China Colloquia

Cheng-hua Wang received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History (her dissertation is on the material culture of the court of Emperor Ming Xuanzong) at Yale University in 1998, and has since published a significant amount on the material culture of late imperial and modern China (including Cixi).  She is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Institute of Modern History.

The talk will focus on the collotype reproduction of antiquities in early twentieth-century China and the related issues revolving around heritage preservation and exhibitionary culture.  Collotype is a photomechanical process, developed to print fine reproductions.  It became a standard printing process in Shanghai around 1908, and was used to publish a large number of picture books through the late 1930s.  The talk will begin with an overview of related research in the fields of art history and the study of print culture.  Then, focusing on two series of picture books published in the last years of the Qing dynasty (1908-11), the talk gives a detailed examination of the context in which these books were published, circulated, and received.  The third section of the talk will address several important issues raised from these books.  One is the formation of the analytical categories of antiquities (guwu), fine arts (meishu), and art (yishu), especially the re-configuration and re-categorization of guwu and meishu.  It also deals with the concepts of “materiality” and “visibility” in early twentieth-century Chinese heritage preservation and exhibitionary culture, including their transformation in the framework of China’s nation-building.

Sponsored by the China Studies Program, and Mary and Cheney Cowles Fellowship of Chinese Art.

Kao Cheng-shu and Gary Hamilton have been research collaborators for twenty years.  After Hamilton was a Fulbright scholar at Tunghai University in 1984/5, they each established and directed research teams investigating the industrialization of East Asia from the point of view of businesspeople.  While Hamilton and his colleagues addressed this topic through a comparative examination of business groups, Kao and his colleagues interviewed local Taiwanese businesspeople. To date, the research center that Kao founded, The Institute of East Asian Economies and Societies, have transcribed interviews of over 600 firms covering over a nearly twenty year period.  A significant subset of these businesspeople has been interviewed many times during this period, and many have been followed to China, where they have established factories in recent years.  Starting in the year 2000, working for a short time each summer, Kao and Hamilton began working on a book that uses Kao’s interview material and Hamilton’s macro-comparative analysis to tell the story of Asia’s post World War Two incorporation in the global economy from the viewpoint of Taiwanese businesspeople.  For the presentation, we will give an overview of the book and will present one chapter, a chapter entitled  “The Round Table,” which is an analysis of how small and medium sized firms organized their production networks during the formative period of Taiwan’s rapid growth, from 1970-1985.

Janet Theiss is an Associate Professor in the History Department, University of Utah. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998.  Theiss is the author of one book, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (UC Press, 2004) and several articles on gender, virtue and family and state politics in Late Imperial China.  She is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled: The Perils of Intimacy: Family Scandals and Family Fortunes in Late Imperial China.

In 1739, a junior daughter-in-law of the elite Fei family of Zhejiang Province brought suit against the head of her husband's family for slandering her chastity.  The lawsuit enmeshed this prominent family in a massive scandal involving adultery, corruption, and official malfeasance, the result of which was the demise not only of the family, but of the sitting governor of Zhejiang, Lu Zhuo.  This paper examines one aspect of this fascinating and tangled story: the role of Governor Lu, who accepts a bribe to intervene in the case, yet whose motives were complicated by his relationships with various members of the Fei family and his personal commitment to the chastity cult.  The Fei case opens up new perspectives on official corruption, the workings of the judicial system, and elite family life, among many other things.  It reveals the usually hidden role of personal alliances and animosities in the handling of judicial cases and in the unfolding of corruption, highlighting the importance of personality, emotion, and deeply-felt principle in matters that are usually seen to be about money, power or the dictates of Qing law.

Kenneth Lieberthal is Arthur F. Thurnau Pr ofessor of Political Science and William Davidson Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan.  He is also Nonresident Senior Fellow of The Brookings Institution.  During 1998-2000, he served as Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council.  He is the author of, among others, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform (2nd revised edition: W.W. Norton, 2004) and has just coauthored NBR Analysis: China's Search For Energy Security and Implications for US Policy.

