| ► | Home |
| ► | Affiliated Faculty |
| ► | East Asia Center |
| ► | East Asia Resource Center |
| ► | Courses |
| ► | Current Courses | |
| ► | Related Courses | |
| ► | Future Courses | |
| ► | Affiliated Programs |
| ► | Events and Colloquia |
| ► | East Asia Library |
| ► | Undergraduate Requirements |
| ► | Graduate Requirements |
| ► | China Program Fellowships |
China Colloquia
Current colloquia for the 2008-2009 academic year are listed here.
[November] [December] [January] [February] [March] [April] [May] [July]
For past colloquia, please check the following links:
[1998-1999] [1999-2000] [2000-2001] [2001-2002] [2002-2003] [2003-2004] [2004-2005] [2005-2006] [2006-2007] [2007-2008]
(For other UW China related lectures and events please visit the calendars at the East Asia Center, and Asian Languages and Literature.)
IN 2009, THE CHINA PROGRAM WILL CELEBRATE ITS 100TH ANNIVERSARY! THROUGHOUT 2008-2009, MANY CENTENNIAL PROGRAMS AND EVENTS WILL BE LISTED ON THIS PAGE.
JUNE 4, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Speaker: TBA
Title: TBA
Details forthcoming.
MAY 28, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Ding Xiang Warner, Associate Professor, Chinese Literature, Cornell University and University of Washington alumna
Title: TBA
To celebrate the Centennial of the China Studies Program, the 2008-09 China Colloquium is featuring a number of China scholars trained at the University of Washington.
Details forthcoming.
MAY 21, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Hairong Yan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Hong Kong, and University of Washington alumna
Title: TBA
To celebrate the Centennial of the China Studies Program, the 2008-09 China Colloquium is featuring a number of China scholars trained at the University of Washington.
Details forthcoming.
MAY 14, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Anne Yue Hashimoto, Professor, and Lin Deng, Graduate Student, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington
Language contact in the Hainan Island -- Southern Min and the Li language
Details forthcoming.
MAY 13, 2009
Wednesday, 7:00 p.m.
Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room
Bradley Jensen Murg, PhD student, Department of Political Science, University of Washington
Hotspots in our World Lecture Series
China’s Far West: Identity, Administration, and Separatism in Xinjiang
Details forthcoming.
Sponsored by the East Asia Center and the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies.
APRIL 30, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
William Schaefer, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California at Berkeley
Title: TBA
Details forthcoming.
April 28, 2009
Tuesday, 7:00 p.m.
Kane Hall 120
David Knechtges, Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington
Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities: How to view a Mountain in Medieval China
One of the leading scholars of classical and medieval Chinese literature and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, David R. Knechtges (Asian Languages and Literature) is best known as the translator of the Wen-xuan, the most influential anthology of classical Chinese poetry. His recent work includes Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West, co-edited with Eugene Vance (Professor Emeritus, French & Italian Studies) and published in 2005.
Sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
APRIL 16, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Imre Hamar, Professor of Chinese and Head of the Chinese language and literature faculty, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary
Title: TBA
Details forthcoming.
APRIL 2, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Joan Judge, Professor of Women's Studies, York University
Title: TBA
Details forthcoming.
March 6, 2009
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Communications 202
David Kelly, Professor, Chinese Politics, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Uncertainty, governance and rights: intellectual strategies and conflicting frameworks
David Kelly is Professor of Chinese Politics at the China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney. Professor Kelly's work ranges widely across Chinese politics: intellectual history, especially of Marxism and liberalism; political sociology, mainly of intellectuals, urban homeowners and migrant workers; and public policy, focusing on the dilemmas of governance under turbulent current conditions.
Social transition in China takes place by the superimposition of frames of reference, rather than their orderly substitution and elimination. The "punctuated" development of citizen rights is a special case of this. It tends to generate uncertainty: people are inclined to hedge, to withhold commitment, to adopt alibis and other strategies. In this context, intellectuals, lawyers, and other activists capable of mobilizing the appropriate resources apply much of their efforts to positioning themselves at points of leverage between the conflicting frameworks: hoping to speed change in the direction of enhanced citizenship, while avoiding the costs of open confrontation. They thus tend to reproduce the uncertainty around them.
