China Lunchtime Seminars

Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
On the 30th Anniversary of the Normalization of US-China Relations
Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, Harvard University.

About the Talk: Just returning from a conference in Beijing to celebrate the 30th anniversary of US-China normalization, Professor Vogel shared his impressions of the conference. The American group that traveled to the conference was led by President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Scowcroft, et al.

About the Speaker: Ezra Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the US Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his PhD in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960-1961, he was assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961-1964 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming a professor in 1967. He retired from teaching in 2000. His books include The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (The Reischauer Lectures, 2006); Living with China: U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century (American Assembly, 1997); and China at War: Regions of China, 1937-45, edited with by Stephen MacKinnon, Diana Lary (2007). Professor Vogel’s current research concerns the life of Deng Xiaoping.

Thursday, January 29, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunctime Seminar
Man, Myth, and Image: George Washington in China 1800-1939
Rudolph Wagner, Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg.

About the Talk: Professor Wagner discussed the Chinese nineteenth- and twentieth-century mythical lore about the man just invoked by President Obama as “founder of the nation,” George Washington. Through this figure and his depictions, Chinese reformers discuss the words, deeds, and mien of a leader both modern and in tune with oldest Chinese political ideals.

About the Speaker: Rudolph Wagner is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. In addition to his position at Heidelberg University, Professor Wagner is one of the directors of a large project in Heidelberg on the transcultural flow of concepts, institutions, and practices entitled “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows.” He works on Chinese intellectual history with a strong interest in the political implications. His recent publications include a three-volume study on Wang Bi, the third-century philosopher and commentator of the laozi and the Book of Changes, and a new edited volume entitled Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870-1910, published in 2007 by the State University of New York Press.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
Chinese Views of the Jews
 Fu Xiaowei, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Center for Judaic and Chinese Studies at Sichuan International Studies University

About the Talk: Professor Fu Xiaowei described his recent study of the perception of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Chinese academia and its consequent impact in China. She gave a brief introduction to Chinese views of Jews and Judaism since the early 1980s. According to her recent survey, the ever-increasing “Jewish Fever” among both academic and general readers has led to an ambivalent perception of Jews; this perception can be linked to a pervasive misreading of and prejudice toward Judaism that stems from unintentional mistranslation or misinterpretation of some key concepts. Professor Fu explained the historical, cultural, and religious causes of this phenomenon.

About the Speaker: Fu Xiaowei has been Professor of English Literature and the Director of the Center of Judaic and Chinese Studies at Sichuan International Studies University, China, since 2006. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Sichuan University, China. She is now a visiting Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. She is working on Jewish literature and its influence in China, with a strong interest in the relevant cultural issues. Her recent publications include: What is God: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Creation and his Reception and Influence in China 《上帝是谁：辛格创作及其对中国作家的影响》 (Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 2006); “Confusing Judaism and Christianity in Contemporary Chinese Letters” in Judaism (Summer/Fall, 2006); and “ The Influence of Jewish Literature in China,” in The Jewish-Chinese Nexus: A Meeting of Civilizations, edited by M. Avrum Ehrlich (London: Routledge, 2008).

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
Inside the Great Firewall: PRC Online Literary Practice
Michel Hockx, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Visiting Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

About the Talk: In his talk, Professor Hockx gave a general overview of the way in which the genre of "web literature" (wangluo wenxue) has developed in China since the 1990s. Unlike what is common in most Western scholarship of this phenomenon, Professor Hockx emphasis was not on censorship (although this topic was addressed), but on the forms of creativity that are produced despite the presence of censorship. He included examples of a wide variety of practices will be presented, including a short case study of the career trajectory of the Shanghai-based author Chen Cun, sometimes referred to as the “father” of Chinese web literature.

About the Speaker: Michel Hockx studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University and Liaoning University. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1994. In 1996, he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2002, he was appointed to the Chair of Chinese at the University of London. He is a Visiting Professor at Harvard for the Spring term. Michel Hockx’s research covers two main areas of interest: modern Chinese poetry and poetics, and the sociology of modern Chinese literature. His 1994 monograph A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity discusses the literary ideals and practices of China’s earliest modern poets. His work on sociological aspects of modern Chinese literature began with the publication of an edited volume, The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, in 1999, and culminated in his 2003 monograph Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. More recently, he has turned his attention to contemporary Chinese literature, especially the texts and practices of Internet literature.

Thursday, February 26, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
Pacific Currents: The Response of U.S. Allies and Security Partners in East Asia to China's Rise
Evan Medeiros, Senior Political Scientist with the RAND Corporation

About the Talk: China's growing presence in East Asian economic, military, and diplomatic affairs has prompted concerns that China is eroding U.S. influence in the region. Dr. Medeiros discussed a new RAND Corporation report that examines the responses of six US allies and security partners in East Asia to China's rise: Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand. The RAND Study, Pacific Currents, found that none of the six countries see China as a viable strategic alternative to the United States and that the United States remains the security partner of choice. Yet, China's rise is changing the nature of US alliances in the region. Most nations want US involvement in the region to continue–but sometimes only in certain ways, at certain times, and on particular issues.

