 方文山 LO Ta-yu 羅大佑 YIN Yue 尹約
Moderated by TIAN Xiaofei 田曉菲 and Li Jie 李潔, sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Please note that this recording is in Mandarin Chinese.
Speaker: Paul Cohen, Fairbank Center Associate
In his memoir Paul Cohen, one of the West’s preeminent historians of China, traces the development of his work from its inception in the early 1960s to the present, offering fresh perspectives that consistently challenge us to think more deeply about China and the historical craft in general. The book’s title reflects the crucially important disparity between the past as originally experienced and the past as later reconstructed historically, by which point the historian and the world in which he or she lives have both undergone extensive change. This distinction is very much on Cohen’s mind throughout the book.
Paul Cohen began his teaching career at the University of Michigan and Amherst College. He then taught for thirty-five years at Wellesley College, where he is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History, Emeritus. He is also a long-time Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Cohen’s books include Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (1984); History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997); Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (2009); and History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis (2014). History in Three Keys was the winner of the 1997 New England Historical Association Book Award and the American Historical Association’s 1997 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Cohen’s work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
“From ‘Touches of History’ to ‘Exercises in Thought’: My Views on May Fourth and May Fourth Studies” (从“触摸历史”到“思想操练”——我看五四以及五四研究)
Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 (Peking University) presents the second keynote speech at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies' "May 4th @ 100: China and the World" conference. With welcome and opening remarks by Professors David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University) and Olga Lomová (Charles University, Prague).
Hosted by Harvard University. Sponsored by: the Chiang Ching-Kuo Center for Sinology; National Taiwan University; the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard; the Harvard University Asia Center; the Harvard-Yenching Institute; and the Harvard Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Please note that this presentation is in Mandarin.
Rudolf Wagner (University of Heidelberg) presents the opening keynote speech at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies' "May 4th @ 100: China and the World" conference. With welcome and opening remarks by Professors David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University), Michael Szonyi (Harvard University) and Zhaoguang Ge 葛兆光 (Fudan University).
Hosted by Harvard University. Sponsored by: the Chiang Ching-Kuo Center for Sinology; National Taiwan University; the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard; the Harvard University Asia Center; the Harvard-Yenching Institute; and the Harvard Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Susan Thornton was Acting Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State during the first 18 months of the Trump administration. Prior to her departure, Thornton led East Asia policy-making amid crises with North Korea, escalating trade tensions with China, and a generally deteriorating environment in the United States for international economic and diplomatic engagement. She was the architect of the diplomatic pressure campaign on the North Korean regime, structured the administration’s initial approach to China, and developed the administration’s trademark Indo-Pacific Strategy.
In previous leadership roles in Washington, Thornton worked on China and Korea policy, including stabilizing relations with Taiwan, the U.S.-China Cyber Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord and led a successful negotiation in Pyongyang for monitoring of the Agreed Framework on denuclearization.
In her 18 years of overseas postings in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and China, Thornton’s leadership furthered U.S. interests and influence and maintained programs and mission morale in a host of difficult operating environments. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, she was among the first State Department Fascell Fellows and served from 1989–90 at the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad. She was also a researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute from 1987–91.
Thornton received her M.A. in International Relations and Soviet Studies from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1991 and earned an M.S. in National Strategy and Resource Management at the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School in 2010. Thornton received her B.A. from Bowdoin College in Economics and Russian in 1985, and taught in international secondary schools in Brussels, London, and Chile. She speaks Russian, Mandarin Chinese and French, is a member of numerous professional associations and is on the Board of Trustees for the Eurasia Foundation.
The Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Read and download the transcript for this event on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/neuhauser-lecture-featuring-susan-thornton-can-we-live-with-china-a-roadmap-for-co-evolution/
Speaker: Derek Scissors – American Enterprise Institute
Derek M. Scissors is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on the Chinese and Indian economies and on US economic relations with Asia. He is concurrently chief economist of the China Beige Book.
Dr. Scissors is the author of the China Global Investment Tracker. In late 2008, he authored a series of papers that chronicled the end of pro-market Chinese reform and predicted economic stagnation in China as a result. He has also written multiple papers on the best course for Indian economic development.
