November 24, 2009
CCS Special Presentation: "China as a Eurasian Subcontinent: Perspectives on the Past and Future"
James A. Millward
Associate Professor of History, Walsh School of Foreign Service,
Georgetown University
December 03, 2009
6:00pm: Reception in 4th floor Rackham Assembly Hall
7:00pm: Talk in 4th floor Rackham Amphitheater
Though often treated as exceptional and isolated from the broader developments of Eurasian history, China is and has always been linked to the rest of Eurasia more closely than is often thought. From contacts with Indo-European- and Altaic-speaking peoples and trans-continental exchanges of ideas and things, to imperial expansion deep into Central Eurasia, to today's tightening economic and political ties with Central Asia, the continental dimension of China's international relations has been and continues to be highly significant to China, the world, and China's position in the world — in ways often neglected when China is framed as an isolated civilization or exclusively as part of "East Asia." In his talk, Professor Millward will consider what China's historical relationship with continental Eurasia means both for our understanding of China's past and with regard to China today and in the future.
Part of the CCS co-sponsored conference on "The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility - from 1789 to 2009."
Posted by zzhu at 11:49 PM
The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789 to 2009
Please click on banner for specific conference panels, abstracts and papers.
Henderson Room, Michigan League
Posted by zzhu at 11:08 PM
China Town Hall 2009
Posted by zzhu at 10:54 PM
November 04, 2009
The Center for Southeast Asian Studies Presents: Peranakan Musical Cultures in Singapore
Source: The Peranakans - http://www.peranakanmuseum.sg/themuseum/abtperanakans.asp
The Center for Southeast Asian Studies invites you to a Friday-at-Noon lecture:
Peranakan Musical Cultures in Singapore
Lee Tong Soon, Department of Music, Emory University
12:00pm – 1:30pm
Friday, November 6, 2009
1636 SSWB/International Institute
The Peranakan community in Singapore has made much concerted efforts in enhancing public understanding of their culture. With a mix of Chinese and Malay heritage, the roots of the Peranakan communities can be traced back to 17th century Malacca. Since the 1980s, Peranakan culture has been represented in the form of restaurants specializing in their cuisine, revival of Peranakan plays, and permanent exhibits of their architecture, dress, household paraphernalia, and crafts in museums. Such efforts complement, and indeed constitute the broader State's effort to create interests and concern on local heritage, thereby affirming the community as an integral part of the State's conception of a national culture. Peranakan musical practices in Singapore include the performance of music and songs in Peranakan plays, singing of Peranakan hymns and translations of English hymns in the Peranakan patois for Catholic masses, and dondang sayang singing sessions.
Much of the State's representation of Peranakan culture is inclined towards nostalgic and reified perspectives of Peranakan identities and belies the current state of anxiety the community faces in affirming who they are. In this presentation, I would like to explore the ways in which Peranakan music underscores the changing dynamics of Peranakan identities in Singapore. By focusing on musical activities of pre-WW2 amateur Peranakan music groups, I want to show how different musical practices of the community in early 20th century Singapore reveal shifting moments in the meanings, values, and functions of being Peranakan.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies.
Posted by zzhu at 10:45 PM
October 26, 2009
CCS and the Global Lens 2009 Film Series: Zhang Yang's GETTING HOME, Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Posted by zzhu at 11:18 AM
October 21, 2009
Asian Languages and Cultures Graduate Student Colloquium "Reconvening Asia: Embodiment, Transformation, Space"
Date: Friday October 23, 2009
Time: 4-6pm
Location: Rm 2022, Thayer Building
Papers to be given:
1) "The yoga in China: narratives of identity, syncretism, and hybridity and the study of East Asian Buddhism."
Professor Charles D. Orzech
University of North Carolina
2) "South Asian refractions in the prism of Diaspora: from ritual clowns and Sufi processions to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood movies."
Professor Pnina Werbner
Keele University
Staffordshire, UK
Papers will be available to distribution, please email harjeets@umich.edu for more information.
Posted by zzhu at 11:33 AM
October 20, 2009
China Entrepreneur Forum, October 31, 2009
Please click on poster for additional information.
