China Colloquia

US-China Links With a Twist: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on American Relations with Hong Kong and Macao

Dr. Chan’s talk will delineate the key dimensions of US-HK relations in the strategic, political, economic and socio-cultural realms.  He will start with a retrospective on US-HK links in the 1949-1997 colonial and Cold War era as a vital element in the Containment of Communist China military-strategic calculus.  It will then focus on the strong US interests in China's HK since 1997 with special concerns for its economic development and democratization under Communist China sovereignty.

In addition, US-Macao ties will also be examined, especially in the context of recent massive American investments in Macao's gaming-tourism industry and the alarm over North Korea’s financial dealings through Macao banks.  It will conclude with observations on HK's prospect as America's gateway to the China market and the mid-Pacific Rim hub for economic & functional services. Co-sponsored by the East Asia Center, China Studies Program and Global Business Center.

Obstructer or Promoter?

The role of local governments in Chinese politics

Professor Heimer’s research interests encompass state capacity, state transformation, development strategy, and poverty reduction.  She is beginning a new project focusing on the impact of popular protest in China.  Her recent publications include an edited volume (together with Stig Thogersen) on Doing Fieldwork in China.

Local government in China is often described as the villain on the political stage.  Professor Heimer’s paper suggests that the concern with corrupt local governments is to a large part misdirected.  She outlines a basic framework through which the role of local governments in Chinese politics can be understood.  While agreeing in large part with those who hold that the central state maintains its capacity to steer local behavior, this project will look not only at the political incentives from above but also at the fiscal constraints and increasing grassroots pressure that local governments face today, as well as, the coping strategies that local leaders adopt in response.  Why do local leaders act like they do? The difference in approach results in very different conclusions where reforming political incentives or introducing local elections are viewed as inadequate solutions to China's implementation problems.  Her paper is a rough draft of the introduction to a book volume on local governments.

Lao-tzu and Medicine: Philosophical Background of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Professor Tateno received his. B.A. and M.A at Nihon University, and Ph.D. in Medicine at Jyuntendo University.  He teaches Chinese philosophy and medicine at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan.

For human beings, health and living healthier lives, is an everlasting theme.  Even living in a highly medically and scientifically developed world, we still fear a number of diseases.  This is the case for all ages and countries.  But at the same time, as a medical scientist, Professor Tateno would like to show you the ways to live healthy lives, not in some theoretically ideal world, but actually in the everyday phenomenal world, where real people suffer from real ailments, such as diabetes mellitus, myocardial infarction, organ failure, cataracts, and so on.  He will attempt to do this mainly from the oriental medical perspective.

Philosophy and medicine may seem a bit of a strange combination.  But in ancient China, philosophy and medicine were like two sides of one coin.  In ancient China, both medicine and philosophy share psychosomatic via mind-bodily systems of practical regimen as a background for the other.  These two sides, when properly combined, form the harmonious unity of a healthy person.  This is real “mens sana in corpore sano” (healthy mind in healthy body).

Sino-Japanese Relations under Abe Shinzo and Hu Jintao

How do we explain Sino-Japanese relations in recent years, both the sharp deterioration during the five and half year term of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro and a significant warming after Abe Shinzo became prime minister in September 2006 and President Hu Jintao demonstrated his firm control over the party and the government in a party plenary in October?  This presentation will evaluate what will have happened to Sino-Japanese relations in the first five months of Abe’s term as prime minister and in the context of ongoing personnel changes leading to the 17^th Chinese Communist Party National Congress in October.  A key question to be addressed is whether it is structural forces, domestic politics or leadership personalities that shape this important bilateral relationship.  Thus, the talk will shed some light on both Chinese and Japanese foreign policy.  Professor Wan’s argument, as it stands now, is that whereas structural and domestic politics set the parameters for a troubled Sino-Japanese relationship from a long-term perspective, how the two governments handle or mishandle their relationship explains the recent sharp swing in the bilateral relationship.

Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program and Japan Studies Program.

For Want of a Hand:

A Study of Sima Qian’s Use of Sources in ‘The Hereditary House of Jin’

William Nienhauser first studied Chinese at the Army Language School in Monterey, California but took his degrees (in Chinese literature) from the University of Indiana (PhD 1972) with a year abroad at the University of Bonn.  After a year teaching German for two years at Indiana University, he joined the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin in 1973.  He has taught or been a fellow in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Germany and published a number of books and articles on early Chinese narrative and poetry.

Although modern scholars know something about the sources for the pre-Qin period Sima Qian must have used in compiling his Shiji, it is unlikely that any of those ‘texts’ has been transmitted to us in the form that he saw them.  Moreover, little is known about how Sima actually put together his great history.  On reading and translating “The Hereditary House of the Jin,” chapter 39 of the Shiji, several perplexing passages led back to the current versions of the Zuo zhuan, Gongyang zhuan, and Guliang zhuan.  A comparison of those texts, which I propose to present in a short paper, may lead to hypotheses about (1) the nature of those three commentaries in Sima Qian’s time, (2) Sima’s use of those three early sources, and (3) the methods Sima may have used in compiling his history.