Sponsored by the UW China Studies Program.
MARCH 5, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Thomas Mullaney, Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University
Meditations on the Han Figurine: How to Conceptualize, Research and Teach the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth
Thomas S. Mullaney is an Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. His research deals with the role of the social sciences in the history of state- and nation-formation, ethnic and racial identity, state and social scientific practices of individual and collective identification, classification theory, and transnational and comparative world history. He is currently researching and writing the history of the development and discourse of the Chinese typewriter.
The Han (漢), a colossal category of identity that encompasses ninety-two percent of the population of mainland China and ninety-eight percent of Taiwan, is technically the largest ethnic group on earth. Like other immense categories of identity, whether national, racial, ethnic, or otherwise, Han is beset by a host of linguistic, cultural, political, and historical inconsistencies that call into question its status as a coherent community. Despite this heterogeneity, however, Han has managed to fly below the radar of Critical Race Theory and largely above that of Ethnic Studies and Anthropology. Drawing upon the experience of the Critical Han Studies Conference, held at Stanford University in April 2008, Mullaney will offer a preliminary synthesis of some of the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical challenges one faces when trying to conceptualize, research, and guide students in thinking critically about the category of Han.
For more information please visit http://jsis.washington.edu/china/colloquia.shtml or email lpbutt@u.washington.edu or call 206.543.4391
FEBRUARY 26, 2009
Thursday, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Trang Ta, PhC, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
Speaking through an Organ of the State:
Propaganda and Popular Law in Contemporary China
Trang X. Ta is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation A State of Imbalance: Corporal Politics and Moral Order in Contemporary China is based on ethnographic research and data collection over the span of 24 months primarily in the city of Beijing from 2004-2007 with additional research data gathered in a preliminary study in Chengdu in summer 2003.
Trang’s presentation will focus on a law lecture in the medium of television to examine the curious use of sensational criminality to educate the public on what would seemingly be considered banal legal legislation. This particular criminal case begins as a love story that leads to a murder, a trial, an execution, an organ extraction, a reward, a lawsuit, and finally a legal and moral lesson in inheritance law and organ donation for the viewing audience. The sensational details of the case serve to attract viewers to the program and in the process provide a means to disseminate information about the law. Her analysis will focus on how the representation of crime and criminal intent is transformed by the state into a modern morality tale. The rise in crime reportage and dissection of criminal cases through programs exploring the criminal world in both dramatized and documentary forms are a part of government efforts to define the boundaries of legal discourse, the rights and parameters of legal citizenship, and encourage confidence in the law and the judicial system. But, they are also a public forum for the discussion and resolution of the new “social problems” that have emerged along with the rapid growth of the economy. The case illustrates the uneasy balance between values of social sacrifice and market rationality that both serve to inform public behavior.
For more information please visit http://jsis.washington.edu/china/colloquia.shtml or email lpbutt@u.washington.edu or call 206.543.4391
FEBRUARY 19, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Mark Swislocki, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Brown University
"The 'Discovery' of Malnutrition in China:
A Window onto the Comparative and Transnational History of Medicine, Hunger, and the Body"
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.
Malnutrition was “discovered” in China during the Republican period (1912-1949). This was a genuine medical discovery that surprised and concerned many observers of China’s relatively new and growing industrial workforce, among whom malnutrition had become widespread by the 1930s. It was also, however, a “discovery,” made possible by new ideas about the body and nutrition that provided Chinese with a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between eating and health. These ideas, which originated in Europe and the United States, matured internationally during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century and spread quickly not only to China, but to many other parts of the world, including Japan, Eastern Africa, and India, where malnutrition was also “discovered” during these same years. Situating the Chinese “discovery” in this global context provides a valuable comparative framework of identifying the shared and divergent patterns in the global history of malnutrition and the processes leading to its discovery and redefinition. Chinese observers of malnutrition located the Chinese case in a distinctive national history of food, medicine, and social change. However, as in numerous other parts of the world, malnutrition in China was eventually defined largely as a personal medical problem, rather than a social problem, and as one that could be solved by changing worker’s eating habits, social customs, and spending patterns. Placing this moment of Chinese history in a global comparative context helps us think through the benefits and limitations of studying the comparative history of China from the China-Japan or “colonial modernity” models that have heretofore informed and inhibited understanding of China’s historical relationship to global currents.
