Welcome from Marty Whyte
Acting Director of the Fairbank Center
 Welcome one and all to the start of a new academic year of activities at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies! This opening statement conveys two new developments at the Fairbank Center. First, our Director, William Kirby, will be enjoying a richly deserved sabbatical leave this year, and I will be serving as Acting Director in his absence. Second, we have changed our name, from the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research to the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. This change, approved by the Center’s Executive Committee last spring, is designed to more accurately reflect our Center’s focus and activities (and acknowledge that we share the East Asian “turf” with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Korea Institute). One related piece of news is that we welcome to our Center Professor Liu Xiaoyuan, who will be teaching courses on China in the history department while Bill Kirby is on leave. Professor Liu received his PhD from the University of Iowa and now teaches at Iowa State University. His primary research focuses on the ethnic frontiers of China. His office for the coming year will be in the Fairbank Center.
This year we again welcome a bumper crop of new postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and visiting fellows. Each has a specific research project for the year, and as the year goes along, all will have opportunities to present talks and participate in workshops, so that our already diverse and lively community will be enriched by the presence of these very special visitors. A brief listing of these newcomers is contained later in this newsletter. For more details on their backgrounds and research projects, you may consult the special booklet, “Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars, Fellows, and Associates, 2007–2008,” which can be found in our front office, Room S138 of the CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street.
Some of the special events scheduled for this fall include a conference entitled “Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Post-Reform China,” organized by Margaret Woo, Mary Gallagher, and Merle Goldman, to be held on October 12–13; the 2007 Annual Neuhauser Lecture, with the speaker this year Alan Romberg, Director of the East Asia Program at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., speaking on “The US ‘One China’ Policy: Time for a Change?” on October 17; the latest in a series of conferences on Tibet co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center, which is scheduled to take place on November 28–29, organized by Lobsang Sangay, Research Associate at the Harvard Law School; and a conference, “Rule and Reform in the Giants: China and India Compared,” organized by Liz Perry and Devesh Kapur, to be held November 30–December 2.
As is the case every year, the Fairbank Center will also play host to a rich variety of ongoing workshops on many different aspects of Chinese society (e.g., Chinese business, current events, gender studies, religion, 20th-century history, Taiwan studies) as well as public lectures by local and visiting China scholars. More information on some of these events will be found later in this newsletter. For newcomers, the best way to keep track of the seemingly bewildering variety of talks, conferences, and other events at both the Fairbank Center and our sister centers in the Asia Center at Harvard is to subscribe to the online Asia Bulletin.
Whether you are a student, faculty member, visiting scholar, or affiliate from the larger Boston community, I hope you will come by 1730 Cambridge Street often to sample the various talks and activities that make the Fairbank Center such an exciting place in which to try to understand better the world’s most populous and dynamically changing society! And don’t forget the Center’s periodic social gatherings, the first of which will be the Open House of all of Harvard’s Asia centers on Wednesday, October 3, from 5 to 9 p.m. at CGIS South.
—Martin K. Whyte
Professor of Sociology and Acting Director
The Fairbank Center Welcomes Professor Liu Xiaoyuan
 This academic year the Fairbank Center is pleased to host Dr. Liu Xiaoyuan. He is a visiting professor in the History Department, replacing Bill Kirby who is on sabbatical this year, and he will have an office in the Center.
Dr. Liu received his PhD from the University of Iowa and he currently teaches at Iowa State University in Ames. As a youth during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, he saw the “massive persecution of many Inner Mongols.” This experience led him to his current research interest in the topic of The Mongolian Question and the Genesis of China’s Multiethnic System: An Historical Inquiry. From the 1940s through to the 1970s, there was a tense interaction between pressures from the Cold War, the Chinese Civil War, and the struggle of the minority peoples in China for autonomy. Inner Mongolia was one of those ethnic frontier regions. Before the PRC was established, these regions had already developed strong secessionist movements or had already achieved de facto separation from China. Their relatively peaceful reintegration with China under the PRC cries for understanding.
Liu feels that the conventional history of post-World War II China has largely neglected the developments in China’s northern and western frontiers. The case of Inner Mongolia, he says, indicates that along China’s ethnic frontiers a sub-national group’s natural propensity for territorial autonomy tends to be balanced or restrained by their historical, cultural, and economic ties with the majority Han population.