On the ci Form of Early Chinese Oratory

David Schaberg (A.B. Stanford 1986, Ph.D. Harvard 1996) is Associate Professor in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA.  He has published articles on early Chinese literature, historiography, and philosophy as well as Greek/Chinese comparative issues in Early China, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Comparative Literature.  He is author of A Patterned Past:  Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography, Harvard East Asian Monographs 205, which was awarded the 2003 Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies (Pre-1900 Category).

Attested in the Zuozhuan and other pre-Han sources, the ci form of oratory shows a distinct kinship with the diction and rhythms of Shijing songs.  Read in connection with early comments on the uses of Shijing, examples of ci suggest that Shijing memorization and exegesis were designed primarily to hone practical oratorical abilities.  This pedagogical reading in turn casts early Chinese poetics ("The Great Preface") and the origins of the rhyme-prose (fu) in a new light.

Non-Proliferation Issues for China and the U.S.

Dr. Dingli Shen, a physicist, is the Executive Dean of Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies and Director of Center for American Studies.  He is also the founder and director of the Program on Arms Control and Regional Security at Fudan University.

His research areas cover China-U.S. security relationship, nuclear arms control and disarmament, nuclear weapons policy of the United States and China, regional nonproliferation issues concerning South Asia, Northeast Asia and Middle East, test ban, missile defense, export control, as well as, China’s foreign and defense policies. He is the author of several books as well as over 500 articles and papers in both international relations and physics.

He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1989 from Fudan University and did his post-doc in arms control at Princeton University from 1989-1991.

Sponsored by the China Studies Program and IGRSS (Institute for Global and Regional Security Studies).

Steven Miles, Assistant Professor of History, Washington University, St. Louis and Matthew Sommer, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Stanford University

Women in Late Imperial China

Steven Miles: Strange Encounters on the Cantonese Frontier: Region and Gender in Kuang Lu's (1604-1650) Chiya

Matthew Sommer: The Sale of Wives in Late Imperial China Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions

Steven Miles received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 2000 and is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at Washington University in Saint Louis.  His book, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2006.  His articles have appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, the Journal of Chinese Overseas, Late Imperial China, Ming Studies, Nan Nü, and T’oung Pao.  He is currently working on a second book project, which will explore Cantonese migration along the West River basin during the early modern era.

Matthew Sommer (BA, Swarthmore College, 1983; MA, University of Washington, 1987; Ph.D., UCLA, 1994) taught Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years before joining Stanford University’s History Department in 2002.  His work focuses on sexuality, gender relations, and law in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912).  He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000).  His second book is near completion: its title will be Wife Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions.  Future plans include a study of male same-sex union and masculinity in the eighteenth-century, based on some 2000 sodomy cases already collected from legal archives in China.

Sponsored by the China Studies Program and East Asia Center.  With special thanks to the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for supporting the China Program’s Gordon C. Culp Fellows.

Rethinking Chinese Business: Trust and Distrust in Chinese Business Networks

Tong Chee Kiong teaches at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.  He was past Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Director, Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, and Co-Director, NUS Center for the Arts.  Presently, he is chair of graduate studies in the Department of Sociology.  Chee Kiong completed his undergraduate training at the University of Singapore and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University, USA.  Tong Chee Kiong’s research interests focus on ethnicity, religion and the nation state in Southeast Asia, and Chinese Business Networks.  His publications include Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore (Routledge 2004), Rationalizing Religion: Religious Conversion, Revivalism and Competition in Singapore (Brill 2006).  Tong Chee Kiong has also published papers in the British Journal of Sociology, Diaspora, International Migration Review and International Sociology.

Much of the literature on the success of East Asian economies and Chinese business has emphasized the importance of guanxi, trust, and networks in business transactions.  There is a tendency to incorporate personal relations in decision making, and business relationships are based on personal trust.  Business relationships are based on trust and guanxi relations.  Based on fieldwork in China, Malaysia, and Singapore, Professor Tong examines the origins of this particular mode of doing business and rethinks the idea of trust in Chinese business.  He suggests that ideas such as trust, guanxi, and personalism can be better understood if they are seen as dependent rather than independent variables, and argues that Chinese business practices arose out a deep sense of distrust, rather than trust, especially in the institutional and environmental conditions in which the businesses operated.  There is a fear of being cheated and defrauded, and Chinese businessmen develop practices, such as trust, personalism, and guanxi to minimize risk and deal with the distrust of others.

The Models of Chinese Social Stratification

Li Yi is the author of two books and a dozen journal articles on Chinese society and culture.  He received his M.A. in Sociology from the University of Missouri—Columbia, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Before coming to the United States in 1994, Dr. Li was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Northwestern School of Law in China.

In the Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification (University Press of America, 2005), Li Yi lays out a detailed model of Chinese social stratification after 1949.  In China today, there are a peasant class, a working class (urban state worker and urban collective worker, urban non-state worker, and peasant worker), a capitalist class (about 15 million), and a class of cadre (about 40 million) and quasi-cadre (about 25 million).