Posted by zzhu at 12:36 PM
October 09, 2009
Hong Kong Today and Beyond: Economy and Opportunities
Click on poster to RSVP.
Posted by zzhu at 03:02 PM
October 06, 2009
A Community between Two Nations: The Chinese in North Vietnam, 1954-1978
The University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies Friday-at-Noon lecture presents
Friday, October 9, 2009
"A Community between Two Nations: The Chinese in North Vietnam, 1954-1978"
Han Xiaorong, Butler University
12:00 – 1:30 pm
1636 SSWB/International Institute
Market stall in Hanoi, 2006. Photo by Ryan Hoover.
From the 1950s to the late 1970’s, when the Chinese in several other Southeast Asian nations were experiencing forced assimilation and other difficulties with local governments, the Chinese in North Vietnam were enjoying privileged treatment by the North Vietnamese government. In the late 1970s, when the Chinese in most other Southeast Asian nations had transformed from sojourners to local citizens, most Chinese in North Vietnam were forced out of the country. Prior to Vietnamese reunification in 1975, North Vietnamese leaders adopted lenient policies towards the Chinese community, mainly a reflection of the importance of their war-time relationship with China. But the state’s preferential treatment of the Chinese ultimately contributed to a delay in the assimilation of Chinese residents, who by the end of the 1970s still had not completed the transformation from sojourners to citizens. After reunification, the desire to clarify loyalty, i.e. to “purify” the nation-state, led the Vietnamese government to initiate an aggressive process of forced assimilation. This policy, and the deterioration of relations between Vietnam and China in the late 1970s, triggered an exodus of Chinese residents.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies
Posted by zzhu at 10:54 PM
September 24, 2009
CCS Public Lecture Series - A Lecture by Melissa Chiu
Posted by zzhu at 04:48 PM
July 29, 2009
UMMA Exhibit - Treasures Rediscovered: Chinese Stone Sculptures - NOW through August 16, 2009
Posted by zzhu at 01:46 PM
March 16, 2009
Air dates of "The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage"
The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage has been scheduled to air on the Michigan Channel at the following times:
3/17/2009 at 9PM
3/18/2009 at 2PM
3/22/2009 at 8PM
The Michigan Channel is channel 22 on cable.
See original event info here.
Posted by zzhu at 03:18 PM
February 26, 2009
03/09/09 LECTURE: Cultural Exchange Along the Silk Road
Monday, March 9, 2009
7:00 p.m. - 8:15 p.m.
International Institute
School of Social Work Building
Room 1636, First Floor, 1080 S. University
Brad Farnsworth, CCS faculty associate, gives a multi-media presentation on the general history of the Silk Road with a specific focus on how trade effects culture.
For more information, contact the Education Department at 734.647.6712 or at umsed@umich.edu.
A collaboration with the U-M Ross School of Business and U-M Center for Chinese Studies.
Posted by zzhu at 09:55 AM
February 05, 2009
Peter Purdue, "Violence and Nationalism," 02/13/09
Posted by zzhu at 03:56 PM
Haiping Yan: Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination: Research Seminar, 02/18/09
Posted by zzhu at 10:07 AM
January 29, 2009
February 17, 2009 - Cross-Currents: the Cinemas of Japan, China and Korea
A Lecture by Tom Vick
Date: Tuesday, 02/17/2009; 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: Rackham Amphitheater, 915 E. Washington Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Tom Vick explains how the cinemas of Japan, China, and Korea have influenced one another over the years.
In recent years, international co-productions have become more and more common in East Asian cinema. Movie stars from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and China now regularly form international casts in films such as Peter Chan’s Perhaps Love (which also featured Bollywood choreography), and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. This talk traces the history of transnational collaboration in East Asian cinema, beginning in the early twentieth century, when the propaganda machinery of Japan’s imperial ambitions laid the groundwork for, and influenced the aesthetics of, film production across the region, to the present day, in which globalization has led to border-crossing movie stars, ambitious international co-productions, and fascinating experiments in popular filmmaking that mix and match genres, styles and cultural influences.