FEBRUARY 17, 2009
Tuesday, 3:30-5:00pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Professor Yung Sik Kim, Director of Kyujanggak Institute, Seoul National University
The Theory of "the Chinese Origin of Western Learning" in Qing China
and Late Choson Korea
Yung Sik Kim, Professor at the Department of Asian History, Seoul National University, is also a member of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. His research interests include science and natural philosophy in traditional China, history of science in Korea and the comparative history of science. He is currently serving as director of the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
When faced with Western ideas and knowledge coming to China in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many Chinese intellectuals resorted to the so-called theory of "the Chinese origin of Western learning" (xixue zhongyuan 西學中源). The proponents of the theory believed that the Western scientific ideas had their origins in ancient China: Chinese had knowledge of them in their ancient golden ages, but such knowledge disappeared later and fell to the hands of the barbarians, who developed it further and brought it back to China. Many modern scholars have studied various ways in which the beliefs in the theory manifested and evolved. In my lecture, I will look again at the situation surrounding the emergence and the spread of the theory. First, Dr. Kim will consider how this belief which now appears so far-fetched could come about and could be accepted so widely. He will suggest that it is a natural attitude found in many other historical circumstances, not restricted to seventeenth-century China. Dr. Kim will then examine the actual responses of the Confucian scholars of the time, including those of the late Choson Korea, and show the great variety found in their attitudes to the idea of the Chinese origin. He will attempt to sort out these various attitudes and to situate them in the intellectual climates surrounding them.
FEBRUARY 12, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Helen Schneider, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Virginia Tech
Patriotic morality and social reform:
Nationalist women's responsibilities during the second Sino-Japanese War
To celebrate the Centennial of the China Studies Program, the 2008-09 China Colloquium is featuring a number of China scholars trained at the University of Washington.
Helen M. Schneider earned her PhD in History from the University of Washington in 2004. She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia where she teaches classes in East Asian History. Her current research interests include gender and war, domesticity, the history of childhood, and Chinese women's history.
Professor Schneider will present some of her ongoing research into the ideas of gendered wartime responsibilities of educated Chinese women during the Sino-Japanese war. She hopes to show that these women believed that it was their patriotic duty to lead their "unenlightened" sisters in combat against unhealthy and seemingly irrational quotidian practices that weakened Chinese moral and psychological defenses. She will trace some of the history of women's involvement in social work in the pre-war period, and will look at the wartime development of these activities through the work of the New Life Movement Women's Advisory Council which, after 1938, was a prime organization in mobilizing women's wartime relief efforts. Professor Schneider will also talk about her experiences finding (or not finding) materials related to this project in archives in mainland China and Taiwan.
Details forthcoming.
JANUARY 30, 2009
Friday, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Tami Blumenfield, PhC, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
Media Collaborations in southwest China:
The Moso Film Festival
Tami Blumenfield is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington and a fellow in the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy at the UW Bothell. Her dissertation examines filmmaking practices and mediation in the Moso/Na tourist zones around Lugu Lake, in China’s Yunnan Province. Research for the dissertation included collaborating with the Moso Folk Museum and organizing the first-ever village film festival in China, the Moso Film Festival (January 2006).
In January 2006, the Moso Folk Museum (located on the shores of Lugu Lake in Yunnan, China) hosted the first-ever Moso Film Festival. The organizers planned screenings to expose inaccuracies promulgated by outside filmmakers and television stations who document Moso culture. Through this exposure and subsequent discussion, they hoped to encourage locals to think more about their role in media production and consumption. Instead, the film screenings became a venue for Moso villagers to reflect on the development of their home community after more than a decade of intense tourism, research and media coverage, and to contemplate how to react.
JANUARY 22, 2009
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Melissa Brown, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University and University of Washington alumna
Why Bind a Daughter's Feet?
Culture, Economy and Gender in China
To celebrate the Centennial of the China Studies Program, the 2008-09 China Colloquium is featuring a number of China scholars trained at the University of Washington.
