China Colloquia

Details forthcoming.

Michael G. Chang received his A.B. in sociology from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in East Asian history from the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of A Court on Horseback:  Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680-1785 (Harvard, 2007).

East Asia is a paradigm in many ways of the costs of development sweeping the world, resulting in rapid urbanization and industrialization, followed by severe environmental degradation and pollution. Taiwan, following in Japan’s footsteps, has had some of the world’s worst environmental problems, with the PRC and Hong Kong following suit. The three states have widely different geographies, political and economic systems, and environmental programs. All three began to really address the environment only in the 1980s. Taiwan has come the furthest, China the least. All three states aspire to sustainable development, but none are close to reaching that goal. China faces the most daunting challenges.

A graduate of Harvard Law (1987), Professor Winn teaches commercial and technology law courses and is the Co-Director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology. She is also a Visiting Fellow of the University of Melbourne School of Law, teaching in the e-Law program there. Professor Winn is a member of the American Law Institute and a board member of CALI - Computer Assisted Legal Instruction. From 1987 to 1989 she practiced law at the New York office of Shearman & Sterling. She is co-author of the treatise Law of Electronic Commerce (4th ed. 2001) and the casebook Electronic Commerce (2002). Her current research interests include electronic commerce law developments in the U.S., EU and greater China.

Professor David M. Lampton is Dean of Faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies and Director of China Studies.  He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and was former President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.  In addition, he consults with government, foundations, and businesses, including the law firm of Akin Gump where he is senior international advisor on China.  Professor Lampton has written and edited many books and articles, including: Same Bed, Different Drams: Managing U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000, and The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Age of Reform (editor).  Lampton will talk about his just-published book entitled: The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money and Minds (University of California Press, 2008).  The paperback edition will be available for purchase for those interested.

Wendy Swartz is Assistant Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese Literature at Columbia University. Her research is primarily on medieval Chinese poetry and poetics. She has published articles on Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun and is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427-1900) (forthcoming July 2008, Harvard University Press).

WANG Jun graduated in 1991 from the Chinese People's University journalism department, and has since worked in the Beijing Branch of the Xinhua News Agency reporting on economic affairs. In 1993, he began researching the work of the architect and planner LIANG Sicheng, and the planning and preservation of the old city of Beijing.  He published a series of papers on this subject, and one book that is currently being translated into English, "Cheng Ji [City Record]" (2003).  More recently, WANG Jun has become a widely published and consulted observer of urban affairs in China, and a leading critic of urban development.

His latest book project, "Cai Fang Ben Shang de Cheng Shi [Cities in a Journalist's Notebook]", to be published later this year, discusses urban development throughout China, and reflects on issues of urban form, property, taxation, etc.  He maintains a blog at http://blog.sina.com.cn/wangjun 

Professor Dien was born in St. Louis, attended Washington University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley, and his degrees are all from the latter.  He has taught at the University of Hawaii, Columbia University and Stanford University, from which he retired fourteen years ago. His area of specialization is the history, culture and archaeology of early China, the history and culture of the nomads of Central Asia, and the Silk Road.

Karl Gerth’s research interests concern how China has related to the rest of the world since the nineteenth century. He is currently researching two book projects: one conceptualizing consumerism in twentieth-century China and a second focusing on the impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s radical social policies on everyday life in the nation’s urban centers in the 1950s. He received his PHD in history from Harvard in 2000 and taught at the University of South Carolina before moving to Oxford in 2007.

Eileen Rose Walsh, cultural anthropologist, researches tourism as consumption and development, and the transformations which Chinese tourism has brought to a matrilineal ethnic minority group, the Mosuo, and the area in which they live.  Walsh is moving to a new position at University of Oxford, and is completing her manuscript entitled Living the Myth of Matriarchy: Gender, Tourism and the Mosuo. 

Chen-shen J. Yen is a Research Fellow and Chair of the First Divison at the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University (Taipei). He earned MAs in History and Political Science from the University of Texas and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Purdue University.  His current research interests include Taiwan’s foreign relations, democratization and ethnic conflicts in Africa, and cross-strait relations.  In 2005, he assumed the editorship of the reputed journal Issues & Studies.

