Center for Chinese Studies

September 17, 2009

Martin Powers

Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China

December 8, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Martin Powers is a Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan; Former Director of the U-M Center for Chinese Studies

It has been said that the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was an early attempt to imagine something very difficult to imagine—the sovereign, the people, and the state—as a single, visually unified entity. Such abstractions did not come easily to the people of premodern times, yet such abstractions were necessary in the formation of the modern state. In China, too, both theorizing and visualizing the relationship between the sovereign, the people, and the state had become a necessity by early modern times. This paper explores the differences between the Hobbsian model and that of Song China and, sidestepping culturalist models, situates those differences in different traditions of fiscal and legal practice.

Martin Powers is Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, and former Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. His research focuses on the role of the arts in the history of human relations in China, with an emphasis on issues of personal agency and social justice. In 1993 his Art and Political Expression in Early China received the Levenson Prize for the best book in pre-twentieth century Chinese Studies. His Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China, was published by Harvard University Press East Asian Series in 2006 and has been awarded the Levenson Prize for 2008. This year he is at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton writing a book on the role of "China" in the cultural politics of the English garden.

Posted by kanepark at 05:27 PM

Mary Ann Ray

Caochangdi : Beijing Inside Out

December 1, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Mary Ann Ray, Taubman Centennial Professor of Practice at the University of Michigan

Caochangdi : Beijing Inside Out - Farmers, Floaters, Taxi Drivers, Artists, and the International Art Mob Challenge and Remake the City is a recently published book focusing on Caochangdi - one of nearly 500 urban villages in the city of Beijing. Caochangdi tells a specific story about itself and its 4,000 to 7,000 mostly illegal residents, but it also has embedded within it both the problems and the possibilities of a new urban space redefining the city of Beijing (and other Asian cities) at the pivotal point in human history where cities make up 50% of the population of the world. The range of inhabitants includes an illegal rural migrant cook for a sewer construction crew to world renowned contemporary artist Ai Weiwei.

Mary-Ann Ray is the Taubman Centennial Professor of Practice at the University of Michigan. Together with Robert Mangurian, she is a Principal of Studio Works Architects in Los Angeles, a co-founder of BASE Beijing in the Urban Village of Caochangdi in Beijing. Mangurian and Ray are architects, authors, and designers, and were awarded the Chrysler Design Award in 2001 for Excellence and Innovation in an ongoing body of work in a design field. In 2008, they were awarded the Stirling Prize for the Memorial Lecture on the City by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the London School of Economics. Mangurian and Ray’s current interests have led them to work on urban change in China, especially as seen in Urban Villages such as Caochangdi and the potential for change in the New Socialist Countryside and Villages.

Posted by kanepark at 05:26 PM

Lara R. Kusnetzky

Embodying National Liberation: History and Autobiography in the Gejiu Tin Mines since 1949

November 24, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Lara R. Kusnetzky, Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Center at the City University of New York

On the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in September 1949, Mao Zedong declared that “the Chinese people have stood up.” The downtrodden masses, their bodies broken by the forces of semi-feudal and semi-colonial oppression, had been liberated and had emerged from their dark factories and dank hovels into the light of the socialist dawn. By equating the bodies of workers and peasants with the body politic, this metaphor also equated national history with biography. In the early decades of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party conducted a series of political campaigns that required local committees to collect oral histories of workers and peasants that would demonstrate in local terms the universal truths of Marxist historiography. In Gejiu, Yunnan province, national history was narrated through the shading—the pitiful tin miner of the Republican era who under the leadership of the Communist Party had become his own master and could now walk erect through safe, lighted tunnels.

Posted by kanepark at 05:25 PM

Wang Zheng

Revealing Erasures: Visual Representation of Women of China: 1949-2009

November 17, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Wang Zheng, U-M Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History

Examining the covers of the official magazine Women of China over the span of 60 years, this presentation traces diverse interplays and contentions between the male-dominated central power, state feminists, and women of diverse social locations in the socialist period, and transformations of their relations in the market economy. The research is part of a large project on a history of the PRC from gender perspective.