This event is from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies' "China Economy Lecture Series," hosted by Professor Meg Rithmire.
https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/derek-scissors-china-economy-lecture/
Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University, and the author of "Curating Revolution: Politics on Display of Mao’s China" (2018). Using a wide variety of primary sources, including Shanghai’s municipal and district archives and oral history, "Curating Revolution" depicts displays of revolution and history, politics and class, and art and science. Analyzing China’s “socialist museums” and “new exhibitions,” Ho demonstrates how Mao-era exhibitionary culture both reflected and made revolution.
Denise Y. Ho is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). She is also interested in urban history, the study of information and propaganda, and material culture. Ho teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary China, the history of Shanghai, the uses of the past in modern China, and the historiography of the Republican era and the PRC.
The "Harvard on China Podcast" is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Download and read the transcript for this podcast interview on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/denise-ho-modern-china-lecture-series/
A panel discussion at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, on Taiwan's 2018 election.
Panelists: Ming-sho Ho, National Taiwan University Chang-ling Huang, National Taiwan University Steven Goldstein, Sophia Smith Professor of Government, Emeritus, Smith College
On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of university students, civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s urban, educated women. Journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses a unique threat to China’s authoritarian regime today.
Leta has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC, CNN and others. She is the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for television feature reporting. Fluent in Mandarin, Leta is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University. She has often been quoted by news organizations such as BBC, CNN, Washington Post, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, TIME and The Economist on the subject of women and feminism in China. Named by the Telegraph as an “awesome woman to follow on Twitter,” Leta was a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University and recently moved to New York.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted and produced by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Speaker: Stephen Owen, Harvard University
Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996); The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (Harvard Asia Center, 2006); and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Owen has completed the translation of the complete poetry of Du Fu, which has been published as the inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities series, featuring Chinese literature in translation. Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard. In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors.
Discussant: Stephen H. West
Stephen West is a Foundation Professor of Chinese in the School of International Letters and Cultures. West works in the textual culture of late medieval and early modern China (1000–1600), with specialties in performance literature, drama, urban literature, and garden studies.
The Reischauer Lectures were established in 1985 to honor Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor Emeritus of Harvard University, by celebrating his distinguished contributions to the study not only of Japan but also of China and Korea. As a reflection of Reischauer’s research, this series intends to highlight current scholarship that deepens understandings of East Asia as a region.
Sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center, Korea Institute, Mittal South Asia Institute, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
Speaker: Stephen Owen, Harvard University
Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996); The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (Harvard Asia Center, 2006); and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Owen has completed the translation of the complete poetry of Du Fu, which has been published as the inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities series, featuring Chinese literature in translation. Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard. In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors.
Discussant: Michael Puett, Harvard University
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early Chinaand To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity.
The Reischauer Lectures were established in 1985 to honor Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor Emeritus of Harvard University, by celebrating his distinguished contributions to the study not only of Japan but also of China and Korea. As a reflection of Reischauer’s research, this series intends to highlight current scholarship that deepens understandings of East Asia as a region.
Sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center, Korea Institute, Mittal South Asia Institute, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
Speaker: Adrian Zenz, Lecturer in social research methods, European School of Culture & Theology, Germany. Dr. Zenz is author of the recently published paper, '"Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude" - China's Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang,' (Central Asian Survey 2018).
Moderator: Mark Elliott, Vice Provost, International Affairs, Harvard University
Co-Sponsored by:
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies East Asian Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program
Read the transcript of this event on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/adrian-zenz-recent-developments-in-xinjiang/
Panelists: Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University Andrew Gordon, Harvard University Joseph Esherick, University of California San Diego Sugata Bose, Harvard University Lien-Hang Nguyen, Columbia University Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
Moderator: Karen Thornber, Harvard University Asia Center
Organized by: Arunabh Ghosh, Harvard University
Co-Sponsored by: Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Harvard University Asia Center Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies Korea Institute Mittal South Asia Institute
As the role of “strongman” leaders on the world stage appears to be on the rise, this panel examines “strongman politics” in a comparative context. In May 2018, Time Magazine proclaimed in an article that “The ‘Strongmen Era’ Is Here” (Time, May 3, 2018). Highlighting Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s tightening authoritarianism in Russia and China, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and Viktor Orbán’s undermining of democratic norms in Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary, it certainly appears that Huntington’s post-Cold War “third wave” of democratization is witnessing a strongman-inspired reversal. But does this entail a new “era” of authoritarianism advance as the United States rhetorically withdraws from its global leadership role?