About the Speaker: Evan Medeiros is a Senior Political Scientist with the RAND Corporation. He received a PhD from the London School of Economics in International Relations. His recent publications include Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (2008) and Modernizing China's Military: Opportunities and Constraints (2005).

Wednesday, March 4, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
The First Uprising of the Cultural Revolution at Nanjing University in 1966:
Dynamics, Nature, and Interpretation
Guoqiang Dong, Associate Professor, History Department, Nanjing University

About the Talk: Professor Dong's talk focused on the “June 2 Incident,” the first uprising of the Cultural Revolution to occur on the Nanjing University campus in 1966. According to Professor Dong’s observation, the incident was mainly the product of internal conflict—at least at first. The relationship between Kuang Yaming, the party leader and president of the university, and the students—which progressed from accord to division to confrontation—derived from a series of misunderstandings. These misunderstandings reflected the inherent flaws of the political structure, administrative principles, and manner of communication at that time. Professor Dong shed new light on Cultural Revolution research and helped the audience to understand better the general nature and characteristics of China’s politics during the Mao period.

About the Speaker: Professor Guoqiang Dong holds a PhD in History from Nanjing University. He currently teaches courses on modern Chinese history at Nanjing University and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, and focuses his research on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. During the 2008-09 academic year, he is visiting Stanford University on a Humanities and International Study fellowship jointly-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center, where he is working on his project, "The Cultural Revolution at Nanjing University as Social History."

Thursday, March 12, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
"For the equality of men--for the equality of nations":
Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States
John Schrecker, Professor of History Emeritus, Brandeis University; Associate in Research, Fairbank Center

About the Talk: In 1861, President Lincoln appointed Anson Burlingame, an anti-slavery leader, minister to China. After Burlingame had served in the post for six years, Beijing selected him as its first ambassador to the Western powers. The Burlingame Mission came to America in 1868. Dr. Schrecker focused on (1) how the politics of reconstruction determined attitudes toward the mission; (2) Burlingame’s presentation of China as a nation that wished to be treated equally, was modernizing, and could both learn from and teach the West; and (3) the famous Burlingame Treaty with America – the first equal treaty between China and a Western power since the Opium War.

About the Speaker: John Schrecker received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from Harvard. From 1971 until he retired in 2008, he taught Chinese history at Brandeis University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He has been a member of the Fairbank Center for almost 50 years. His interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese history, Sino-Western relations, and traditional Chinese social thought. In his most recent book, The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective, 2nd edition, he uses Confucian historical theory to analyze Chinese history and China’s interactions with the West.

Monday, March 30, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Series
Rhetoric of Chinese Nationalism
Peter Perdue, Professor of History, Yale University

About the Talk: The history of modern China is one of almost unrelenting violence, spanning the scale from feuds and paramilitaries to civil war, foreign invasion, and international warfare. In the early twentieth century, revolutionary nationalism, responding to China’s humiliation, adopted a rhetoric justifying violence. Today, China still faces endemic conflict in word and deed, ranging from farmer protests to virtual threats on the Internet. Professor Perdue discussed several dominant tropes of this discourse that persist through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the “race-traitor” or hanjian, humiliation and vengeance, and the psychology of ressentiment.

About the Author: Peter C. Perdue is Professor of History at Yale University. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 A.D. (Harvard University Press,1987), China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), and coeditor of Imperial Formations (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity (Routledge, 2008). He is now beginning a new project of comparative research on Chinese frontiers.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12:15
China Lunchtime Seminar
Two Chinas: The Impact of the Economic Crisis on China
Craig Simons, Asia Bureau Chief for Cox Newspapers

About the Talk: The economic crisis has reshaped China for the worse -- but also for the better. The government is using the export slump to focus industries on building brands and is stepping up support for higher value-added industries. The crisis has also prodded Beijing to speed up financial support for rural areas to boost domestic demand. Mr. Simons led his audience through a close look at the impacts of the crisis on Dongguan, the industrial hub in Guangdong Province.