Wang Zheng is associate professor of Women’s Studies and History and associate research scientist of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. A long-term academic activist promoting gender studies in China, she is the director of the UM-China Gender Studies Project, and founder and co-director of the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai. Her English publications concern changing gender discourses and relations in China's socioeconomic, political and cultural transformations of the past century, and feminism in China, both in terms of its historical development and its contemporary activism in the context of globalization. She is the author of Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (UC Press, 1999). Her current project is a gender history of the People’s Republic of China, exploring the relationship between gender and the socialist state formation, and gender and capitalist transformation. She has edited volumes (both in English and Chinese) on a variety of topics: the constructions of feminist subjectivity in socialist China, the politics and effects of translating feminisms in China throughout the twentieth century, and significance of introducing “gender” into the study of Chinese history as well as into the discursive contentions in contemporary China.

Posted by kanepark at 05:23 PM

Lucille Chia

A Sea Change in Chinese Printing and Book Culture: Chinese Books and Printing in Early Spanish Philippines

November 10, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Lucille Chia, Associate Professor of History, University of California at Riverside

This talk concerns the diffusion of printing in Chinese across the sea in Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Given the vital involvement of the Chinese settlers and sojourners in the commerce and service industries of the Spanish Philippines, it is no surprise that some of them were instrumental in developing the earliest printing and publishing enterprises of the colony in the late sixteenth century. They produced books in Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Spanish, and Latin, including religious works published under the auspices of Catholic missionary institutions. Furthermore, books were printed in China and Japan, sometimes specifically for different groups in the Philippines. In particular, the export of popular works published in Fujian and other parts of southern China represents a significant extension of the dissemination of Chinese books that followed the first large-scale overseas Chinese diaspora. By looking at Chinese works printed in or for readers in the Spanish Philippines, we can begin to understand how Chinese book culture adapted to and developed in the presence of other very different non-Chinese cultures and religions.

Lucille Chia is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research interests include book culture and printing in imperial China, and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the early modern period and its impact on China.

Posted by kanepark at 05:21 PM

Yuming He

Inventorying Barbarians: An Early Modern Chinese Pictorial Vogue

November 3, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Yuming He, Assistant Professor in Chinese Literature, University of Chicago

From the 15th to 18th century, pictorial inventories of foreign countries and peoples were printed and circulated widely in China, and onto the trans-regional book market. This study attempts to bring to light the history of these popular and commonplace books, and their specific socio-cultural relevance in Ming-Qing China and the larger global world. Yuming He received her BA and MA from Peking University, and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She taught at Reed College before joining the faculty at the Univ. of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include the literature and culture of late-imperial China (currently focusing on theater and performance), the history of the book (focusing on woodblock prints, both texts and images), and Chinese intellectual history.

Posted by kanepark at 05:20 PM

Carlos Rojas

Alai, Internal Diasporas, and Rethinking Sinophone Literature

October 27, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Carlos Rojas, Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Duke University

This talk will consider the work of the ethnically Tibetan, Chinese-language (and Mao Dun Prize-winning) author, Alai. Of particular interest will be the way in which Alai's fiction addresses issues of spatial identification and linguistic alienation, together with the broader implications of his work for our understanding of the categories of Chinese and Sinophone literature.

Carlos Rojas is Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at Duke University. He is the author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard Asia Center, 2008); the co-editor (with David Der-wei Wang) of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke, 2007) and (with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow) of Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (2009); and the co-translator (also with Eileen Chow) of Yu Hua's novel, Brothers (Pantheon, 2009).

Posted by kanepark at 05:19 PM

Tsering Shakya

China's Tibet Policy: Accommodation and Conflict

October 13, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Tsering Shakya, Canadian Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia, Institute for Asian Research, University of British Columbia

In March 2008, the Tibetan plateau erupted in a wave of protests highlighting problems faced by the PRC government in ruling the region. After five decades of direct rule, China still faces no easy solution in governing the plateau. The talk will explore China’s policies and argues that the fundamental problem confronting PRC is the question of governance, resurgence of Tibetan ethnonationalism and the perceived threat to the security of Tibetan identity.

Tsering Shakya is a world renowned and widely published scholar on both historical and contemporary Tibet. His most expansive work to date The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (Pimlico, London 1999) was acclaimed as “the definitive history of modern Tibet” by The New York Times, and “a prodigious work of scholarship” by the UK’s Sunday Telegraph. The book is the first comprehensive account of Tibet’s recent history. Tsering was able to draw upon his unrivalled network of official and unofficial contacts in government, academia, religious circles and the media throughout Tibet and China, and across Asia, Europe and the U.S., including numerous, previously unpublished sources. The book received wide recognition and is now regarded as a standard text on the history of modern Tibet.

