Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

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An Era of Emotion? 2021 Annual Reischauer Lecture with Rana Mitter, Part 2 Mar 25, 2021

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Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Jie Li, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University LECTURE 2 OF 3: AN ERA OF EMOTION? One factor that defines Chinese engagement with the world today is its highly emotional character, in terms of self-presentation that can move from saccharine to shrill at remarkable speed. But emotion is not new – the use of the registers from exhilaration to depression defines the way that China, Japan and the Koreas have chosen to present themselves over the past century, whether through (often highly gendered) lenses of Asianism, revolution, martiality, discourses of “national humiliation,” or of global citizenship. How much of this draws on emotional registers defined by modernity, and how much from a repertoire shaped by a culture with much longer roots? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.

How New is the New Era? 2021 Annual Reischauer Lecture with Rana Mitter, Part 1 Mar 23, 2021

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Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Odd Arne Westad, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University LECTURE 1 OF 3: HOW NEW IS THE NEW ERA? China’s leaders speak today of a “new era” – but East Asia has seen a range of “new eras” in the modern age, defined by Japan, China, and outsiders who encountered both. What defines that novelty and how familiar are the elements that form part of it? The mid-twentieth century saw war, social change and changing global encounters defined as moments when both China and Japan entered a “new” or “special” era in a global context. What continuities and contrasts are there between the past and the present, and what defines that “newness”? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is a three-part annual lecture series on East Asia at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center.

Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, with Andrew B. Liu Mar 05, 2021

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Speaker: Andrew B. Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India. Andrew B. Liu is assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where his research focuses on China, transnational Asia, political economy, and comparative history. This event co-sponsored by The Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University.

China's Corrupt Meritocracy, with Yuen Yuen Ang Mar 05, 2021

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Speaker: Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan Portrayals of China’s political economy tend to be divided, with one side depicting it as a Confucian-style meritocracy, and the other arguing that the regime is a kleptocracy. In fact, neither view is correct: in the Chinese officialdom, competence and corruption can go hand in hand. Drawing on her new book, China’s Gilded Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Ang underscores that paradoxes define China’s political economy. Chinese growth is speedy yet risky and imbalanced. Corrupt officials worship the pursuit of prosperity. China’s regime is authoritarian yet its regions are decentralized and highly competitive. Understanding China requires that we grasp these seeming paradoxes, which will persist well into the next decade. Yuen Yuen Ang is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.” She is also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship [on] the most pressing issues of our times.” Her first, award-winning book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), is acclaimed as “game changing” and “field shifting.” The sequel to this book, China’s Gilded Age: the Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption, is released in 2020. She writes for a broad audience in Foreign Affairs and Project Syndicate. Ang is a graduate of Colorado College and Stanford University, and a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee of US-China Relations.

Protecting China's Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy, with Andrea Ghiselli Feb 28, 2021

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Speaker: Andrea Ghiselli, Assistant Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University Moderator: Robert Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate The securitization of non-traditional security issues is a scarcely discussed and, yet, extremely powerful force that shapes the evolution of Chinese foreign and security policy. The lecture will show how this tortuous process deeply shaped China’s approach to the protection of the life and assets of Chinese nationals overseas, an aspect of Chinese foreign policy that is already and will become increasingly important over time. This became evident as, especially after the evacuation of 36,000 Chinese nationals from Libya in 2011, Chinese institutions evolved and issued new regulations that are also aimed at supporting the possible use of the military overseas. Dr. Andrea Ghiselli is an assistant professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He is also the Head of Research of the ChinaMed Project, a research project on China’s role in the wider Mediterranean region sponsored by the University of Torino’s TOChina Hub. Andrea’s research interests include Chinese foreign policy, China-Middle East relations, and foreign policy analysis. Besides his book Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy published by Oxford University Press, his research on Chinese foreign policy has been published in peer-reviewed journals like the China Quarterly, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Contemporary China, and Armed Forces & Society.

Iran and China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Between Desirable and Feasible Feb 25, 2021

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Experiencing another downturn in its relations with the West, Iran has been more actively “looking to the East” to pursue stronger political and economic cooperation with China. Tehran remains an enthusiastic supporter of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), despite the withdrawal of Chinese companies from a number of projects due to U.S. sanctions. Iran still hopes to benefit from investments, technologies and new connectivity routes promoted under the BRI umbrella. This roundtable will discuss the prospects of Iran becoming a node of the BRI, and the promises and challenges of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy. Speakers: Eyck Freymann, Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford University Nader Habibi, Professor of Practice, Brandeis University Dina Esfandiary, Senior Advisor, International Crisis Group Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University This event is co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. This event is part of a new seminar hosted by the Fairbank Center and the Davis Center. This seminar aims to foster vibrant, comprehensive, and fruitful discussion about the ongoing transformations in geopolitics and governance resulting from China’s Belt Road Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics: Sri Lanka, Angola, and Beyond, with Deborah Brautigam Feb 23, 2021

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Speaker: Deborah Brautigam, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

AI-tocracy: The Political Economy of AI, with David Yang Feb 23, 2021

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Speaker: David Yang, Assistant Professor Economics, Harvard University The conventional wisdom suggests a misalignment between autocracy and technological innovation. In this project, we examine whether there exists a political and economic alignment between the monitoring aims of autocracies and the innovative aims of AI firms. We gather comprehensive data on ﬁrms and government procurement contracts in China’s facial recognition AI industry. We find two results. First, autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government demands for public security AI, and increased AI investment suppresses subsequent unrest. Second, AI sector benefits from the autocrats: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results indicate a stable equilibrium between the autocrats and the AI sector. Using a directed technical change model, we show that autocrats’ demand for AI not only could enhance its stability, but may also sustain growth and bias innovation towards data-intensive sector when economies of scope from government data are sufficiently large. David Yang is an Assistant Professor of Economics. His research focuses on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, economic history, and cultural economics. In particular, David studies the forces of stability and forces of changes in authoritarian regimes, drawing lessons from historical and contemporary China. David received a B.A. in Statistics and B.S. in Business Administration from University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Stanford.

China's War on Smuggling, with Philip Thai Feb 15, 2021

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Philip Thai is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China, with research interests in legal history, economic history, business history, and history of capitalism. He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 (Columbia University Press and a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, published in 2018). The book examines the impact of smuggling and illicit trade in China from the late Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic. The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A New Approach to Studying the Chinese Intellectual, with Eddy U Feb 14, 2021

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Speaker: Eddy U, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis No system of rule has objectified the intellectual as much as communist rule of the twentieth century. Communist regimes codified, identified, and governed part of the general population as intellectuals based on Marxist thought. This talk builds on my recently published book and illustrates how the “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) in China evolved from an obscure classification of people during the 1920s to embodied subjects locatable everywhere after the 1949 revolution. This transformation of the intellectual changed Chinese society, intensifying mass surveillance, political education, and other governing practices. My analytical approach moves the study of the intellectual in modern China into new terrains. I end with an interpretation of the current situation in Hong Kong. Eddy U is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. His book, Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification (UC Press, 2019), won the Barrington Moore Book Award given by the American Sociological Association.

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