About the Speaker: Craig Simons is the Asia Bureau Chief for Cox Newspapers, a chain running 17 daily newspapers including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He earned a master's degree from Harvard's Regional Studies - East Asia program in 2001 and studied for a year at Tsinghua University. Prior to joining Cox, he covered western China for Newsweek, worked for Reuters in Singapore, and worked as a freelance writer. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Far Eastern Economic Review, among other publications.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 12:15 pm
"The Past Is Not Like Smoke" Remembrances of the Maoist Era
Jie Li, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

About the Talk: Jie Li's talk was based on a dissertation-in-progress about memory and amnesia of the Mao era, as mediated by words and images, bodies, and places. Ms. Li outlines modes of remembrance from trauma to nostalgia, victimhood to complicity, individual to collective, unofficial to official, and then turned her focus on the life, extant writings, and apotheosis of Lin Zhao (b. 1932), a devout Communist in her early years who turned into a dissident poet in 1957, wrote testaments of blood in prison throughout the 1960s, was executed as a "counterrevolutionary" in 1968, and has been "resurrected" as a martyr or "Chinese Joan of Arc" through a 2004 documentary film.

About the Speaker: Jie Li is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature and film studies at Harvard. She is working on contemporary memories of the Mao era and documentary films from propaganda to testimony. Her fiction has been published in Shanghai Wenxue and her essays on Chinese cinema have appeared or are forthcoming in Senses of Cinema, Jump Cut, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Public Culture. Also a documentary filmmaker, her recent work in Cameroon, The Al-Hadji and His Wives, has been screened at a number of international film festivals.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009   4:15 pm
China Seminar
A Beijing-born Los Angeles Times Reporter Rediscovers China
Ching-Ching Ni, Correspondent, Los Angeles Times and currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University

About the Talk: Covering China is a dream job. But what if you are an American with a Chinese face? Beijing-born Los Angeles Times reporter Ching-Ching Ni talked about her transformation from a young girl who left China in 1979 without speaking a word of English to a foreign correspondent dispatched to the land of her birth by a major American newspaper.

About the Speaker: Ching-Ching Ni is a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.  She spent the past eight years covering China for the Los Angeles Times, based first in Shanghai and then Beijing.  She graduated from Oberlin College and received her master degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
China Environmental Activism and Civil Society Development in China
Wu Fengshi, Assistant Professor, Department of Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong

About the Talk: Despite macro-level structural barriers and an official ideology of materialistic historicism, bottom-up environmentalism has emerged and grown steadily in China during the past 15 years. To date, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social activism have reached a higher level of maturity in environmental protection than in other issue areas. Professor Wu examined three features of environmental activism in China: first, consolidation of connections among NGOs and other social groups; second, coordinating collective actions and sharing experiences; and last but not least, self-reflection on the whole community and articulation of shared principles. The continual development of environmental social activism provides important evidence for political scientists when applying the concept of civil society in order to develop suitable meso-level indicators for the China case.

About the Speaker: Dr. Wu specializes in China’s transnational relations and civil society development. She has published on transnational activism and advocacy networks related to China’s environment and public health (particularly AIDS). During this academic year, she is a Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholar. Her current research focuses on engaging the Chinese through international NGOs. Her most recent publications include “State and Environmental NGOs in Environmental Security in Northeast Asia” (with Esook Yoon, in Environmental Security in Northeast Asia, U.S. Institute for Peace Press, forthcoming) and “Global Regime Formation or Complex Institution Building? The Principled Content of International River Agreements.” (with Ken Conca and Cigi Mei, in International Studies Quarterly, 50/2, June 2006).

Thursday, May 14, 2009 12:15 pm
China Lunchtime Seminar
The Road from Tiananmen Square:
Twenty Years Since June 4th
William Alford, Professor of Law, and Director, East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard; Merle Goldman, Professor of History Emerita, Boston University, and Associate, the Fairbank Center; Roderick MacFarquhar, Professor of History and Political Science, Dept. of Government, Harvard; and Martin K. Whyte, Professor of Sociology, Harvard

About the Talk: The panelists discussed the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration on China's political, economic, social, and intellectual environment.

About the Speakers:
William P. Alford is Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, Director of East Asian Legal Studies, and Chair of the Project on Disability at Harvard Law School. His books include Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (edited, 2007) and Prospects for Professionalism in China: Essays on Civic Vocations (co-edited, forthcoming).

Merle Goldman, Professor Emerita of Chinese History at Boston University and Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies of Harvard, is the author of a number of books on modern Chinese history and culture. Two of her books, China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (1981) and Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (1994), were selected by The New York Times Book Review as notable books in their respective years. She is co-author of updated editions of China: A New History (with John K. Fairbank, 1998, 2006), and her latest book is From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (2005).

Roderick MacFarquhar is Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard, and has been Director of the Fairbank Center and Chairman of the Government Department. His many authored, edited, and co-edited volumes include The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (1989), the PRC volumes for the Cambridge History of China (1987, 1991), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (1997), three volumes on The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974, 1983, 1997), and, most recently, Mao's Last Revolution (co-authored, 2006). In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a member of Parliament.

Martin K. Whyte is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He specializes in the study of grassroots social organization and social change in the PRC and has two forthcoming books reflecting his recent work on inequality in China: One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in China (edited, 2010) and Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China (forthcoming).

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