Posted by kanepark at 05:17 PM

Anna Shields

From Gossip to History: Views of Mid-Tang Literature in Anecdotal Texts

October 6, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Anna Shields, Director of the Honors College, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The writers of Tang anecdotal texts collected many lively stories of literati culture, combining hearsay with gossip and personal opinion with historical fact. Though these memorable works have shaped our understanding of the Tang for centuries, their unusual perspective poses problems for literary historical inquiry. How might we read anecdotal texts to sort out gossip from history? This talk will explore the representation of mid-Tang literature in ninth-century anecdotal works and show how such texts reveal ongoing debates over literary culture, debates that were largely concealed by Song citation and reorganization of Tang texts.

Anna M. Shields studied Chinese literature at Harvard University (M.A.) and Indiana University (Ph.D.), and has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, Princeton University; she is now Director of the Honors College and Associate Professor of Chinese, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her book, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian ji (Collection from among the Flowers), was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2006. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship in 2005-2006, and is currently completing a book on the literature of friendship in mid-Tang China.

Posted by kanepark at 05:16 PM

Benjamin Ridgway

From River By-Way to River Border: The City of Jiankang in the Wartime Writings of Ye Mengde (1077-1148)

September 29, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Benjamin Ridgway, Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Valparaiso University

This presentation explores the way that geographical discourses on dynastic capitals were deployed in political writings and literary works of the Chinese scholar-official elite during the traumatic collapse of the Northern Song (960-1279). Specifically, Professor Ridgway examines the way Ye Mengde's writings on the city of Jiankang (i.e. modern-day Nanjing) reflect the tensions felt by many scholar officials to relocate their “place” in a redefined geo-political order.

Benjamin Ridgway is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and MA in Chinese Studies Program at Valparaiso University. He earned his Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His area of specialization is poetry of the Song dynasty (960-1279). More broadly his research interests the intersections between geography, displacement, and literature. His Ph.D. dissertation, “Imagined Travel: Displacement, Landscape, and Literati Identity in the Song Lyrics of Su Shi (1037-1101)” researched the interaction between practices of official travel during the Song dynasty and imagined travel into the historical past in the song lyrics of Su Shi. Recently, he has begun work on a cultural history of the city of Hangzhou during the Southern Song, examining the city’s history through a range of genres, including song lyrics, shi poetry, local gazetteers, strange tales, maps, as well as painting.

Posted by kanepark at 05:12 PM

Dorothy J. Solinger

A Question of Confidence: State Legitimacy and the New Urban Poor

September 22, 2009
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Dorothy J. Solinger
Professor of Political Science, University of California at Irvine

If state benevolence is to serve as a critical condition for Chinese citizens’ acceptance of their government as legitimate, then the concept and practice of official “benevolence” demands some interrogation in today’s China. Does benevolence obtain, and do those who would depend deeply upon it believe in its presence? And, as evidence of such belief, do they entertain an expectation that the state, in its guise as donor, can be counted upon for what for them are vital extensions of its current offerings in the days to come? I target the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee program in Chinese cities and its subjects in order to address this query.

Paradoxically, she will argue, a very prominent element in the relationship between the two is the far more abiding confidence that the recipients appear to place in the powers-that-be than the leaders are willing to lead back to them.

Dorothy J. Solinger is Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Irvine where she has been teaching since 1986. Previously, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh. In academic year 1985-86, she was invited to teach and held a fellowship at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (1999), which won the Joseph R. Levenson prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999. Her forthcoming book, “States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses: China, France and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980-2000,” will be published by Cornell University Press later this year.

