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China Studies Program

This Week

• Chinese Political Communication: A New Research Frontier
  Thu May 17, 2012
• The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China
  Fri May 18, 2012

All Events

May 2012

Thursday May 10, 2012
9:30 - 11:30 AM
Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse

Lisa Keitges at lisa.keitges@wilsoncenter.org.

Introductory remarks will be provided by Dean Sandra Archibald, University of Washington

Confirmed participants Include:
Jennifer L. Turner ♦ China Environment Forum, The Wilson Center
Stevan Harrell ♦ University of Washington
Brett Walton ♦ Circle of Blue

China’s soaring economy, fueled by an unyielding appetite for coal, is threatened by the country's steadily diminishing freshwater reserves. Next to agriculture, China's coal mining, processing, combustion, and coal-to-chemicals industries consume more water than any other industrial, municipal, or commercial sector. China’s coal boom is forcing China into a choke point; one where limited and polluted water supplies could constrain energy development, endanger food production, and stymie economic growth. The United States faces similar water-energy confrontations—millions of gallons of water are taken from ranchers to develop the deep oil and gas shale reserves of the west and there are battles between Georgia and Florida over diminishing drinking water reserves.

Over the past 18 months, Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum have explored the extensive water circulatory system and vast energy production musculature that makes China and the United States go, and what could also contribute to making both nations falter. The new findings, presented in rich narratives, data, imagery and graphics, provide compelling evidence of a potentially ruinous confrontation between growth, water, food, and fuel that is readily visible in both countries and virtually certain to grow more dire over the next decade. Global Choke Point, though, is not necessarily a narrative of doom and gloom. The presentations at this event will highlight the oft-overlooked energy-water-food choke points confronting the United States and China and opportunities for collaboration to address them.

Click here for more information on the Wilson Center's China Environment Program, the Evans School of Public Affairs, and Circle of Blue.

Co-sponsored by the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington &
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Refreshments will be provided prior to the event.

Click here to RSVP or e-mail Lisa Keitges at lisa.keitges@wilsoncenter.org.

Thursday May 10, 2012
3:30 PM
Thomson Hall 317

Helen Siu

China Studies; East Asia Center

jonatb@uw.edu

This seminar focuses on village life in a district of Guangzhou that is being developed into a new Central Business District (CBD). Villagers are absorbed by the city while tied to collective property ownership and “rural” statuses left from a Maoist era. Labeled chengzhongcun, these urban village enclaves pose serious challenges to city governance. The penetrating power of the late socialist state, the intensely volatile global market, and (post)modernist landmark schemes dominate the residents’ predicaments and sentiments. Their lives are suspended in a political past and a cultural vacuum that they are ambivalent with, and an economic future they have little control. However, capitalizing on collective land rights that the government is not ready to revoke, the villagers reap unimaginable dividends from developers and planners. The seminar hopes to identify key features in China’s (and Asia’s) expanding urbanities and engages with theoretical literature on global urban restructuring and nationalist aspirations. Moreover, at a historical juncture where market and late-socialist priorities intertwine to create China’s new urban dreamscape, it explores particular uses of the past and multiple cultural referencing by rural actors who are drawn into this compelling process.

Helen F. Siu, is a professor of anthropology. Her teaching interests are political and historical anthropology, urban and global culture change. She earned a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Carleton College, an MA in East Asian Studies, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. After teaching at Williams College as a Culpeper Postdoctoral fellow, she joined the faculty at Yale in 1982. She has served as Chair for the Council on East Asian Studies and Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies for Anthropology. Since the 1970s, she has conducted fieldwork in South China, exploring the nature of the socialist state, the refashioning of identities through rituals, festivals, and commerce. Lately, she explores the rural-urban divide in China, cross-border dynamics in Hong Kong, historical and contemporary Asian connections. She served on the University Grants Committee (1992-2001) and the Research Grant’s Council (1996-2001) in Hong Kong, for which she received the Bronze Bauhinia Star. In the U.S. she has served on the Committee for Advanced Study in China and the National Screening Committee for Fulbright awards in the U.S. In 2001, she established the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and has served as honorary director until 2011(www.hku.hk/ihss). She remains chair of the Institute’s executive committee.
 

