Post-doctoral Fellows 2006-2007

Lee Haiyan, An Wang Post-doctoral Fellow
haiyan.lee@colorado.edu

Lee Haiyan is assistant professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her articles have appeared in Public Culture, positions, Modern China, and The Journal of Asian Studies. Stanford University Press will soon issue her new book, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Her project at the Fairbank Center is titled How We Learned to Love Strangers: A Study of Social Imaginaries in China. The project studies how identities, values, and solidarities are negotiated in contemporary China through the figure of "the stranger." The stranger might be the wanderer, the bandit, the class enemy, the migrant, the foreigner, the ghost—all well-known tropes in Chinese social imaginaries and can tell us much about changing constructions of identity and difference, emotion and ethics, and civility and citizenship. By canvassing a wide range of materials and combining the methods and concerns of literary studies, history, philosophy, and anthropology, she hopes to contribute to the interdisciplinary studies of public culture, democracy, and globalization.

Liu Yu, An Wang Post-doctoral Fellow
yl487@columbia.edu

Liu Yu received her PhD from Columbia University in spring 2006. She is a political scientist who will be researching her dissertation topic, From the Mass Line to the Mao Cult: The Production of Legitimate Dictatorship in Revolutionary China. The research explains the puzzle of Mao’s “legitimate dictatorship,” how people fanatically supported him as a totalitarian leader whose policies destroyed their own lives.  It discusses Mao’s unique practice and discourse, the Mass Line, and posits that this was not a mechanism of representation, as many scholars have claimed, but was rather only a means of policy implementation. By making the masses agents of dictatorial policies, the Mass Line created the condition for the masses to justify these policies internally. In other words, by turning personal dictatorship into mass dictatorship, Mao reaped a high level of legitimacy.

Eugenio Menegon, An Wang Post-doctoral Fellow
emenegon@bu.edu

Eugenio Menegon currently teaches in the Department of History at Boston University. He has published widely in English, Chinese, and Italian. At the Fairbank Center his research will be on Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. Starting in the late sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries introduced their own version of European culture and religion to late-Ming and Qing courtiers, officials, scholars, and commoners. This research will investigate the neglected ritual and religious dimensions in the life of Catholic communities in late imperial times, in order to contextualize the experiences of those Chinese who believed in the “Teaching of the Lord of Heaven” (Tianzhujiao), as Catholicism was known in China. The teaching was considered a heterodox movement by the state, and it suffered the same fate as other suspect cults. This research will investigate state and elite inquisitorial-style records, to reveal some of the dynamics of state-believer relations. The geographic area investigated will be northeastern Fujian province (Mindong), partly because of the richness of the multilingual archival records available for this area, and their uninterrupted history of almost four centuries as Catholic communities.

Liu Hwa-jen, Taiwan Studies Post-doctoral Fellow
hj_liu@berkeley.edu

Liu Hwa-jen received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research project is When Labor and Nature Strike Back: Taiwan and Korea Compared. In this study, the post-WWII labor and environmental movements in Taiwan will be compared with those in Korea, a country sharing similar experiences in colonial heritage, geopolitical position, divided statehood, authoritarian government, and a breakneck speed of state-led industrialization. In Taiwan’s case, the environmental movement arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the labor movement of 1987 and 1988. By contrast, Korea followed the more commonly accepted pattern of a strong labor movement preceding its environmental movement. This phenomenon will use concepts such as the early-riser movements versus latecomer movements and the coexistence of labor and environmental issues, and how these became potent social forces challenging the state and the market. The time span of the research done this year will be the 1987 to 1995 period, a time of political reconfigurations just after the rise of the latecomer movements in each country.

He Zhaohui, Harvard-Yenching Library Postdoctoral Fellow
zhaohuihe@pku.edu.cn

He Zhaohui received his PhD in Ming history from Peking University in 2004, and was a visiting scholar in the History Department of the University of Minnesota in the 2005–2006 academic year. He has an interest in both China’s early print culture and in librarianship. At the Fairbank Center he will be investigating Authorship and Copyright in Early Modern China. In the newly developing field of printing culture, the topics of authorship and copyright have yet to be fully explored. In China, cultural production and political practice were closely combined, unlike early modern Europe where men of letters were blocked from pursuing a political career. Although China did not have effective protections for copyright or a licensing system, early Chinese books often carried the phrase fanke bijiu (reprinting prohibited). In China during the Ming, when commercial printing and publishing boomed, many literate men became commercial writers. They may have hoped to become officials, but not all could pass the civil service exam, and writing for money became a possible way to earn income. Some commercial writers made their living by writing, while others were more concerned with the dissemination of their thought.

M. Taylor Fravel, Chinese International Relations Postdoctoral Fellow
fravel@mit.edu

M. Taylor Fravel received his PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and currently teaches as an assistant professor at MIT. He has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research articles have appeared in The China Quarterly and Asian Survey. He also holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. During his fellowship at the Fairbank Center, he will be completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Securing China: Explaining Cooperation and Escalation in Territorial Disputes. China has settled 17 of its 23 territorial disputes, often to improve ties with neighboring states during periods of regime insecurity. China has used force in six disputes to bolster its claims, but has rarely seized large amounts of land on the battlefield.