China is having a significant and growing impact on the global economy.  This presentation seeks to answer four key questions:  Will China's strong growth record continue?  What factors will shape the answer to this question?  What are the potential international implications?  And what are the key underlying risk factors?

Khoan and Michael Sullivan never set out to be collectors, but over a period of sixty years, beginning in west China,  they came to know a number of Chinese artists who gave them their works.  To these gifts, and one bequest, they have in recent years made a number of additions, from gifts, and from a few purchases, not to make the collection more representative of current trends, but simply because they admired the works, and treasured their friendship with the artists.

Sponsored by: The China Studies Program; Cowles Professorship Funds of Chinese Art; Painting Program.

Timothy Brook, a history professor and specialist on Ming dynasty visual culture, will explore the life of the late-Ming art collector Li Rihua and a diary he kept between 1609 and 1616 describing his adventures in the treacherous art market of 17^th century China.

Sponsored by the University of Washington China Studies Program.

The question of governance in China during its transition to market economy 0 is an important and urgent task facing the Chinese state, as the survival of one-party rule is at stake.  Unemployment facing urban Chinese is worsening as state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are undergoing privatization.  As a result, the work unit (danwei) as social control mechanism is losing its grip.  What is the new social control mechanism in the emerging market economy?  This presentation looks specifically at the state's effort to promote community building in urban China as a new space of governance.  Community building is to move away from the model of direct government actions in all aspects of people's lives down to the neighborhood and families and toward a model of community self-governance.  What is emerging in the thinking and practice of governance in China is its adoption of global neo-liberal governance, influenced by ãnew public managementä. Because community building is seen to be part of an effort to build civil society, it is often hailed as a sign of democratization in post-socialist China by both Chinese scholars and international scholars as well as international donor agencies.

This presentation joins other scholars (N. Rose; Z. Bauman) in taking a critical stand on the global discovery of community 0, and argue that community building in China serves to 1) off-load social responsibility to individuals in community by calling on individuals to be responsible 0 and active 0 citizens; 2) enabling the state to demonstrate that it is building local democracy by empowering citizens to govern themselves in community, without having to forego the one-party rule.

~Random House

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Center, University Book Store and China Studies Program.

In current China, to discuss the issue of globalization in regard to those of postmodernity and postcoloniality has been attracting the attention of almost all the literary and cultural scholars since the late 1990s.  Actually, since the beginning of the 1980s, the issue of the postmodern or postmodernism has been attractive to some avant-garde Chinese artists, literary critics and scholars of cultural and literary studies.  Through heated theoretic discussions, dialogues and even debates, scholars have come to agree that postmodernism is no longer a unique phenomenon in the Western post-industrial society, for it has long gone beyond the limitation of historical periodization and generated some metamorphosed versions in those under-developed and developing Oriental and Third World countries, including China. Although the prime of its life has become an immediate past along with the rise of postcolonial critical trends and the critical reaction on it in the context of Cultural Studies, postmodernism is still heatedly discussed in regard to its critical and creative reception in the Chinese context along with the scholars' recent interest in the issue of globalization concerning the current Chinese practice.  In offering his reflections on issues of global postmodernity and postcoloniality, the author will analyze these phenomena from a Chinese cultural and literary perspective from which some theoretic dialogues could be carried on at the level of postmodernity and postcoloniality in an age of globalization, and starting with which some Chinese cultural and intellectual strategies could be put forward in the face of Western influence. The author will offer his own reconstruction of globalization from a Marxist perspective.

Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program and Department of Comparative Literature.

Professor Goldman is the author of numerous books, edited volumes, and articles on modern Chinese history, particularly of Chinese Communist history.  She is the co-author with John K. Fairbank of China: A New History, Enlarged Edition, updated in 2005.  She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (BA), Radcliffe College (MA) and Harvard University (PhD). From Comrade to Citizen: the Struggle for Political Rights in China analyzes the changes in the role of public intellectuals in the post-Mao era and how their use of the language of "rights" spread from the intellectuals to workers, farmers and ordinary citizens.

~Random House

Cosponsored by the East Asia Center and the University Book Store.