The work in progress will be Professor Liu’s third book. His first was A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941– 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and the second was Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2004). Liu is not a stranger to the Fairbank Center, since he was here from 1997 to 1999, so many friends will welcome him back.
Shum Fellowship Winners Announced
The Shum fellowships have been offered for the past two years by the Fairbank Center. A generous grant from Desmond Shum enables two Harvard graduate students to spend a year studying in China. These students, who are studying in the fields of the contemporary Chinese social sciences, receive a grant of $20,000 each. Students apply to the Fairbank Center and are selected through a competitive application process, with award decisions made by a committee of faculty associated with the Fairbank Center. The winning students are known as the Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellows.
Two fellowships have been awarded each year in the past two years. Preference in awarding the fellowships is given to students in the fields of government, public policy, public administration, economics, law and sociology, according to the terms of the gift. Competition is open to all Harvard PhD candidates from any school within the university specializing in a field of the social sciences. The two Shum Fellows selected for the 2007–2008 academic year were recently announced.
Holly Ming is a PhD candidate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The title of her proposed project is Two Studies on Intergenerational Poverty and Social Mobility in Urban China. One study will investigate the educational opportunities and outcomes of migrant workers’ children in Beijing and Shanghai. The second study will compare trends in intergenerational poverty and will evaluate intervention strategies targeting at-risk youths in Hong Kong and Shanghai. She will be affiliated with research institutions in each city; in Beijing her affiliation will be with Beijing Normal University.
Wu Hsinchao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Harvard. Her research is titled Engaging the Government and Local Communities in Reconstructing ‘the’ Tradition; Revitalization of Jinshang Culture in Shanxi Province. She will be affiliated with the History and Culture College of Shanxi University, where she will join the ongoing seminars about the issue of Jinshang culture and will visit the filled in sites of the culture as part of this research.
Latest Publication from the Fairbank Center
The Fairbank Center has been publishing academic monographs since 1956, when it was called the Center for East Asian Studies. Today, books funded by Center money are published by the Harvard University Asia Center and distributed by Harvard University Press.
The most recent title funded in part by Center funds is a study by Patricia Thornton, Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, who is currently teaching international studies at Portland State University. The book is Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China. The key finding of the book holds that state-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing process. Central leaders seek not only to impose a particular moral order, but also to make the presence of the state at the center of that vision appear both natural and necessary.
Thornton’s book maps the complex process of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzhen reign (1723–1735), the Guomindang’s Nanjing decade (1927–1937); and the Communist Party’s Socialist Education Campaign (1962–1966). During each period, central authorities introduced, not without resistance, institutional change designed to extend the reach of central control over local political life.
16th Annual Neuhauser Lecture presents Alan Romberg
Alan Romberg has enjoyed a distinguished career working on Asian issues in and out of government, including 20 years as a US foreign service officer. He is currently Director of the East Asia Program at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC. He has been Principal Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and a staff member of the National Security Council for China. He spent almost ten years as the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. We claim him as a Harvard man, since he holds an MA from Harvard, along with his BA from Princeton.
For the past few years, Romberg has joined the delegation of scholars sent by the Fairbank Center to visit Taipei and Beijing, and recently the trip has also included Tokyo, where they meet and speak with top government officials in each nation. His most recent visit was earlier this year. The US ‘One China” Policy: Time for a Change? is the provocative title of this year’s talk. Drawing on his many years of government service and policy analysis, and his experiences living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Romberg provided an analysis that is straightforward and in the best interest of all the parties concerned with this issue. Although all parties might not agree with the analysis, the Fairbank Center hopes that all sides will give Romberg’s points thoughtful evaluation.
The lecture was held on Wednesday 24 October 2007 at 4 p.m. in the Belfer Case Study Room (S020) of CGIS South Building, at 1730 Cambridge street on the Harvard campus. The Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture Series was instituted in 1988. It is funded by a generous grant from Charlie’s brother Dr. Paul Neuhauser and his wife, Mary, who are expected to be present. A reception will follow the talk.
For the full transcipt of the talk, click here >
Workshop, 12 – 13 October 2007
"Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Post-Reform China"
In recent years the Chinese state has implemented a wide array of competing legal mechanisms ranging from courts to mediation to arbitration to administrative review. This workshop attempted an evaluation and critical review of the various legal options that are theoretically open to Chinese citizens. Among the questions asked were: Are these institutions working at cross-purposes or are they reaffirming each other’s legitimacy? What are the experiences of ordinary citizens in their dispute resolution? How do these legal institutions adjust state and society relations? More importantly, is there a gap between ordinary Chinese citizens and their legal institutions?
