Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Over the past three decades, China has become a major trade partner and investor for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. The region is also an important component of the BRI New Eurasian Land Bridge, providing alternative access to Western Europe. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is shaking up China's plans and prospects in this part of Eurasia. With the closing of borders between Russia and the EU, China's long-term interests are arguably at risk. The war is also resulting in geopolitical shifts and hardening divisions between the West on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. This panel discusses China's response to Russia's war in Ukraine and the impact that today's dramatic developments will have on China's presence in Eastern Europe and its BRI plans. Panelists: Jinghan Zeng Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University and Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, Asia Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs Jeremy Garlick Director of the J. Masaryk Centre of International Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations and China Studies at Prague University of Economics and Business Arseny Sivitsky Co-Founder and Director of Minsk-based Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies Moderators: Nargis Kassenova Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University This event is sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Speaker: Stephen Kaplan, Associate Professor of Political Science and Economic Affairs, George Washington University Discussant: Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School This book explores how China's state-led capitalism affects national level governance. China, as the world's largest saver, has more than doubled its overseas banking presence since the 2008 global financial crisis. Compared to the West's private-sector capital, China's overseas financing is a distinct form of patient capital that marshals the country's vast domestic financial resources to create commercial opportunities internationally. Its long-term horizon, high risk tolerance, and lack of policy conditionality have allowed developing economies to sidestep the fiscal austerity tendencies of Western markets and multilaterals. Employing a multi-method research strategy that includes statistical tests and extensive field research from across China and Latin America, this book finds that China's patient capital endows national governments more room to maneuver in formulating their domestic economic policies. This book also evaluates the potential costs of Chinese financing, raising the question of how Chinese lenders will deal with developing nations' ongoing struggles with debt and dependency. Globalizing Patient Capital is targeted toward a broad audience within political science, economics, Latin American politics, and Asian studies but is especially relevant for scholars of the political economy of finance, globalization and development, the politics of economic policymaking, and US-China relations. By disaggregating the structure of international finance, this book also offers new insights about globalization and development, demonstrating that the type of international capital (state vs. market) can influence the extent of national-level policy discretion. This event is part of the China Economy Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Meg Rithmire.

Speaker: Cheng Li, Director, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution Moderator/Discussant: Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the opens in a new windowHarvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change, the Chinese middle class, and technological development in China. Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, he came to the United States, where he received a master's in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. From 1993 to 1995, he worked in China as a fellow sponsored by the Institute of Current World Affairs in the U.S., observing grassroots changes in his native country. Based on this experience, he published a nationally acclaimed book, “Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform” (1997). Li is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including “China's Leaders: The New Generation” (2001), “Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange 1978-2003” (2005), “China's Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy” (2008), “China's Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation” (2010), “The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress” (in Chinese, 2012), “The Political Mapping of China's Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign” (2012), “China's Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives” (2014), “Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership” (2016), “The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China” (2017), and “Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement” (Spring 2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title “Xi Jinping's Protégés: Rising Elite Groups in the Chinese Leadership”. He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press. This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. This event is introduced and moderated by Professor Elizabeth J. Perry.

Speakers: Ashley Esarey, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta Joanna Lewis, Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA),Georgetown University Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology and School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College Ashley Esarey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and was An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His research concerns political communication in China, elite politics, renewable energy policy, and Taiwanese politics. He was co-author (with Lu Hsiu-lien) of My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman's Journey from Prison to Power. His co-edited books include Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization and Greening East Asia: The Rise of the Eco-Developmental State, both published by the University of Washington Press in 2020. Joanna Lewis is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research examines political and technical determinants of energy and climate policy, particularly in China. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report. Mary Alice Haddad is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. A Fulbright and Harvard Academy scholar, she is the author of Effective Advocacy: Lessons from East Asia's Environmentalists (MIT press, forthcoming 2021), Building Democracy in Japan (Cambridge, 2012) and Politics and Volunteering in Japan (Cambridge, 2007), and she co-edits the new Elements in Politics and Society in East Asia series from Cambridge University Press. Her current work concerns environmental politics in East Asia, as well as how urban diplomacy is connecting and transforming policy around the world. Stevan Harrell retired in 2017 from the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. A special issue of Human Ecology on Social-Ecological System Resilience in China, co-edited with Denise M. Glover and Jack Patrick Hayes, will appear in February. He is writing an ecological history of modern China, provisionally entitled either Intensification and its Discontents or The Great Un-Buffering. He also edits the University of Washington Press series, Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. This event is part of the Environment in Asia public lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, organized by Professor Ling Zhang.