Melissa J. Brown (PhD U Washington 1995) has ongoing collaborative research projects about Chinese girls' and women's labor and footbinding, son preferences and rural men's inability to marry in the contemporary PRC, marriage practices, and sex ratio imbalances in early 20th-century Taiwan. Her books include: Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities and Explaining Culture Scientifically.
Footbinding was widespread, but not universal, among Han Chinese women in the late imperial and republican periods. This former custom is often thought to derive from Han cultural notions of beauty and sexuality or, more recently, to be a crucial means of constructing gender identity, and to have stopped as a result of elite policy efforts. Surveys of rural women suggest an alternative, economic explanation: footbinding served as a form of labor control for young girls being trained in pre-industrial handcraft production, especially textiles. Economic variation in space and time correlates with regional variation in the practice of footbinding and in the mosaic pattern of its demise. However, women themselves were generally unaware of this connection, believing that footbinding improved their marriage prospects and were able to offer no other explanation for footbinding's end than that "society changed." Understanding why families chose to bind their daughters' feet, or not, requires reconciling contradictory cultural and economic evidence as well as revisiting women's place in the Han kinship system.
JANUARY 15, 2009
Thursday, 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Henry Gao, Associate Professor, School of Law, Singapore Management University
Japan-China Trade Disputes: 'Aggressive Legalism' with a Confucian Touch?
The first Chinese lawyer to ever work at the WTO Secretariat, Professsor Gao has published widely on all issues relating to China and WTO. He has spoken at conferences across the world and trained hundreds of government officials on WTO issues. A consultant to many national governments and international organizations, including the WTO, the World Bank and APEC, he is also a frequent commentator in major international media such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Bloomberg.
Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program, Japan Studies Program, and East Asia Center.
DECEMBER 4, 2008
Thursday, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Architecture Hall 147
Chen Shizhe, photographer of folk life and architecture of Southern Fujian, China
Photographic Works on Four Topics:
Beijing Olympics; Quanzhou, the Global City;
the Survived Memory; and Glimpses of Daily Life
For his first visit to the U.S., Mr. Chen brings with him photographic works centering on four topics. The first of these is the pyrotechnic show of the Beijing Olympics and the photographic record of its designer Cai Guoqiang’s artistic activities. The second is “Quanzhou, the Global City,” an introduction to the cultural history of the port city in Fujian Province touted as the “starting point of the Silk Route on Sea,” and to the important role played by this port city in the maritime history of the ancient world. The third topic is “the Survived Memory.”
Through a close examination of the architectural remnants and relics collected by the Quanzhou Museum of Southern Style Architecture, this group of works showcases the cultural and historical value of the Southern Fujian architecture, and teaches a heart-disturbing lesson of a losing battle of preservation in the face of development and modernization. The last topic, “Glimpses of Daily Life,” is substantiated by black-and-white pictures taken in the 1980’s and 1990’s of the daily lives of the common people in the Southern Fujian area at the beginning of the era of the reformation. The nostalgia touched off by these old pictures is a vivid reminder of the great changes China witnessed in the past two decades.
Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program, East Asia Center, and Department of Urban Design and Planning.
DECEMBER 2, 2008
Tuesday, 7:00 p.m. / Reception to follow
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall
Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor of history at the University of Washington and author of The Cambridge Illustrated History of China and The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period.
Book Reading/Lecture/Reception
Accumulating Culture: The Art and Antiquities Collection of Emperor Huizong
By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art, particularly scrolls of calligraphy and paintings done by known artists. By the time of Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty (960-1279), both scholars and the imperial court were cataloguing their collections and also collecting ancient bronzes and rubbings of ancient inscriptions. The catalogues of Huizong's painting, calligraphy, and antiquities collections list over 9,000 items, and the tiny fraction of the listed items that survive today are all among the masterpieces of early Chinese art.
Patricia Ebrey's study of Huizong's collections places them in both political and art historical context. The acts of adding to and cataloguing the imperial collections were political ones, among the strategies that the Song court used to demonstrate its patronage of the culture of the brush, and they need to be seen in the context of contemporary political divisions and controversies. At the same time, court intervention in the art market was both influenced by, and had an impact on, the production, circulation, and imagination of art outside the court.