This panel examines the role of politically-strong male leaders in authoritarian countries in a comparative context. Elsa Clavé, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center, examines the 2016 election of Duterte in the Philippines; Ayşe Kadıoğlu, Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, looks at Erdoğan’s reversal of Turkey’s previous move towards democratization; Joseph Fewsmith, Professor Political Science at Boston University, compares Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in China to Mao’s historical rise at Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party; and Valerie Sperling, Professor of Political Science at Clark University, interrogates the cult-like masculinity of Vladimir Putin’s image as a “manly” leader in post-Soviet Russia.
Regarding her upcoming discussion of the presidency of Duterte at the panel, Asia Center Postdoctoral Fellow Elsa Clavé, a historian of the Philippines working on the expression of authority and power in its Muslim periphery, stated “President Duerte is not only a populist; he was elected and stays extremely popular for various other reasons. Understanding these reasons is essential to understanding the present society and the direction it is taking. Models and theory are a good approach to reality, but reality exceeds both. A conversation between different fields and disciplines will help, I hope, to refine the model.”
The panel is moderated by Thomas Vallely, Senior Advisor at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, and a specialist on Southeast Asia, and introduced by Karen Thornber, Director of the Harvard University Asia Center.
Co-sponsoring Centers: Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Harvard University Asia Center Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Xi Jinping is consolidating power just as China has embarked on an unprecedented push to become a global and technological power. Xi’s followers are fashioning an economic and administrative system that they hope can achieve these ambitious goals. Some parts of this multi-stranded program will succeed and some will fail. The global economy—and global power relations—will depend on the balance between success and failure, and the ways in which Chinese manages the success and failure of individual initiatives.
Barry Naughton is the Sokwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at UCSD. He is one of the world’s most highly respected economists working on China. He is an authority on the Chinese economy with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance and China’s transition to a market economy.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
In the drama of Chinese history, the environment - and the Yellow River (Huang He) in particular - plays a major role. The river's breaching of its northern banks in the year 1048, for example, precipitated an environmental catastrophe that caused political and economic turmoil in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 CE).
Ling Zhang examines this catastrophe to reveal new information about China's transition from the Tang to the Song dynasty and prompt questions for how China handles its contemporary relationship with its environment.
Ling Zhang is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston College, and an Associate in Research at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, asks how America and China can escape future conflict.
Discussed by Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History at Harvard University, and Oriana Skylar Mastro, Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
Chaired by Michael Szonyi, Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University,
China's leaders often invoke the "century of humiliation" at the hands of foreigners as a means to promote national unity and garner public support for China's return to great power status.
An historical metaphor for outside intervention is the vivid image of foreigners "dividing China up like a melon." As Rudolf Wagner explains, however, this metaphor has a more complex history, which highlights a continuing reverse-engineering of history by China's leaders for political gain.
Rudolf Wagner is Senior Professor in the Institute for Sinology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and Center Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. His research spans Sinology, history, philosopher, and literature, and he has published extensively on topics ranging from Laozi to Buddhism, Republican China, and contemporary fiction.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
From 1966 to 1968, youth in urban China were embroiled in factional battles in what many of them believed to be a revolution of a lifetime. Guobin Yang explores how this factional violence was the result of the enactment of China's earlier revolutionary tradition, and how echoes of this tradition persist in online forums.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Yang’s research bridges the Cultural Revolution, critical social theory, social movements, activism, and media and politics in China. His recent books include, "The Power of the Internet in China" (2009), and "The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China" (2017), both from Columbia University Press.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Mary Gallagher is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies.