Posted by zzhu at 04:18 PM
The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
A Lecture by Alexandra Harney
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
6:00pm: Reception to meet the author
4th floor Rackham Assembly Hall
7:00pm: Presentation
4th floor Rackham Amphitheater
Rackham Graduate School
915 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
Free and Open to the Public
The China Price, once the term used to describe the world’s lowest prices, is rising as the cost of everything from labor to energy increases in China. As the country’s manufacturing sector enters another period of transformation, what does this mean for its people, its environment and its economy? What should American policymakers, businesses and shoppers be thinking about as China’s factories change?
Alexandra Harney has been writing about Asia for a decade. The author of The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (Penguin Press, 2008), she covered Hong Kong, China and Japan for The Financial Times and was an editor at the newspaper in London. From 2003 until 2006, she was the FT’s South China correspondent. Alexandra’s work has also been published in many international newspapers and magazines including The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Marie Claire, Slate and CNN.com. She has contributed to National Public Radio and the BBC World Service and was a regular business and economics commentator on Japanese television. A 1997 cum laude graduate of Princeton University, Alexandra speaks Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
Posted by batesbe at 01:39 PM
October 30, 2008
Former NYTimes Shanghai bureau chief to speak on China's growing presence in Africa
Howard W. French: "China’s Expanding African Frontier and the Implications for the Continent"
5:30PM, Monday, November 3, 2008
Vandenberg Room, Michigan League
(please note new room)
Reception to follow
Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. For many years, he was a Senior Writer for The New York Times, where he spent most of a 22-year career as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents. From August 2003 to July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
French is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf 2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers. Continent won the 2005 American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for both the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and for the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s non-fiction prize.
Posted by zzhu at 11:31 AM
October 09, 2008
Yasheng Huang book reviewed in The Economist
Yasheng Huang
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Huang will speak at UM on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008 at 7 pm
His lecture is titled "Rethinking Chinese Reforms"
1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 S. University
From The Economist Print Edition, Oct. 2, 2008:
Chinese capitalism
The Long March Backwards
A surprising new book argues that China is becoming less, not more, of a capitalist economy.
MOST people, particularly those living outside China, assume that the country’s phenomenal growth and increasing global heft are based on a steady, if not always smooth, transition to capitalism. Thirty years of reforms have freed the economy and it can be only a matter of time until the politics follows.
This gradualist view is wrong, according to an important new book by Yasheng Huang, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original research on China is rare, largely because statistics, though plentiful, are notoriously unreliable. Mr Huang has gone far beyond the superficial data on gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment that satisfy most researchers. Instead, he has unearthed thousands of long-forgotten pages of memoranda and policy documents issued by bank chairmen, businessmen and state officials. In the process he has discovered two Chinas: one, from not so long ago, vibrant, entrepreneurial and rural; the other, today’s China, urban and controlled by the state.
In the 1980s rural China was in the ascendancy. Peasants, far from being tied to the land, as has been assumed, were free to set up manufacturing, distribution and service businesses and these were allowed to retain profits, pay dividends, issue share capital and even a form of stock option. State banks rushed to provide the finance. Nian Guangjiu, a farmer from impoverished Anhui province, built up a business selling sunflower seeds (a popular snack), employed over 100 people and made a million yuan (nearly $300,000) in profit in 1986—just a decade after Mao’s death. Because most of this activity was set up under the misleading label of “Township and Village Enterprises?, Western academics largely failed to spot that these ostensibly collective businesses were, in fact, private.
But then, in 1989, came the Tiananmen Square protests. A generation of policymakers who had grown up in the countryside, led by Zhao Ziyang, were swept away by city boys, notably the president, Jiang Zemin, and Zhu Rongji, his premier. Both men hailed from Shanghai and it was the “Shanghai model? that dominated the 1990s: rapid urban development that favoured massive state-owned enterprises and big foreign multinational companies. The countryside suffered. Indigenous entrepreneurs were starved of funds and strangled with red tape. Like many small, private businessmen, Mr Nian was arrested and his firm shut down.