Accumulating Culture provides a rich context for interpreting the three book-length catalogues of Huizong's collection and specific objects that have survived. It contributes to a rethinking of the cultural side of Chinese imperial rule and of the court as a patron of scholars and the arts, neither glorifying Huizong as a man of the arts nor castigating him as a megalomaniac, but rather taking a hardheaded look at the political and cultural ramifications of collecting and the reasons for choices made by Huizong and his curators. The reader is offered glimpses of the magnificence of the collections he formed and the disparate fates of the objects after they were seized as booty by the Jurchen invaders in 1127.
The heart of the book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting - antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese art history, social history, and culture, as well as art collectors.
Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program, East Asia Center, and UW Press.
DECEMBER 2, 2008
Tuesday, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Communications 120
Nicholas Lardy, Senior Fellow, The Peterson Institute for International Economics
Sustaining Economic Growth in China
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Nicholas Lardy back to the University of Washington for this special Centennial program. Dr. Lardy is former Chair of the China Studies Program as well as Director of the Jackson School of International Studies.
Dr. Nicholas R. Lardy is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. He is an expert on Asia, especially the Chinese economy. His recent publications include: China’s Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (2008), Debating China’s Exchange Rate Policy (2008), China: Toward a Consumption-Driven Growth Path (2006); China: The Balance Sheet (2006). He is also the author of Integrating China into the Global Economy (2002), China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution (1998), Foreign Trade and Economic Reform in China (1992), Agriculture in China’s Modern Economic Development (1983), and Economic Growth and Distribution in China (1978).
Since a key meeting of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in December 2004 China’s leadership has sought to rebalance the sources of economic growth. They seek to rely less on the expansion of investment and exports and more on the expansion of domestic consumption, particularly household consumption, to generate economic growth. This presentation will examine the rationale for this decision; analyze the policy initiatives that would rebalance growth; and evaluate the progress that China has made to date.
Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program, Global Business Center, and East Asia Center.
NOVEMBER 21, 2008
Friday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Bank of America Executive Education Center,
Douglas Forum
Economic Expert on China, Daniel H. Rosen, and Diego Piacentini, Sr. VP, Int'l Retail, Amazon.com
Amazon in Asia –
Why and How China’s Market Matters
A panel with Diego Piacentini and Daniel Rosen
Moderated by Foster MBA 2008 graduate Carrie Pederson
Come hear Amazon’s top international executive discuss Amazon’s experience in Asia with a renowned author and economic advisor. What are the implications for all global businesses?
Diego Piacentini, Sr. Vice President, International, Amazon.com
He is one of only nine officers reporting directly to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO. Amazon sales are growing despite recessions here and in many of its international markets. Sales grew 31 percent in the third quarter of 2008 thanks to, among other things, its presence in Asia with joyoamazon.cn. Net sales are expected to reach anywhere from $18.5 to $19.5 billion next year.
Diego Piacentini has served as Senior Vice President, International Retail, since joining Amazon.com in February 2000. Prior to joining Amazon.com, Diego was vice president and general manager of Apple Computer Europe, where he headed operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Diego joined Apple Computer in 1987. He held several financial management positions both in Apple Italy and at a European level through 1993. He served as sales director for Apple Italy in 1994 and was promoted to the post of general manager for Apple Italy in May 1995.
Diego holds a degree in economics from Bocconi University of Milan. An Italian national, he has traveled and worked across Europe, Asia and North America.
Daniel Rosen, author and economist specializing in the China market
Daniel H. Rosen is a renowned author and economic advisor specializing in China’s commercial development. He is the author of six books, including the author of Roots of Competitiveness (2004), Prospects for a US-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement (2004), The New Economy and APEC (2002), and Behind the Open Door: Foreign Enterprises in the Chinese Marketplace (1998). Rosen’s most recent book, China Energy, will be released early next year. A Visiting Fellow at the Peterson Institute, Rosen is a principle with the Rhodium Group, a New-York based consultancy. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where his graduate seminar China’s New Marketplace is popular in preparation for global management careers.