Professor Gallagher researches the relationships between capitalism, law and democracy, which she examines in her latest book, “Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers and the State” from Cambridge University Press. In addition, her research also focuses on the resilience of China's authoritarian system and the use of censorship by the Chinese state.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Subscribe via SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, or other podcast providers.
Kaiser Kuo is a household name among China watchers as host of the Sinica Podcast with Jeremy Goldkorn, a current affairs podcast that invites prominent China journalists and China-watchers to participate in uncensored discussions about Chinese political and economic affairs.
Before launching the podcast, however, Kaiser was the guitarist in the Chinese heavy metal band "Tang Dynasty." Kaiser's story of China's burgeoning rock & roll scene in the late 1980s colorfully fuses the music, culture, and politics of the time to present an alternate angle on events that shaped a generation.
Kaiser previously worked as director for international communications for Chinese search engine Baidu. Before that he was a technology correspondent for Red Herring magazine, and also worked as director of digital strategy, China, for Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing. He used to write a column for the foreigner-focused English-language magazine The Beijinger from 2001 to 2011, and is now a regular contributor for SupChina, which acquired the Sinica Podcast in 2016.
The "Harvard on China Podcast" is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen and subscribe to the Harvard on China Podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and Podbean.
As President Trump returns from his first visit to China as Commander-in-Chief, how is U.S. foreign policy reacting to a new administration in Washington and a new rising power in Beijing?
The Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation present Ambassador and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Nicholas Burns, in conversation with Jeeyang Rhee Baum, Ezra Vogel, and Odd Arne Westad, moderated by Michael Szonyi.
Speaker: Ambassador (Ret.) Nicholas Burns, Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School; Former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
Discussants: Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University
Odd Arne Westad, S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School
Jeeyang Rhee Baum, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese History
This event was sponsored by Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The collapse of communist regimes at the end of the Cold War led to a “third wave” of democratization across the world. Despite this, five nominally communist regimes still survive, including the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and today a rising number of nation states appear to be embracing authoritarianism.
Martin Dimitrov, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University and a former postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, talks to the “Harvard on China” podcast about the institutions and mechanisms that it takes for an authoritarian regime to survive in the twenty-first century.
The “Harvard on China” podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, explores the rise of Xi Jinping.
Hosted by Ezra F Vogel at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of our world-debut exhibition of Cultural Revolution-era artworks.
This is the first time that these works, including "dazibao" (or “big-character posters”), have been publicly displayed since the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Panelists: Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History, Yale University
Jie Li, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Research Professor of History and Political Science, Emeritus, Harvard University
Julia Murray, Professor of Art History, Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Xiaofei Tian, Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University
Moderated by Michael Szonyi, Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University
Read blog posts by our panelists on dazibao and Cultural Revolution-era artworks on the Fairbank Center Blog:
Part 1: Reading “Big-Character Posters”: https://medium.com/fairbank-center/exhibiting-the-cultural-revolution-part-1-reading-big-character-posters-d3edd7bb0104
Part 2: The Visual Spectacle of “Dazibao”: https://medium.com/fairbank-center/exhibiting-the-cultural-revolution-part-2-the-visual-spectacle-of-dazibao-7a61d5ba684b
Part 3: Dazibao Exhibitionism: https://medium.com/fairbank-center/exhibiting-the-cultural-revolution-part-3-dazibao-exhibitionism-3855a62a8bc6
Part 4: Pictorial Posters: https://medium.com/fairbank-center/exhibiting-the-cultural-revolution-part-4-pictoral-posters-4475daf92185
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation present a panel discussion with exclusive insight and opinions on China’s 19th Party Congress.
Moderator: Mark Elliott, Vice Provost of International Affairs and Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University
Panelists: Anthony Saich, Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs.
Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the BU Pardee School.
Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Edward Wong, journalist and a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
Huang Yasheng, International Program Professor in Chinese Economy and Business and a Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
James Steinberg, University Professor of Social Science, International Affairs, and Law at Syracuse University, presents the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies' 2017 Neuhauser Lecture.