Posted by kanepark at 04:43 PM

December 08, 2008

Yiching Wu

Coping with Crisis in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution: Toward a Historical Critique of China’s Postsocialist Condition

Tuesday, January 20
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Yiching Wu
Postdoctoral Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows and U-M Assistant Professor in Anthropology and History

China’s post-Mao reforms provide a great opportunity to explore a number of important historical, political, and theoretical issues with respect to postsocialist transitions. Focusing on the late 1970s, this talk situates the inaugural moment of China’s liberalizing turn in the context of the organic crisis of the party-state and its ideological apparatus in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The early post-Mao years of the late 1970s is extremely important, as it was the time when ideological possibilities contrasting sharply from what was to become the new hegemonic formation of the 1980s and 1990s flourished briefly in what was a spontaneous movement of popular activism and criticism, cultural renaissance, and social mobilization. Professor Wu examines the state’s maneuver as tactics of crisis management aiming to contain and neutralize the emergent opposition from below.

Yiching Wu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture, he is interested in popular social movements, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and resistance. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the popular transgressions and radicalization within the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

Posted by batesbe at 10:56 AM

David Porter

Gendered Utopias in Chinese Porcelains and English Women's Writings of the 17th Century

Tuesday, January 27
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

David Porter
U-M Professor of English

This talk will explore a curious and unexpected convergence in the iconography of Chinese transitional ware porcelain and new genres of English women's writing in the 17th century, and will offer reflections on the methodological problems raised by such instances of historical simultaneity.

David Porter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe and a number of articles on the Chinese taste in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

Posted by batesbe at 10:55 AM

David R. Knechtges

The Problem with Anthologies: The Case of the Poems of Ying Qu (190-252)

Tuesday, February 3
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

David R. Knechtges
Professor of Literature, University of Washington

The shi poems in the Wen xuan are classified into twenty-three categories. There is one troublesome category designated “Bai yi�? 百一, which literally means “one hundred one�? or “one of a hundred.�? The “Bai yi�? category in the Wen xuan contains only one poem by a single poet, Ying Qu 應璩 (190–252). Li Shan �?�善 (d. 689) in his commentary to the Wen xuan records four explanations of title “Bai yi�? all of which state that Ying Qu’s poems contained veiled criticisms of contemporary affairs. In this paper, I examine the extant fragments of Ying Qu’s poems. I also consider the question of why some sources designate his poems not as “Bai yi,�? but xin shi 新詩 or “new poems.�? I adduce evidence to show that Ying Qu was considered throughout the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period the premier author of poems critical of contemporary affairs, and his poems were called “new�? because he was the first poet to use the pentasyllabic form to write a series of critical poems. I also reconsider Ying Qu’s “Bai yi�? poem included in the Wen xuan and argue that it may actually contain an implicit criticism of the court.

David R. Knechtges is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Washington. He also has taught at Yale, Wisconsin, and Harvard. He is the author of over 100 articles and nine books including Two Studies of the Han Fu (1968), The Han Rhapsody: A Study of the Fu of Yang Hsiung (53 B.C. –A.D.18) (1976), The Han shu Biography of Yang Xiong (1982), Wen-xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume One. Rhapsodies on Metropolises and Capitals 1982), Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume Two. Rhapsodies on Sacrifices, Hunts, Travel, Palaces and Halls, Rivers and Seas (1987), Wen xuan, Volume Three, Rhapsodies on Natural Phenomena, Birds and Animals, Aspirations and Feelings, Sorrowful Laments, Literature, Music and Passions(1996), Editor and co-translator, Gong Kechang. Studies of the Han Fu (1997), Court Culture and Literature in Early China (2002), Co-editor, with Paul Kroll. Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History (2003), Co-editor, with Eugene Vance, Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West, 2005. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Posted by batesbe at 10:49 AM

Xuefei Ren

Transnational Architectural Production in Urban China

Tuesday, February 10
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Xuefei Ren
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Michigan State University

Professor Xuefei Ren will talk about her forthcoming book "Transnational Architectural Production in Urban China." Based on more than 100 interviews with developers, architects, residents, governmental officials in Beijing and Shanghai between 2004 and 2007, the book explores why China’s urban elites have repeatedly turned to international architects to design their mega projects, and how Beijing and Shanghai have become strategic nodes in the global network of architectural production.

Xuefei Ren is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2007. Her research interests include global political economy, politics of urban development, and sociology of space and built environment. She is currently working on a few projects, including (1) heterogeneous Chinese urbanism, (2) urban governance in China and India, (3) the global art market. She has published her work in a number of academic journals, such as City and Community, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Built Environment, and CITY.