Taiwan held its fourth direct presidential election since 1996 on March 22, 2008.  Opposition candidate Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) won a convincing victory over ruling party candidate Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) by garnering over 58% of the popular support and beating the latter by nearly 17% or over 2.2 million votes in the final ballot counts.  This is the second alternation of party in power since 2000.  From the studies of democratization and democratic theories, it can be considered a condition where democratic consolidation has been met.

What does “environmental protection” really mean in China? And what does the Chinese government’s pledge to hold a “Green Olympics” in Beijing this coming August indicate for China’s growing environmental movement? Dr. Bao Maohong, professor of environmental history at Peking University, will address these questions.

Dr. Bao’s lecture is entitled “Beijing and the ‘Green Olympics’” and will showcase his expertise as a top analyst of Chinese environmental policy. In addition to many presentations and interviews at U.S. institutions such as American University and the University of Southern California, he worked for two years as a visiting professor at Bayreuth University in Germany. Dr. Bao is currently a guest professor at Obirin University in Japan, and arrives directly in Washington state from Tokyo. His essays have been published in many Chinese and Japanese journals, and a recent article “The Evolution of Environmental Policy and its impact in People’s Republic of China,” appeared in Conservation and Society (March 2006).

Mark Swislocki is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where he has taught since 2003.  He earned his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 2002.  His research focuses on the social and cultural history of China, and his interests include the history of food and cuisine, medicine and the history of the body, and human-animal relations.  His first book, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture in Shanghai, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Mina Titi Liu is currently the Garvey Schubert Barer visiting professor in Asian Law at the University of Washington School of Law. Her research and teaching focuses on Chinese law and society, comparative criminal procedure and public interest law. She was the Law and Rights program officer in China for the Ford Foundation from July 2000 to March 2007. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Jerome Silbergeld is the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History and Director of the Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University. He was previously the chair of Art History and director of the School of Art at the University of Washington, where he taught for twenty-five years. He teaches and publishes in the areas of Chinese painting history, both traditional and contemporary, Chinese cinema and photography, and Chinese architecture and gardens. He is the author of more than forty articles and book chapters, as well as seven books and three edited volumes, including Chinese Painting Style (1982), Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (1993), China Into Film (1999), Hitchcock With a Chinese Face (2004), and a forthcoming book on the films of director Jiang Wen. He is currently organizing two exhibitions, on contemporary Chinese/American art for the Princeton University Art Museum and on Chinese documentary photography for the China Institute in New York.

Yangming Chu recently joined the Seattle Chinese Garden Society as chief curator. A Chinese art historian, Chu most recently was deputy director and curator of the Beijing World Art Museum. Prior positions included research associate at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator of the New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden at the Staten Island Botanical Garden, where he supervised the garden’s construction and operations. From 1995-97 while at the MMA, he coordinated the renovation of the Astor Court, a re-creation of a Ming Dynasty garden courtyard, the installation of Chinese architectural components for the new Chinese Galleries, and worked on the preparations and installation of "The Splendors of Imperial China." A native of Yangzhou, China, Chu earned his BA at the Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing, and an MA and MPhil in art history at Columbia University, where he is completing his doctorate.

Our present-day knowledge of Chinese gardens is mostly based on examples from China's eastern cities, from Yangzhou and Suzhou through Hangzhou in the south, and from Beijing in the north. Western and Chinese literature on the subject suggests a species of garden so singular, so self-contained, so coherent, and so distinct from the world's other varieties that little or no internal differentiation needs to be discerned. A preliminary examination of the gardens of Sichuan, however, reveals differences in style, engineering, patronage, and function so different from this norm that further study of the regionalization of Chinese gardens seems imperative.

R. Bin Wong is Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Professor of History.  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 as 转变的中国 （江苏人民出版社, 1998.  Wong has also written or co-authored some sixty 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.