From 2000-2001, he was Senior Advisor for International Economic Policy at the White House National Economic Council (NEC), where he played a managing role in completing China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, accompanied the President of the United States to Asia for summit meetings, and participated in Cabinet level meetings and meetings with foreign heads of state. He was educated at the Graduate School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and at the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Hosted by the Global Business Center and co-sponsored by the Jackson School China Studies Program and East Asia Center.
For more information, please contact Jenn Adrien at
(206) 616-3806.
NOVEMBER 13, 2008
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
You-tien Hsing, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley
Politics of Property in Urban China
You-tien Hsing was born in Taiwan. She is the author of "Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection" (1998, Oxford University Press) and "The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Property in China" (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of "Reclaiming Chinese Society: Politics of Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation," (forthcoming,
Rutledge).
In this talk, Professor Tsing will use two sets of ethnography to tell the tale of urban politics in post Mao and Post Deng China. The first set is the ethnography of the state. She will look at the way urban renewal projects shape and are shaped by the process of power restructuring among state actors. The second set concerns social mobilization triggered by urban renewal. Professor Tsing will examine the way property rights are played out as both spatial and legal strategies of urban residents in the increasingly explosive urban contestation in the last ten years.
NOVEMBER 7, 2008
Friday, 12:00-1:30 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Jane Winn, Professor, School of Law, University of Washington
The Role of Electronic Commerce in China's Strategy to Upgrade Its Economic Development
Professor Winn is a leading international authority on electronic commerce law and technological and governance issues surrounding information security. She is coauthor of Law of Electronic Commerce and the casebook Electronic Commerce
China has adopted a strategy of moving from extensive to intensive economic development, and targeted e-commerce as a tool to help execute that strategy. However, actual e-commerce adoption rates in China remain low, particularly among the urban and rural small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that constitute the majority of Chinese enterprises. China plays the role of a developmental state when it directly supports high-tech research & development, and the growth of “national champions.” It plays the role of a regulatory state when it contributes indirectly to meeting the “informatization” needs of urban and rural SMEs by providing public goods, e.g., broadband Internet access to the countryside by 2010, or helping to increase the efficiency of markets, e.g., modernizing commercial laws or supporting the creation of credit bureaus. Within this framework, competitive markets are growing for e-commerce products and services adapted to meet the needs of urban and rural SMEs, with private parties offering third party verification services; Internet marketing and search services; and software products and services.
NOVEMBER 6, 2008
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Yasheng Huang, Professor, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Rethinking Reforms
Yasheng Huang teaches international management at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (Cambridge 2008). In collaborative projects with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on engineering education and human capital formation in China and India and on entrepreneurship. Professor Huang is the recipient of the Social Science-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Fellowship. At MIT, he runs the China Lab and India Lab to help entrepreneurial businesses to improve their management.
The year 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of Chinese reforms. It is high time to take stock of and assess where the Chinese economy is today. This presentation will show that much of the foundation of China's miracle was laid down in the 1980s and experienced substantial reversals in the 1990s. Even after 30 years of reforms, the reforms are far from complete.
OCTOBER 20-22, 2008
Monday-Wednesday, Time: refer to schedule below
Location: Kane Hall (Walker-Ames Room), Physics-Astronomy Auditorium and Sieg Hall (refer to schedule below)
Speakers: Refer to schedule below
Taiwan Film Festival 2008
October 20, Monday
5:30 Reception & Performance (Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room)
Live performances by Chen Enno and KK from their movie soundtrack Summer's Tail.
6:45 pm Summer's Tail* (Sieg Hall, #134)
8:30 pm Elephant Boy and Robogirl* (Sieg Hall, #134)
9:20 pm Gangster God* (Sieg Hall, #134)
October 21, Tuesday
6:00 pm The Most Distant Course* (Sieg Hall, #134)
8:00 pm Secret (Sieg Hall, #134)
October 22, Wednesday
6:00 pm For More Sun* (Physics-Astronomy Auditorium, #102)
8:00 pm The Wall-Passer (Physics-Astronomy Auditorium, #102)
*Filmmaker(s) in person for post-screening Q&A session
Presented by: UW East Asian Center and the China Studies Program
http://2008tff.blogspot.com/.