Posted by batesbe at 10:48 AM

James Lee

Higher Education and Diversity: The Changing Origins of University Students in China, 1903-2002

Tuesday, February 17
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

James Lee
U-M Professor of History and Sociology

James Lee has five authored or coauthored five books and five edited books published or soon to be published. He is also the co-editor of Historical Methods and the MIT Series in Eurasian Population and Family History. In 2000, he received the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Social Demography and the Social Science History Association Allan Sharlin Award for Best Book in Social Science History. His areas of academic specialization include late imperial and contemporary China; comparative demography and sociology of populations; social-scientific history. Currently, he holds the position of Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Posted by batesbe at 10:46 AM

Sherman Cochran

Chinese Business Dynasty: Family Survival Strategies in War and Revolution

Tuesday, March 3
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Sherman Cochran
Hu Shih Professor of History, Cornell University

How did a Chinese family survive the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 and the Communist Revolution of 1949? The strategies of one of China’s most economically dominant and politically influential families, the Lius of Shanghai, are revealed in more than 2,000 letters exchanged by its members: father, mother, nine sons, and three daughters. Their intimate correspondence provides a window on their decision making within their own family and in relation to the wider world of business, national politics, and international affairs.

Sherman Cochran is Hu Shih Professor of Chinese History at Cornell University where he teaches modern Chinese and Asian history. His publications include Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast and Diaspora in Transnational China, co-edited with David Strand (Berkeley, 2007) and Encountering Chinese Networks: Western Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (Berkeley, 2002). His 2006 publication Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006) won the 2008 Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies for the “greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics or economy of China�? since 1900.

Posted by batesbe at 10:45 AM

Nicholas Howson

The Shanghai People's Courts -- Competence, Autonomy and Independence

Tuesday, March 10
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Nicholas Howson
Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan Law School

In late 2005, China's Company Law was almost completely re-written, most importantly to provide for a host of new claims which could be brought by private litigants before the Chinese People's Courts. This new "justiability" of China's corporate law presents a very significant challenge to China's developing legal institutions, and their demonstrated technical competence, institutional autonomy and political independence. In the Fall of 2008, Professor Howson analyzed hundreds of corporate law opinions rendered by the Shanghai People's Court system between 1994 and 2008 and interviewed Shanghai judges, judicial officials and academics on the same topic. In this Noon Lecture, he will report his preliminary findings, and explore a contemporary expression of what one historian has called the "paradox of modernity" arising from a prior effort at judicial reform in early 20th century China."

Nicholas C. Howson earned his J.D. from the Columbia Law School in 1988 after graduating from Williams College in 1983 and spending 1983-5 as a graduate fellow at Shanghai's Fudan University. After law school, he was awarded a fellowship to complete research in Qing Dynasty penal law when he was resident at Beijing University for the Fall of 1988. In 1988, Howson joined the New York-based international law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where he was elected a partner of the firm, practicing in New York, London, Paris and Beijing. Between 1983 and 2003 he lived for more than a decade in Beijing and Shanghai. Howson writes and lectures widely on Chinese law topics, focusing on Chinese corporate and securities law developments, and has acted as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the UNDP and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and various Chinese government ministries and administrative departments. He serves often as an expert witness on Chinese law matters in U.S. and international litigations. He is a past chair of the Asian Affairs Committee of the New York Bar Association, on the Board of Advisors for the Columbia Law School, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2005 after teaching at the Columbia, Harvard and Cornell Law Schools.

Posted by batesbe at 10:43 AM

Yi-Li Wu

Gender, Disease, and Visual Culture: Representations of the Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine

Tuesday, March 17
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Yi-Li Wu
Associate Professor of History and Chair of International Studies, Albion College

This talk examines how medical images of female breast disease in 18th and 19th century China were shaped by religious and political iconography, Confucian gender norms, and competing medical definitions of the human body.

Yi-Li Wu is Associate Professor of History and Chair of International Studies at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in International Relations and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. She is the author of Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (UC Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a comparative study of British missionary medicine and Chinese medicine in the mid-19th century.