Leading law scholars from China, Taiwan, and the US who have gained unusual access to mainland Chinese courts and have collected empirical data on civil dispute resolution in China presented their findings. The workshop was held on 12 and 13 October 2007 in Room S050 of CGIS South Building. It was organized by Margaret Woo, professor of law at Northeastern University, Mary Gallagher, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan, and Merle Goldman, associate at the Fairbank Center. Support for its activities comes from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the program in East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and the Fairbank Center. For more information contact m.woo@neu.edu.
Conference, 28–29 November 2007
Autonomy in Tibet Conference This conference is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, 28 and 29 November 2007, in Room S250 of the CGIS South Building. It is being organized by Dr. Lobsang Sangay, Research Associate at the Harvard Law School. Funding will be provided by the Fairbank Center, the Harvard University Asia Center, and the East Asian Legal Studies Program at the Harvard Law School.
The main purpose of the conference is to allow Tibetan and Chinese scholars to exchange views on the contemporary situation and visions for future improvement on the concept of autonomy. This conference will provide a forum for prominent Chinese and Tibetan scholars and policy analysts to meet face to face in an academic environment. It will allow the participants to initiate discussions on autonomy from divergent perspectives, social, economic and cultural issues including an implementation of the Constitution and the Minority Nationality Act in Tibetan areas in China.
These topics address vitally important subjects that will help open the gate to exploring other issues and contribute to a conducive environment to promote understanding on Tibet-China relations. Efforts will be made to address and understand each of these topics in a dispassionate and objective style, permitting all sides to present their perspectives and to better understand one another.
Conference, 30 November–1 December
"Rule and Reform in the Giants: China and India Compared"
China and India will be the focus of a two-day comparative conference entitled “Rule and Reform in the Giants: China and India Compared” on 30 November and 1 December 2007. Co-sponsored by the Asia Center and the Fairbank Center and organized by Professors Elizabeth Perry, Government Department, Harvard University, and Devesh Kapur, Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, the conference will explore, in six separate panels, issues of national integration, center-local relations, separatist tensions, democracy and authoritarianism, and the political processes and developmental outcomes of economic reform.
The aim of the conference is to produce an edited volume that will offer a comparative understanding of the means by which the world’s two most populous polities, China and India, have attempted to control and change their huge and unwieldy societies. As both countries move from previously quite self-sufficient economies toward increasing integration with world markets, their impact economically—and strategically as well—will obviously grow. Understanding the sources of their different levels of socioeconomic success to date will help to predict their projections of global power in the near future.
Panelists include Zhao Suisheng, University of Denver; Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University; Yang Dali, University of Chicago; Nirvikar Singh, UC Santa Cruz; Bruce Dickson, George Washington University; Pratap Mehta, Center for Policy Research, New Delhi; Gardner Bovingdon, Indiana University; Sanjib Baruah, Bard College; Martin Whyte, Harvard University; Lant Pritchett, Harvard University; Mary Gallagher, Cornell University, and Devesh Kapur, University of Pennsylvania.
The conference will be held in Seminar Room S020, CGIS South Building, Concourse Level. For additional information, please contact Holly Angell at vhangell@fas.harvard.edu.
Conference in Kerala, 21–23 January 2008
"The India-China-US Triangle" This is an international conference convened by the Centre for National Renaissance in New Delhi, in association with the Fairbank Center, the Institute for International Studies and the Center for China in the World Economy, Tsinghua University, Beijing.
India, China, and the US are the three most populous nations of the world, together comprising about 43 percent of the global population. These three economies have the world’s largest GDPs and each possesses a large military force. Clearly the bilateral and trilateral relations of these three nations in the coming decades will be of extraordinary global interest.
The conference intends to pose serious questions for debate: In the coming decades, will India and China continue to grow economically or are there obstacles to such growth? As candidates for developed country status, will India and China be an economic opportunity or a threat to the US economic situation? Will the US be able to strategically partner with India or China to build a new world order? How politically stable will India and China be decades hence? The conference will be held on 21–23 January 2008 at the School for Communication and Management Studies in Kerala, India. Harvard associates attending will include Roderick MacFarquhar, Dwight Perkins, Merle Goldman, and Marshall Goldman.
The conference organizer is Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Chairman of the Centre for National Renaissance, India.
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