http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/northcentral.html?80,83,616,391
http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/southcentral.html?67,67,521,685
http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/northcentral.html?67,52,766,542
OCTOBER 17, 2008
Friday, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Art Building, Room 317
Peter Lam, Professor, Department of Art History, Chinese University of Hong Kong
How to study China's china:
Methodology in Chinese ceramics
Co-sponsored by the Division of Art History, School of Art, the China Studies Program, and the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
OCTOBER 17, 2008
Friday, 12:30 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Stevan Harrell, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington; Han Hua; and Zhou Yingying
Documentary Film Presentation: Dahua's Wedding
Professor of Anthropology Stevan Harrell’s research interests are demography, family, ecology, education, ethnicity, material culture; China and Taiwan. His recent fieldwork has been in mostly in southern Sichuan, southern Taiwan, and Western Washington.
Dahua was married in March 2006 in the village of Yishala in the hills above Panzhihua. Her marriage reveals a lot about the recent changes in marriage, dating, sex, gender, work, and family in rural China. This film alternates scenes of the wedding ceremony with interviews and focus groups conducted with village people, reflecting on the contrast between the marriages of past and current generations, on the current practice of living together before marriage, and on the ways labor migration has influenced young people's attitudes. Dahua's Wedding is the work of Ben Gertsen, Han Hua, Stevan Harrell, He Wenting, Rachel Wall, Wang Chi, Wang Shuo, Yao Shishi, and Zhou Yingying.
Dahua's Wedding runs 36 minutes, approved by Dahua, suitable for classroom use.
The joint CSDE seminar and China Studies Colloquium will consist of a brief description of how the film was made, a showing of the film, and discussion afterwards.
Dahua's Wedding was produced by a collective from University of Washington, Sichuan University, Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute, Beijing TV, and Mt. Holyoke college. Funding came from the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the UW Worldwide exchange program. We also thank CARTAH for approving our sometimes boiseterous and contentious use of their facilities in Raitt Hall.
Co-sponsored with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.
OCTOBER 16, 2008
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Thomson Hall 317
Stevan Harrell, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
Reperiodizing Recent Chinese History:
An ecosystem perspective
Professor of Anthropology Stevan Harrell’s research interests are demography, family, ecology, education, ethnicity, material culture; China and Taiwan. His recent fieldwork has been in mostly in southern Sichuan, southern Taiwan, and Western Washington.
Contemporary Chinese history is almost inevitably periodized according to political events and political movements, with the initial Communist Takeover, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform and Opening serving as the temporal guideposts for our understanding. But China is not only a political system, it is also an ecological system, and if we center historiography around ecologically significant events, we gain a different and potentially useful perspective on the events of the last 60 years. This essay uses the Adaptive Cycle model of C.S. Holling and his followers to re-interpret recent Chinese history, and illustrates the usefulness of this model on national, regional, and local scales.
OCTOBER 2, 2008
Thursday, 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Communications 202
Ellen Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Virginia and University of Washington alumna
Many Kinds of 'Miscellaneous Knowledge':
A Study of Song Biji Writing
To celebrate the centennial of the China Studies Program, the 2008-09 China Colloquium is featuring prominent China scholars trained at the University of Washington. Cong Zhang is currently assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a historian of the Song period (960-1279). Her research interest includes Song travel culture, literati culture, local history and identity, and women and the family.
Compared to earlier biji (random notes) writers, Song authors were exposed to and showed increasing interest in a wider variety of topics. This expansion in the content material of their works went hand in hand with the celebration of the authors’ rich wenjian (things heard and seen), information that they had acquired from direct investigation and from socializing with their peers. This trend can be seen especially clearly from the close attention they paid to the natural conditions and social practices of the different regions and localities. In the end, the circulation of such “miscellaneous knowledge” tremendously shaped the geographical consciousness of Song educated men. At the same time, these biji writers, who were often literary and political figures of lesser stature, were able to fashion themselves as solid scholars.
| China Studies Program | |
| East Asia Studies | |
| Box 353650 | |
| Seattle, WA 98195 | |
| ► | chinast@u.washington.edu |
| Madeleine Yue Dong, Chair | |
| ► | yuedong@u.washington.edu |
| Asia Studies Program Coordinator | |
| ► | chinast@u.washington.edu |
| China Studies Program Assistant | |
| ► | chinast@u.washington.edu |