Posted by batesbe at 10:41 AM

Minyuan Zhao

The 3rd Generation Wireless Technology Standard in China:
A Game Theoretical Perspective

Tuesday, March 24
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Minyuan Zhao
Assistant Professor of Strategy, U-M Ross School of Business

As China considers the next technology standard for its large wireless communications market, the process evolves into a 10-year battle among multinational giants, indigenous firms, and the industry authority. This talk provides a game theoretical perspective on the strategies taken by various parties, and explains why the outcome is not inevitable.

Minyuan Zhao is Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. from Stern School of Business, New York University and her master's degree from Fudan University, China. Professor Zhao’s research focuses on firms' innovation strategies, and the interaction between internal organization and external environments in a global context.

Posted by batesbe at 10:40 AM

R. Bin Wong

The Taxing Transformation of the Contemporary Chinese State in Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Tuesday, March 31
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

R. Bin Wong
Director, Asia Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles

This presentation considers the political responses to the challenges of fiscal management as an indicator of state transformation. Public finances figure prominently in accounts of modern European state formation and contemporary concerns for democracy in developing countries. What features of the Chinese state’s major fiscal restructuring since the mid-1990s reflect the fiscal problems and political possibilities of other cases? How can these changes be seen in historical perspective? What might China’s current efforts suggest about future changes within China and are there lessons for other parts of the world?

Wong’s research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change, especially since eighteenth century, both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns. Among his books, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press, 1997) also appears in Chinese and a Japanese edition is due out in 2009. Wong has also written or co-authored some fifty articles published in North America, East Asia and Europe, published in Chinese, English, French and Japanese in journals that reach diverse audiences within and beyond academia. His scholarly articles include "Entre monde et nation :Les regions Braudelienne en Asie�? in Annales HSS, (56.1 (jan-fev 2001): 5-42); “The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia,�? American Historical Review, (107.2 (April 2002): 447-69). More popular essays appear in the Nihon keizai shimbun (Japan Economic Times) the Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India). A ten-page interview with Wong appears in the August 2004 issue of Shehui kexue (Social Sciences).

Posted by batesbe at 10:38 AM

Charles Hartman

Soldiers, Money, and History in Song China (960-1279)

Tuesday, April 7
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Charles Hartman
Department of East Asian Studies, The University at Albany

In the conventional understanding of Chinese history, the Song dynasty (960-1279) appears as a period during which civil officials, fortified by a renewal of Confucian values and recruited through an expanded civil service system, inaugurated a period of civilian rule that lead to a domination of literati over military officials in the administration of the dynasty. This view derives ultimately from the official Song History (Songshi) of 1345. My research challenges this assumption by examining the history of the dynasty's financial administration. Preliminary results suggest that Song civil officials fought a losing battle for control of dynastic resources, yet, through their control of the state historiographic function, were able to create an enduring historical image to the contrary.

Professor Charles Hartman obtained his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Indiana University in 1975. A member of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University at Albany since 1980, his present research focuses on the history and historiography of the Song dynasty (960-1279).

Posted by batesbe at 10:34 AM

June 12, 2008

Jin Feng

Training Her Body for God or for China: Physical Education at Ginling College

Tuesday, December 2
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Jin Feng
Associate Professor of Chinese, Grinnell College

Ginling College (Jinling nuzi wenii xueyuan) was an all-women's institution founded by female American missionaries in Nanjing, China in the early twentieth-century. Its physical education department generated a kaleidoscope of tales that highlighted complex negotiations of gender, culture, religion, and nationalism at several important junctures of modern Chinese history.

Jin Feng is Associate Professor of Chinese at Grinnell College. She earned her Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2004), Ginling College: The Making of A Fammily Saga (SUNY Press, forthcoming), and several scholarly articles. She is also the translator of Chen Hengzhe's Early Autogiography (Anhui Education Publications, 2006).

Posted by moyera at 09:48 AM

Wen Yuhang

Singing, Chanting and Acting in Kunqu
Kunqu Performer, Graduate of Beijing Traditional Opera School

Tuesday, November 25
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

As a classical genre of Chinese theatre, kunqu features sophisticated and coordinated performances of elaborate singing, stylized chanting/speaking, and intricate acting/dancing.

To reveal the artistic creativity involved, and the expressions it generates, Mr. Wen Yuhang, an internationally known artist of the genre, will discuss and perform a number of representative arias and monologues, demonstrating kunqu manipulations of words, singing, chanting/speaking, and acting/dancing.