Li Yi Model of Chinese Social Stratification:

1. A Coherent and Consistent Picture of Chinese Social Stratification

2. The Decline of the Peasant Class

3. The Making of the Chinese Working Class

4. The Rise of the Chinese Capitalist Class

5. The Splitting off of the Cadre Class

6. Where is the Middle Class?

7. The Party in the Chinese Social Stratification

8. Foreseeing the Future of Chinese Social Stratification

Health, Poverty and Children's Education in Rural Northwest China

Emily Hannum is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also affiliated with the Graduate School of Education, the Population Studies Center, and the Center for East Asian Studies.  Her research focuses on education, child welfare, and social inequality, particularly in China.  Recent publications include "Market Transition, Educational Disparities, and Family Strategies in Rural China: New Evidence on Gender Stratification and Development" (Demography, 2005) and "Global Educational Expansion and Socio-Economic Development: An Assessment of Findings from the Social Sciences" (with Claudia Buchmann, World Development, 2005).

In the context of rising costs for health care services in rural China, some studies suggest that ill health has become a common precursor to falling into poverty.  Does the pernicious impact of ill health reach across generations?  Drawing on a survey of rural children and families conducted in Gansu province in 2004, this presentation investigates linkages between parental health problems and children's access to education.

The triumph of ‘goods’ over ‘children’?  Family planning in post-Mao rural Southeastern China

Gonçalo Duro dos Santos is a Senior Associate Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.  He has been carrying out extensive fieldwork (1999-2001, 2005) in rural Southeastern China and has recently started to undertake comparative field research (2005-2006) in Eastern and Southwestern China as well as in the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia).  His research and writings focus primarily on kinship, personhood, gender and identity, wet-rice farming, economics, distinction and social change.  He currently holds a Post-Doctoral Grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology to complete a monograph on kinship and relatedness in Southeastern China. Bearing in mind the old anthropological motto: “small places, large issues”, Dr. Duro dos Santos will take you on a short trip to a small Cantonese lineage-village in Northern Guangdong, to provide a detailed portrait of the process of local implementation of the ‘one child policy’ as well as of the villagers’ demographic behaviour before and after the implementation of this policy. The qualitative and quantitative data presented will suggest that the residents of this village may have been good students of the recent market-oriented post-Mao reforms but they were certainly not good students of the ‘one-child policy’. Their seemingly ‘atypical’ family-planning ideas and behaviour will lead us to raise questions about the extent of the urban/rural and regional variations of China’s recent fertility decline, and about widespread Malthusian assumptions regarding the key motivational factors behind a population’s fertility decline.

Spatial Sampling in China

Shen Mingming received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, and currently is a professor at the School of Government of Peking University.  His areas of research include theories of comparative politics, political development, survey research methodology, and regional security of Northeast Asia.  Most of his publications are in English.

Since 1996, he has served as director of the Research Center of Contemporary China (RCCC), an interdisciplinary research institute at Peking University.  Under his tenure the RCCC has developed, among other achievements, a center of survey research and quantitative data analysis in China.

Dr. Shen also serves as adjunct research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.  He has also provided professional consultancy to a number of international organizations, such as, UNDB, WHO, World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank.

Is There a Chinese Model of Development? China and the GlobalSouth

Arif Dirlik, recently retired, taught at Duke University for thirty years, before moving to the University of Oregon in 2001 as Knight Professor of Social Science and Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies.  He has just completed a term as Visiting Professor at the Contemporary Marxism Institute of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China in Beijing.  His most recent book-length publications are "Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism," and an edited volume, "Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest."

There have been claims in recent years to a "Chinese Model of Development."  Floated first by an employee of Goldman Sachs in Beijing, it has assumed more enduring theoretical dimensions in the promotion of a "Concept of Scientific Development" by the Communist Party of China.  The Party also claims the concept as the articulation of Marxism appropriate to a "New Age." The discussion will review the theoretical and practical validity of these claims with reference to developmental policies pursued by the PRC, their consequences for Chinese society, and their implications for the so-called Global South, the contemporary reincarnation of the Third World.

Courtesans and Local government in the Song: the case of Zhu Xi and Tang Zhongyou

Beverly Bossler is Professor of History at University of California, Davis, where she specializes in the social, intellectual, and gender history of middle-period China.  Her current book project, "Harlots and Heroines," examines changing gender ideology from the late Tang through the Yuan dynasties, by tracing the intertwining cultural roles of courtesans and female exemplars.

Friday-Sunday: 9:00-5:00 p.m.

Friday-Sunday: Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall

The 39th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics

Ninety-two papers were presented over three days by scholars from around the world.  In addition to presentations on Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages, there were talks on Hmong-Mien, Thai, and Vietnamese. Randy LaPolla, Robbins Burling, and Jerry Norman delivered the three keynote addresses.

Sponsored by: The China Studies Program, East Asia Center and Department of Asian Languages and Literature.