Tuesday May 15, 2012
12:30 PM
Thomson Hall 317

David Bachman, Jackson School of International Studies

For more information, please email jonatb@uw.edu

David Bachman is a professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where he teaches on Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy. He served as the associate director of the School from 2003 to 2010, chair of the China Studies Program from 1992 to 2002, and is an adjunct professor of Political Science. Prior to coming to the University of Washington in 1991, he taught at Stanford and Princeton. He has written 2 books and coedited another, and published 50 articles on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He served as President of the Washington State China Relations Council in 2005, and on its executive committee for 10 years. He also served as Chair of the China Scholar Selection Committee, Fulbright Fellowships, Council on International Educational Exchanges, 2003-2005. He is currently working on a book on the history of China’s defense industries and their role in the Chinese political economy.

Thursday May 17, 2012
3:30 PM
Thomson Hall 317

Ashley Esarey, Whitman College

For more information, please email jonatb@uw.edu

The Chinese Communist Party has utilized mass media as conduits for regime propaganda since the founding of the People’s Republic. Yet media commercialization and the popularization of the Internet have dramatically altered media operations and news content in the Reform Period (1978-present). State propaganda has been “repackaged” to increase its appeal with mass audiences, while millions of Chinese “netizens” (wangmin) express dissent via blogs and microblogs (weibo), and participate in online and offline activism. The interaction between media and politics thus provides an excellent window for observing power relations in Chinese society. Despite the ongoing transformation of political communication in China, researchers have only recently begun to focus on the effects of media on public opinion, social movements, and support for Communist Party rule. In his talk, Jackson School Visiting Scholar Ashley Esarey, surveys scholarship on the interconnections between Chinese media and political life and identifies promising areas of current and future research.

Friday May 18, 2012
10:30-11:20 AM
Smith Hall 205

Maxwell Hearn, head of Asian Art Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For more information, please email jonatb@uw.edu

The collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and subsequent conquest of China by semi-nomadic Manchu tribesmen from northeast of the Great Wall engendered some of the most traumatic events in Chinese history. This wrenching era also spurred an enormous outpouring of creative energy as many former Ming subjects turned to the arts to express their loyalty to the noble but doomed cause of Ming restoration and to assert their defiance and moral virtue. The talk will use landscape paintings and calligraphy to highlight the intensely personal styles created by the leading artists of that time.

Currently the Douglas Dillon Curator for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Maxwell K. Hearn, began working at the Metropolitan Museum in curatorial assistant (1971 to 1974) and research associate (1977) positions. Over the following years, he served as Assistant Curator (1979-84), Associate Curator (1984-92), and Curator (1993-2004), and became the Douglas Dillon Curator in 2005. He received his undergraduate degree in art history from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.

At the Museum, he has helped oversee the expansion of the collection of Chinese art as well as major additions to many permanent gallery spaces, including the Astor Chinese Garden Court and the Douglas Dillon Galleries, both completed in 1981, and the renovated and expanded galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, which opened in May 1997. He has also been curator of a large number of exhibitions and installations including, in recent years, The Artist as Collector: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, 1999; The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios, and Painting, 2000; The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, 2000; Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001; When the Manchus Ruled China: Painting under the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), 2002; The Douglas Dillon Legacy: Chinese Painting for the Metropolitan Museum, 2004; Art of the Brush: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 2005; Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Yutang, 2007; Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings, 2008; Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717), 2008; Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799), 2009; Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997), 2010; and The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change, 2010.

He has authored a wide range of catalogues and catalogue essays, articles, symposium presentations, and lectures at more than 40 institutions, as well as graduate and undergraduate seminars on Chinese painting given at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia universities, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.