A graduate of the Beijing Traditional Opera School, Mr. Wen specializes in the xiaoshing (young male) role type. Once a principle actor with the Northern Kunqu Company, he recieved "Best Performer" awards in Chinese Drama competitions.

In 1999, he played the leading male role in the Lincoln Center production of Peony Pavilion.

Currently, Mr. Wen resides in New York.

Posted by moyera at 09:11 AM

Mary Gallagher

Legislating Harmony?
Why Chinese Laws are So Good and Implementation So Bad

Tuesday, November 18
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Mary Gallagher
U-M Associate Professor of Political Science

This talk examines the Chinese legislative process and legislative output.

I examine why Chinese laws are increasingly more attentive to important social problems but still likely to fail at the implementation and enforcement stages.

Mary E. Gallagher is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan where she is also a faculty associate at the Center for Comparative Political Studies. She is the director of the Center for Chinese Studies. She received her Ph.D. in politics in 2001 from Princeton University. Her book Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China was published by Princeton Unviersity Press in 2005. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar from 2003 to 2004 at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai, China where she worked on a new project, The Rule of Law in Chinas: If They Build It, Who Will Come? This project examines the legal mobilization of Chinese workers. It was funded by the Fulbright Association and the National Science Foundation. She has published articles in World Politics, Law and Society Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Asian Survey. She teaches classes on Chinese politics, labor rights in the global economy, and research design. She also serves on the University of Michigan's Advisory Committee for labor standards and human rights.

Posted by moyera at 09:09 AM

Mayling Birney

Building the Rule of Law around Democratic Reforms:
Influences on the Enforcement and Defiance of Village Election Laws in China

Tuesday, November 11
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Mayling Birney
Wilson-Cotsen Fellow, Princeton Society of Fellows and Woodrow Wilson School

Using original multi-level survey data from China's two largest provinces, Dr. Birney will show that a key determinant of village election law implementation is the attitude that the higher level government holds towards village self-governance. In contrast, possible bottom-up drivers of election implementation, such as public political engagement, public self-interest in the elections, and social harmony, do not seem to be as significant factors. This finding suggests that when it comes to democracy-enhancing reforms, buiding the rule of law is best done through enlisting top-down support. The assumption that a self-interested, engaged public is able to effectively demand that policitical reforms be implemented, even when they ahve already been passed into laws, may be too optimistic in restrictive authoritarian contexts.

Posted by moyera at 09:05 AM

Yanjie Bian

The Rise of Guanxi in Chinese Transition Economy

Tuesday, November 4
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Yanjie Bian
Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

How do we understand the increasing roles that guanxi plays in Chinese transition economy? Sociologist Yanjie Bian proposes a theoretical model in which the role of guanxi is a function of institutional uncertainty and market competition. He tests some empirical implications of this model by analyzing several surveys on job mobility and growth of economic enterprises from 1978 to 2003.

Yanjie Bian is professor of sociology at University of Minnesota, funding director of the Survey Research Center at HKUST, and the PI of the Chinese General Social Survey.

Posted by moyera at 09:00 AM

June 11, 2008

Giovanni Vitiello

Libertine Masculinity: Homosexuality and Homosociality
in Late Imperial Pornographic Fiction

Tuesday, October 28
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Giovanni Vitiello
Associate Professor, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Hawaii

This presentation focuses on the figure of the male libertine in pornographic fiction to argue that the boundaries of his sexuality and masculinity were drawn and redrawn, and in the process significantly altered, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. In late Ming erotic narratives we encournter a libertine whose masculinity is centrally realized through sexual penetration (of women and boys alike), and at once predicated upon his own impenetrability. But in a number of early Qing novels that same character can be sexually penetrated without his masculinity being compromised. Later still, in the first half of the eighteenth century, yet a new tendency is detectable, namely a gradual adumbration of the libertine's homoeroticism. These developments, while pointing at a shift in the representation of masculinity and male-male sexuality in fiction, might also signal an attempt to meet the new moral and legal standards of the mid-Qing period.