In the past year, the leaders of China and the United States laid out their respective visions for future peace and prosperity in widely noted speeches at Davos (President Xi) and the UN (President Trump). What do those speeches tell us about the emerging grand strategies of the world’s two leading powers and the implications for East Asia and beyond?
Mr. Steinberg was dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University from 2011 to June 2016. He was previously principal deputy secretary of state for Hillary Clinton, dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, vice president and foreign policy studies director at Brookings Institution, President Clinton’s deputy national security advisor, director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and deputy assistant secretary for analysis in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He co-authored Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: US-China Relations in the 21st Century and Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Presidential Power.
Digital methods are a developing field in the humanities and social sciences that is still little understood by many in the academy.
Dr. Donald Sturgeon is a former Fairbank Center An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, founder of the Chinese Text Project, and currently teaching digital methods at Harvard University. Based on his class at Harvard, Donald discusses how to develop a curriculum for teaching digital methods in Chinese Studies.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The U.S. has maintained a policy of engagement with the People’s Republic of China since Richard Nixon normalized relations with Mao Zedong in 1972. But how is 'engagement' actually understood in Washington and Beijing? And has engagement changed under the new Trump administration?
Orville Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Gary King, Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, talks to the "Harvard on China" podcast about his latest research into online censorship in China.
Professor King is the co-author of a 2017 article, "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument." This paper builds on his previous research about how censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression (2013), as well as the reverse engineering of Harvard's own Chinese social media site to better study censorship.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Follow us on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcast apps.
How could bugs and insects be used to process urban waste in an environmentally-conscious way?
Amy Zhang - An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University - talks to the "Harvard on China" podcast about how black fly larvae are used in communal composting in Guangzhou, China. Could insects hold the answer to China's urban organic waste crisis?
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Follow us on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcast apps.
What role is there for storytelling and roleplay in teaching about Chinatowns and Chinese diasporas?
The "Harvard on China" podcast talks to Eileen Chengyin Chow, Professor in Duke University's Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Director of Duke’s Story Lab, director of the Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University, and Harvard alum. She is the author of the forthcoming “Chinatown States of Mind,” as well as the co-translator with Carlos Rojas of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel “Brothers” and the co-editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas.”
The “Harvard on China” podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the “Harvard on China” podcast on iTunes, or listen to us on Soundcloud, Stitcher, and other podcast apps.
Pundits have been predicting the impending collapse of the Chinese banking system. The collapse has not happened, so what have these pundits been missing?
James Stent is the former director of two Chinese banks from 2003 to 2016, and the author of the “China’s Banking Transformation: the Untold Story,” which dissects China’s hybrid banking model. Stent demonstrates that the banking system can be used as a prism for understanding how the contemporary Chinese political economy works.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, journalist, and reviewer of China’s society, religion, and history.
His writing appears regularly in leading publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books. This year, he was awarded the Shorenstein Journalism Award by Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
Ian's latest book, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao," follows three religious groups in China - an underground Protestant church in Chengdu, pilgrims in Beijing, rural Daoist priests in Shanxi, and meditation groups in caves in the country's south - and their differing approaches to spirituality.
This event was recorded at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and introduced by the Fairbank Center's Director Michael Szonyi.
On May 24, 2017, a court in Taipei struck down Taiwan’s ban on same-sex marriage. This ruling, the result of years of campaigning by LGBT-rights activists in Taiwan combined with recent political support, opens the doors for Taiwan to become the first place in Asia to recognize same-sex unions.
The Taiwanese legislature now has two years in which to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, but in the meantime the effects of today's ruling will resonate across Taiwan and Asia.
George Yin, a former Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate and newly appointed Research Fellow in government at Dartmouth College, talks to the "Harvard on China" podcast about how this same-sex marriage ruling will influence Taiwan's political scene, as well as the island's international reputation.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
Michael Forsythe is a New York Times journalist who is well known for his detailed reports on the links between money and politics in China.
The "Harvard on China" podcast spoke to Michael Forsythe on the eve of China's 19th Party Congress, an important political event where Chinese President Xi Jinping will formally appoint new members to China's politburo standing committee.