True, China’s cities sprouted gleaming skyscrapers, foreign investment exploded and GDP continued to grow. But it was at a huge cost. As the state reversed course, taxing the countryside to finance urban development, growth in average household income and poverty eradication slowed while income differences and social tensions widened. Rural schools and hospitals were closed, with the result that between 2000 and 2005 the number of illiterate adults increased by 30m. According to Mr Huang, the worst weaknesses of China’s state-led capitalism—a reliance on creaking state companies rather than more efficient private ones, a weak financial sector, pollution and rampant corruption—are increasingly distorting the economy.
But what about the growing cohort of Chinese companies starting to strut the world stage? Surely that is evidence of a healthy and expanding private economy. Mr Huang’s evidence shows that, on closer inspection, these firms are either not really Chinese or not really private. Lenovo, a computer group, has succeeded because it was controlled, financed and run not from mainland China but from Hong Kong (a happy legacy of the founder’s family connections there—not something enjoyed by most Chinese businessmen). The subsidiaries of Haier, a white-goods maker, were also put out of reach of mainland bureaucrats early on. Wahaha, a food producer, Galanz, a maker of microwave ovens, and many others all depended on foreign protection and capital to grow and escape state strictures.
Indeed one of the main, and underappreciated, functions of foreign investment in China has been to play venture capitalist to domestic entrepreneurs. As for Huawei, a telecoms group and one of China’s much vaunted “global? companies, its structure and links to the state are so convoluted that the most diligent China-watchers have little idea if it is a private or state firm. They do, however, agree that Huawei’s opacity is a microcosm of China’s distorted economy.
Could China genuinely embrace entrepreneurial capitalism again, as it did in the 1980s? Its current leaders under President Hu Jintao, who cut his teeth in Guizhou and Tibet, two of the poorest and most rural provinces, talk about supporting the countryside and reducing social inequality. But nothing much has been done. China’s deep problems demand institutional and political reform. Sadly, as Beijing’s heavy-handed control of the Olympics suggests, there is scant hope of that.
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12333103
Posted by moyera at 04:11 PM
October 01, 2008
Winners, we have them!
Congratulations to the 2008 CCS Photo Competition Winners!
First Place – Marilyn Mai, Homeland Pride
Second Place – Shu-li Huang, A Family of Silver Artisans
Third Place – Jason Lin, Broken Home, Broken Family
The theme of this year's competition was "Home and Family." All the entries, including the winning photographs, are on display in the International Institute Gallery October 1-31, 2008.
Posted by zzhu at 05:01 PM
August 27, 2008
Ai Xiaoming
Visual Representation, Memory and Public Interest
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
4:00 pm
1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University
Ai Xiaoming
Department of Chinse Language and Literature
Sun Yat-sen University
Ai Xiaoming is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdon Province, China, and head of the Sex/Gender Education Forum established in 2003.
She is a feminist academic, a human rights activist, and director of several documentary films on issues of health, human rights, the legal system and the election system in China, among other topoics.
Films she has directed include Care and Love(2007), the story of a villager who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during childbirth and her attempts to seek legal redress against the hospital; The Epic of Central Plains (2006) on villagers in Henan Province who contracted AIDS while seeking to alleviate their poverty by selling their blood, and Tai Shi Village(2006) on the events surrounding a village's attempts to remove their appointed local officials.
Professor Ai's film Care and Love will be shown in the CCS Chinese Documentary Film Series on Saturday, October 4 at 7:00 pm in Auditorium A of Angell Hall. The film series is free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact the UM Center for Chinese Studies, 734 764 6308.
Posted by moyera at 11:30 AM
Yasheng Huang
Rethinking Chinese Reforms
Thursday, October 23, 2008
7:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University
Yasheng Huang
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The year 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of Chinese reforms.
It is high time to take stock of and assess where the Chinese economy is today. This presentation will show that much of the foundation of China's miracle was laid down in the 1980s and experienced substantial reversals in the 1990s. Even after 30 years of reforms, the reforms are far from complete.
Yasheng Huang teaches international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (Cambridge 2008). In collaborative projects with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on engineering education and human capital formation in China and India and on entrepreneurship. Professor Huang is the recipient of the Social Science-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Fellowship.
Posted by moyera at 11:23 AM