Professor Vitiello obtained a Laurea in Oriental Languages from the University of Rome, and MA and Ph.D. degrees in Chinese from the University of California at Berkeley. His research and publications focus on late imperial Chinese fiction and the history of sexuality. He has just completed a book manuscript by the title of The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China - 1550-1850. He is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Posted by moyera at 04:22 PM

Shuen-fu Lin

A Premonition of the Fall of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279):
Reading a Song Lyric Composed in 1253 about Reveling on the West Lake

Tuesday, October 14
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Shuen-fu Lin
U-M Professor of Chinese Literature

In this lecture, Professor Shuen-fu Lin will present a close reading of a song lyric (ci) reportedly written by the scholar-official Wen Jiweng (fl 1253-1275) while reveling on the West Lake with fellow scholars on the occasion of their passing the Civil Service Examination for the jinshi (or highest-level) degree.

Wen Jiweng's song lyric will be examined in the context of the mode of life of prosperity, social elegance and graceful leisure of the Southern Song educated elite on the eve of the Mongol conquest of China.

Professor Lin specializes in the literature and culture of premodern China, with special research interests in the poetry and aesthetic theory of the middle periods. He is also interested in early Daoist philosophical literature, the literary dream in poetry and fiction, and garden aesthetics. His books include The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Chiang K'uei and Southern Sung Tz'u Poetry, The Vitality of the Lyric Voice: Shih Poetry from the Late Han to the T'ang (co-edited with Stephen Owen), and The Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West by Tung Yueh (1620-1685) (co-translated with Larry Schulz). He is currently working on a book project on the Inner Chapters of the early Daoist classsic text Zhuangzi.

Posted by moyera at 03:55 PM

Joseph Dennis

Local Gazetteers in Ming Dynasty Borderlands

Tuesday, October 7
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Joseph Dennis
Assistant Professor of History, Davidson College, North Carolina

This lecture will explore the compilation, publication, and circulation of local gazetteers in Ming dynasty borderlands. The focus will be on gazetteers compiled by native officials in native domains (tusi土�?�) and the role of local gazetteers in building literary culture along the southwestern border.

Professor Dennis' research is on Chinese social, legal, and cultural history. He is currently writing a book, Writing, Publishing and Reading Local Histories in China, 1100-1644. His courses include surveys of East Asian History, upper division courses on imperial and modern China, and seminars on Chinese legal history and the history of the book.

Posted by moyera at 03:41 PM

Madeline Chu

The Three Kingdoms Heroes Re-Viewed

Tuesday, September 30
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Madeline Chu
Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Kalamazoo College

In the Mao Zonggang Edition of the Sanguo Yanyi, many Tang and Song poems were quoted to provide comments of the gallant deeds of the heroes in the novel. It is interesting to see how very different a tone was adopted by Mao's contemporaries in their poetic comments of the same heroes. The talk will present some preliminary findings in this respect.

Posted by moyera at 03:35 PM

Teemu Ruskola

China, for Example

Tuesday, September 23
Tuesday 12 noon to 1:00 pm
Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
1080 South University

Teemu Ruskola
Professor Law, Emory Law School

International law is a foundational element in the political ontology of the modern world. However, studies of international law approach it almost exclusively from the vantage point of Europe, with China figuring only minimally - often merely as an illustration of a larger point or a counter-example of a general principle.

In these conditions, what would it mean to analyze international law from the point of view of China, and what does its history in China mean for our understanding of international law as a transnational cultural form today? From an even more fundamental perspective, why is China always only an example, merely an instance of the particular? Is a history of China's place in the making of modern international law also only an illustration of something larger than China itself? To begin to answer these questions, this presentation will approach international law as a political and epistemological project, with deeply embedded notions of space, time, and politics.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University. Upon graduating from Yale Law School, Ruskola practised law as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, in the firm's New York and Hong Kong offices. Thereafter, he studies East Asian Studies at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Emory Law School faculty in 2007, Ruskola was Professor of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. He has been a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and at Cornell Law School, and served as a sabbatical visitor at Columbia Law School. During the academic year 2008-09, he is a member of the Insititute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, NJ.

Professor Ruskola's scholarhsip addresses questions of legal theory from multiple perspectives, frequently with China as a vantage point. His publications - apearing in the American Quarterly, Social Text, Michigan Law Review, Standford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, among other places - explore the intersection of corporate and family law in China, "legal Orientalism," and the history and politics of Euro-American conceptions of sovereignty in the Asia-Pacific.

Posted by moyera at 03:19 PM