Speaker: Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective.She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is currently working on two new projects. The first project examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban governance in six countries, including China, the United States, Canada, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. The second project compares culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities, with Detroit, Harbin, and Turin as case studies. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (2021-2023). She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations, Georgetown University Evan S. Medeiros is a professor and Penner family chair in Asia studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has published several books and articles on East Asia, U.S.-China relations, and China's foreign and national security policies. He regularly provides advice and commentary to global corporations and international media in his current role as Senior Advisor with The Asia Group. Dr. Medeiros' background is a unique blend of regional expertise and government experience. He served for six years on the staff of the National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and then as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia. In the latter role, Dr. Medeiros was President Barack Obama's top advisor on the Asia-Pacific and was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific across areas of diplomacy, defense policy, economic policy, and intelligence. Prior to joining the White House, Medeiros worked for seven years as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. From 2007 to 2008, he also served as policy advisor to Secretary Hank Paulson Jr., working on the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of Treasury. Dr. Medeiros holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.Phil in international relations from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in China studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a B.A. in analytic philosophy from Bates College. Dr. Medeiros is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a member of the International Advisory Board of Cambridge University's Centre for Geopolitics, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Bernadette Meehan, and they have a daughter, Amelia. This lecture is the 2021 Annual Neuhauser Lecture, presented at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies' attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats. Xiangmao soap was featured in the first ever trademark litigation trial in China held in 1889. In that trial, it became evident that the emerging global trademark regime was premised on an Orientalist understanding of the Chinese character as ideograph. A second case in 1919 that also featured the alleged counterfeiting of the Xiangmao brand then reveals how the homophonic nature of Chinese and the issue of dialect were often the basis of wordplay and punning in Chinese trademarks, and that international trademark law was unable to accommodate these practices. The key legal premise that an offending trademark rested on its function to deceive the public prevented the system from recognizing (and thus, successfully prosecuting) marks that while likely to have been emulative, turned precisely on a knowing audience, willing to purchase the “counterfeit” because of the witty pun or wordplay at work. Both bring to the fore how the emerging trademark regime was premised on romance languages and failed to appreciate the complexity of both the Chinese language and the nature of the Chinese consumer market. Hardly marks that purposefully deceived in acts of “passing off,” so-called “spurious” marks aided (and arguably abetted) knowledgeable and appreciative consumers in their wily acts of consumption and were part of a larger market of rogue knock-offs in China that eluded the emerging trademark regime in the early twentieth-century and that continue to elude the global IP today. Eugenia Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, affect studies and gender, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press, 2007) which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association. Professor Lean's second book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in theMaking of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the manufacturing, commercial and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early twentieth century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing and was marked by heterogeneous, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. This event is part of the Modern China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.

China is constantly in the global media limelight due to its growing presence and influence throughout the world. Journalists reporting on this rising superpower play a crucial role in explaining the complexities of its domestic developments and international activities to local publics. This is a formidable task, made even more difficult by the increasingly constrained environment in China forcing most critical journalists leave the country and work from outside its borders. This panel brings together reporters from different parts of the world to discuss how they see their role in shaping and challenging narratives on China and how they approach challenges that they face in conducting their work. Speakers: Ananth Krishnan China Correspondent, The Hindu Newspaper Hui (Lulu) Ning Senior International News Journalist, Initium Media Alexander Gabuev Senior Fellow and Chair, Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program, Carnegie Moscow Center Moderator: Lucy Hornby Visiting Scholar, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University Organizers: Nargis Kassenova Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University This event was co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Joan Judge, Professor, Department of History, York University What can we learn from intellectual detritus? Focusing on cheap print, vernacular daily-use knowledge, and common readers in the Long Republic (1895-1955), this talk argues that the books an age discards as slipshod and unscientific, and the readers it disparages as superstitious and ignorant, comprise the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change is actualized. Premised on the notion that what we currently know about China's iconic 20th-century revolutions does not explain enough, it shifts our attention from innovation to ingenuity, from “knowledge what” to “knowledge how,” from the momentous to the mundane—without losing sight of the momentous. The talk first introduces a project on “China's Mundane Revolution” that is based on some 500, largely unstudied, daily-use texts, together with material gathered from the interstices of various archives. It then zeros in on one of the “how to” topics in the study: “how to treat a cholera infection.” Examining the ways individual common readers might have approached “the most spectacular ‘new' disease of the nineteenth century,” the example highlights the dynamic processes of scientizing vernacular and vernacularizing scientific forms of knowledge. It also raises questions about the ways these processes align—or misalign—with the various iterations of mass politics in this critical period. Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada.She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China's Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project, China's Mundane Revolution: Cheap Print, Vernacular Knowledge, and Common Reading in the Long Republic, 1894–1955. This presentation is part of the Modern China Lecture Series, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.