What outcomes can we expect to see from this quinquennial event? How do foreign journalists cover sensitive political topics in China? And how is money altering the U.S.-China relationship in light of revelations regarding Jared Kushner's family and their attempted financial deals with a leading Chinese company?
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
In 2004, David Barboza became the New York Times' Shanghai correspondent, where he began researching a story that would fundamentally change the relationship between Western journalists and the Chinese government.
The story involved the former Prime Minister of China, Wen Jiabao, and his billions of hidden assets in stocks, companies, and through family and close friends. By confirming rumors that indicated corruption at the highest levels of the Chinese government, David Barboza's report was explosive, and received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
The scandalizing nature of his report did not go unnoticed by Beijing, however, and the New York Times website remains blocked in China to this day.
The "Harvard on China" podcast sat down with David Barboza while he was in residence at Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 2016.
This interview is the inaugural conversation in the Fairbank Center’s “Communicating China” project, where we examine how China is communicated in public discourse by academics, journalists, and officials, and how that shapes conversations about China’s position in the world.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
China has a long and complex history of interacting with foreign thinkers. After Mao's death in 1976, the Chinese leadership solicited foreign economists in order to curate China’s path towards market reforms and the economic boom that continues today.
These little-understood partnerships between foreign economists and China's leaders are the subject of Julian Gewirtz’s new book “Unlikely Partners: Western Economists, and the Making of Global China" from Harvard University Press. This project developed out of Julian's senior thesis here at Harvard, supervised by the Fairbank Center’s own Professor Erez Manella in 2013.
Julian is currently a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil Candidate in history at the University of Oxford.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
Today’s guest on the “Harvard on China” podcast is Sarah Allan, the Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies at Dartmouth College, and Chair of the Society for the Study of Early China.
Professor Allan's research explores previously undiscovered Chinese philosophical texts from the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) written on bamboo slips and buried in tombs in rural China.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
Today’s guest on the Harvard on China podcast is Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Her research spans the history of China’s long twentieth century. She re-examines the immense societal changes of China's communist past through oral histories of rural women.
While Mao Zedong's mass campaigns for collectivization, anti-intellectualism and ideological purity raged in China’s coastal cities, did these rural women experience the same messages as their urban counterparts?
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
This week, President Donald Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time.
Will their meeting herald a new era in U.S.-China relations? Probably not, and in fact we may see a lot of short term instability between Washington and Beijing. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be optimistic about the future of this vital relationship.
The "Harvard on China" podcast spoke with John Pomfret - former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post from 1996 to 2003, and author of "The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present" - about how he sees the Trump-Xi meeting in the historical context of U.S.-China relations.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
President-elect Donald Trump broke diplomatic protocol by receiving a call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. Why is this phone call so important, why shouldn’t Trump have taken the call, and why are the foreign policy establishment seemingly split on the issue? We spoke with Steven Goldstein, Fairbank Center Associate, organizer of the Center’s Taiwan Studies Workshop, and Sophia Smith Professor of Government, Emeritus at Smith College.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
In the West, we often consider Western philosophical discourse to have a degree of universality. This is not always the case, however, when we think about Chinese thought. Why does Chinese philosophy not hold a similar degree of universal applicability that is assigned to thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant? Can China’s past be conceptualized as a global heritage beyond individuals who are considered Chinese?
Leigh Jenco is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Her research examines Chinese political thought and linkages in political theory between East Asia and the West, and she is the author of the forthcoming Changing Referents: Learning Across Time and Space in China and the West, from Oxford University Press.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
Sino-Japanese relations are often portrayed as a rivalry hindered by historical grievances. Joshua Fogel, Canada Research Chair at York University, Toronto, explores a different side of China’s relationship with Japan. Fogel is the author of many books on Sino-Japanese relations, with his latest book, Japanese for Sinologists, forthcoming from University of California Press.
