Spring 2008 news

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Postdoctoral workshop:
"Urban Space, Activism, and the Everyday in Twentieth-Century China"
Saturday, March 1, 2008

Organized by Fabio Lanza, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow

This workshop posed the questions: How can we understand activism without reducing it to the expression of pre-existing social groups, or to the result of shifts in the realm of ideas? How do people become political, and how do they get involved in political militancy? How do political categories and subjectivities (worker, student, activist) come to the fore in a particular historical conjuncture?

The workshop focused on the famous case of the May Fourth Movement in Beijing and the concurrent emergence of the political category of “student” in modern China. While the weighty presence of politically active students in China throughout the twentieth century has been widely studied, the confines and the very existence of the category of “students” have been largely taken for granted. Students, it has been assumed, simply materialize as soon as people who go to (modern) schools can be counted and accounted for. But the category of “students” has an origin, and this is precisely the first instance of modern “student” activism, on May 4, 1919. While in China—as elsewhere—there have always been people who study, the political category of “student” was created in the twentieth century.

The problem then and now is how to discuss not only the involvement of single individuals in political action (politicization), but also the shaping of a political signifier that defines this action. This workshop examined this issue from two different and complementary perspectives.

  1. Daily Life: Lived practice and the shifting routine of the quotidian might not only influence political awareness, but also the location of political expression. How lived space changes and is changed might be more relevant than other factors in framing activism.
  2. Urban Space: Most activists (and those of the May Fourth period are examples) take to the streets—that is, they interact with and use urban space for politics. But the city does not simply function as a background. Modern activism is historically related to changes in the city structure (as in the case of Paris), but also actively reshapes the urban geography and remakes the meaning of urban symbols.

Postdoctoral workshop:
"Contemporary Temple Networks in Taiwan and China"
Saturday, April 12, 2008

Organized by Elana Chipman, Taiwan Studies Postdoctoral Fellow

Relationships among popular Taiwanese temples have changed significantly over the past few decades. Political liberalization, the transforming economy, and changing social organization have all contributed to the transformation of temple networks and hierarchies.

Renewed travel across the Taiwan Strait has had equally significant consequences for the ways in which temples interact with one another and with their faithful. Most recently, the situation appears to have stabilized or reached an impasse; the rush to re-establish relations with mainland temples seems to have abated and inter-temple rivalries are less likely to command media attention. In contrast, communal temples on the mainland continue to be rebuilt, and Buddhist and other sectarian orders are reconfiguring the religious landscape with ambitious projects.

This workshop reflected on these transformations and their significance for individual religiosity, communal identity, and national politics. Some possible topics/questions addressed were: Can trans-national pan-Chinese temple networks be mapped? What role do the overseas Chinese play in Chinese temple networks? Have inter-temple rivalries already passed their peak in Taiwan? How will the resurgence in religion and reconstruction of temples on the mainland affect Taiwanese temple networks? Can we compare historical temple networks with contemporary configurations? What is the significance of internal migration to local networks of power (as in Duara 1988)?

Participants included: Prof. Robert Weller (Boston University); Prof. Michael Szonyi (Harvard); Sun Yanfei (University of Chicago); Prof. Michael Puett (Harvard); Dr. D.J. Hatfield (Berklee College of Music); and workshop organizer Dr. Elana Chipman (Harvard).

Postdoctoral workshop:
"Public Finance and Market Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century China, 1850–1911"
Saturday, May 31, 2008

Organized by Wenkai He, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow

Wenkai He’s dissertation, “Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England (1642–1752), Japan (1868–1895), and China (1850–1911),” examines a fundamental institutional innovation in public finance which he terms the rise of the modern fiscal state. This change enabled the state to use centrally collected revenues from indirect taxes to mobilize financial resources through either long-term borrowing or issuing paper notes. The modern fiscal state greatly enhanced state capacity and stimulated financial development, particularly the development of long-term credit instruments, such as state bonds and paper notes. The rise of the modern fiscal state thus represents a vital stage in the transformation from early modern to modern state and economy.

The Fairbank postdoctoral workshop, scheduled for May 31, 2008, will examine the implications of the modern fiscal state for the study of state-economy interactions in late nineteenth-century China. The workshop’s main theme is to consider how Chinese institutions of public finance restricted the further development of a vibrant and dynamic market economy. More specifically, why did the institutions of public finance remain decentralized in China during the second half of the nineteenth century even though the Chinese state had turned to indirect taxes, such as customs and taxes upon domestic consumption (for example, the salt taxes and lijin 釐金 duties)? Further, how did fiscal decentralization contribute to the lack of long-term investment in China?

The first half of the workshop will consider how monetary institutions contributed to the Chinese state’s inability to mitigate the deflation caused by the severe silver drainage after the 1820s. The economic reasoning behind the 1850s experiment with paper notes will be discussed against the background of statecraft school approaches to monetary policy. Special attention will also be given to the severe disruptions to the domestic economy during the Taiping Rebellion and to the subsequent failure of paper notes. The second half of the workshop will concentrate on the persistence of fiscal decentralization between the 1860s and 1890s and the center’s inability to use speedy means to remit government spending during this period. Also to be examined are the methods used to supervise the collection of lijin duties in the provinces and the potential and limitations of centralizing indirect tax collection in China during this period. Based upon these discussions, the workshop will then re-evaluate the center-province relationship.

Participants in this workshop will include Prof. Patrick O’Brien from the London School of Economics, Prof. Ho Hon-Wai of the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Prof. Mark C. Elliot of Harvard, Profs. Madeleine Zelin and David Weiman of Columbia University, Prof. R. Bin Wong of UCLA, and Prof. Jack Goldstone of George Mason University.

The workshop is sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and co-sponsored by the 20th-Century China Seminar.

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