The Harvard on China podcast talks to Joshua Fogel about his recent research on Kanzo Uchiyama—the founder of Shanghai’s Uchiyama Bookstore and close friend of Chinese literary giant Lu Xun—about how this deep friendship fostered a personal connection between China and Japan and provides grounds for further research on Sino-Japanese relations.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts on the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
Europe’s post-2008 financial crises have provided opportunities for Chinese overseas investment in cash-strapped European states. From infrastructure investments in a high-speed rail line between Serbia and Hungary, to developing Greece’s port of Piraeus, becoming majority shareholders in France’s Toulouse airport, and developing business parks in Belarus, China’s continent-wide investments are altering economic and political realities across Europe. In the wake of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit), how will Chinese investment continue to change realpolitik in the Old Continent?
The Harvard on China podcast talks with Phillipe Le Corre, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute, former advisor at France’s Ministry of Defense, and former fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Le Corre is the author of “China Offensive in Europe” from Brookings Institution Press.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Listen to more podcasts at the Fairbank Center's SoundCloud page.
The 2016 presidential election pushed the U.S-China relationship to the forefront of public debates. In both foreign policy and domestic politics, China loomed large as politicians threw accusations against Beijing's apparent currency manipulation, damage to American competitiveness, or even stealing of American jobs.
So how do these accusations affect arguably the most important relationship in the world? The Fairbank Center talks to Evan Medeiros, former Senior Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council and special assistant to President Obama, about the foundations of U.S.-China relations during the Obama Administration, as well as lessons for the next administration.
The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
The Asia-related centers at Harvard University continue our new “Trump and Asia” series with a panel on international business and trade between the U.S. and Asia in the age of Trump.
Speakers:
William Kirby T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies; Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration; Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor; Director of the Harvard China Fund; former Director of the Fairbank Center
Mireya Solis Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies, and Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies at the Brookings Institute
Mark Wu Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Moderated by Tarun Khanna Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, Director of Harvard University South Asia Institute
Chaired by Andrew Gordon Victor and William Fung Acting Director of the Harvard University Asia Center; Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia-related Centers, this event is the first in a new series on the Asia-Pacific during Trump’s presidency.
Speakers: Joseph Nye, University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University
Lynn Kuok, Visiting Scholar, East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Nonresident Fellow at Brookings Institution
Sung-Yoon Lee, Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Moderated by Susan Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, Harvard University
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
Please note that this recording is in Mandarin 此演讲以汉语进行. Hosted by Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威, this panel of Chinese-language writers explores authors’ perspectives of the Sinophone, featuring Ge Fei 格非 (Writer; Tsinghua University), Ha Jin 哈金 (Writer; Boston University), LO Yi-chin 駱以軍 (writer), NG Kim Chew 黃錦樹 (Writer; National Chi Nan University), Shu Ching SHIH 施叔青 (writer), Kamloon WOO 胡⾦金倫 (publisher, Linking Publishing Company, Taiwan).
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
境外南⽅華⽂文學共和國 | Malaysian writer Ng Kim Chew 黃錦樹presents the keynote speech at the Sinophone Studies: New Directions conference華語語系研究：新⽅方向. Please note that this recording is in Mandarin 此演讲以汉语进行.
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
Professors Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko examine the origins of feminism in contemporary China through translations of He-Yin Zhen, a feminist theorist during China’s Republican Era. This talk is moderated by Professors Ellen Rooney and Ellen Widmer.
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
Elizabeth Economy, C.V. Starr senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, presents "Rethinking China under Xi Jinping: Politics at Home and Abroad” for the Fairbank Center's 2015 Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture.
Listen to more public events from Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on our Soundcloud page.
On September 21, the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion that helped illuminate the historical context of the U.S.-China relationship. Three leading China historians, including Fairbank Center Director Mark Elliott and Harvard China Fund Director William Kirby, presented accounts of U.S.-China relations during different periods in history, shedding valuable light on how historical perspective can help guide relations in a challenging time and in the long-term.
With the state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping approaching, headlines in the United States about China have been dominated by concerns about China’s economic expansion and stock market volatility, cyberespionage, reclamation activities in the South China Sea, and—most critically—China’s reemergence as a global power. However, this prevalent narrative tends to mask the important history of both the enduring issues and profound changes in the bilateral relationship—a history that can help provide the context for actions taken by both countries today and prevent misunderstandings and policy mistakes that could shake the world community.