Speaker: Scott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Center on China's Economy and Institutions, Stanford University Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford's Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition. This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Speaker: Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Notre Dame On July 30, 1979, Deng Xiaoping addressed the fourth national conference of Chinese writers and artists. Towards the end of his speech he stated, to collective sighs of relief, that “the Party's leadership of literature and the arts does not mean issuing orders, nor requiring writers and artists to make themselves subservient to […] political tasks.” In doing so, he redefined the relationship between CCP ideologues and creative producers, which had become increasingly politicized during the first thirty years of Communist rule. He also set the template for later “important speeches” on art and literature by Party leaders, which have been a core component of Chinese cultural policy ever since. Looking at leaders' speeches as a genre of cultural production, I show how each leader after Deng tried to confirm the post-1979 consensus that promised more freedom to cultural producers, while at the same time indicating where the limits to that freedom might lie. The talk will engage with these speeches against three discrete backgrounds: the ongoing dismantlement of what was once the “socialist literary system,” the claims made about Chinese censorship and “self-censorship” in American and European public opinion, and the theoretical debates about structural censorship in the field of New Censorship Studies. Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His monograph Internet Literature in China was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.” His current book project focuses on literary and cultural censorship in modern China from the early twentieth century to the present. Hockx studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he earned his Ph.D., and at Liaoning and Peking universities in China. From 1996-2016 he taught at SOAS, University of London. In addition to his scholarly work he has also been active as a translator of modern Chinese literature into his native Dutch. This lecture is part of the Modern Chinese Humanities lecture series, hosted by Professors Jie Li and David Der-wei Wang.

Speaker: Naima Green-Riley, Ph.D. Candidate and Raymond Vernon Fellow, Department of Government, Harvard University; Former Consular Officer, US. Consulate General, Guangzhou, China This event is part of our Critical Issues Confronting China public lecture series.

China's Hengtong Group—leading a consortium of telecom companies from Hong Kong, Pakistan, and East Africa—will soon complete installation of the Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable. Spanning the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, this cable will connect the three most populous continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, or what Halford Mackinder described as the “World Island.” The cable aims to provide these previously under-serviced regions with the shortest latency between routes and high-quality Internet, but what are China's aims with the project and what benefits will it bring to partners in South Asia and Africa? This roundtable will discuss the technical, economic, and geopolitical implications of this flagship project of China's Belt and Road Initiative. Speakers: Motolani Agbebi University teacher, Faculty of Management and Business, University of Tampere (Finland) Tayyab Safdar Post-Doctoral Researcher, East Asia Centre & Department of Politics, University of Virginia Roxana Vatanparast Affiliate, Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia Law School Moderators: James Gethyn Evans, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Nargis Kassenova, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Center for African Studies at Harvard University.

The Stone and the Wireless: Lyrical Media and Bad Models of the Feeling Women Ma Shaoling is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, and spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in academic journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Configurations, Mediations, and positions. Her first book manuscript, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 is published in June 2021 by Duke University Press as part of the ‘Sign, Storage, Transmission' series. This lecture is part of the Modern Chinese Humanities lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. The series is organized by Professor David Der-wei Wang and Jie Li.

Speaker: Bill Bikales, Principal and Lead Economist, Kunlun Associates Bill is a Harvard-trained economist and Asia specialist and has worked at the most senior level of government in Mongolia on comprehensive fiscal reform and restructuring insolvent bank and power sectors, and at grass roots level in rural China on increasing poor women's uptake of maternal health services. This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Fang Xiaoping, Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During the 1961-1965 period, a cholera pandemic ravaged the southeastern coastal areas of Mao's China which was already suffering from lingering starvation, class struggles, political campaigns and geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. This lecture focuses on the first global pandemic that had plagued China after 1949 and the resulting large-scale but clandestine emergency response. Based on rare archival documents and in-depth interviews with the ever-dwindling witnesses of the pandemic, this lecture examines the dynamics between disease and politics when the Communist Party was committed to restructuring society between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The speaker argues that disease and its control were not only affected by the social restructuring that began in the 1950s and strengthened since 1961, but also integral components of this. Quarantine, mass inoculation, epidemic surveillance and information control functionalised social control and political discipline, and therefore significantly contributed to the rise of an emergency disciplinary state, which exerted far-reaching impacts on its sociopolitical system and emergency response since Mao's China, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Xiaoping Fang is an assistant professor of history at the School of Humanities of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his PhD in History from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he majored in modern China and the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia from 2002 to 2008. He studied and worked at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK (2005-2006), the Asia Research Institute of the NUS (2008), the China Research Centre of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (2009-2013), and the National Humanities Center, USA (2019-2020). His research interests focus on the history of medicine, health, and disease in twentieth-century China and the socio-political history of Mao's China after 1949. He is the author of Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012) and China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). The lecture is part of the Modern China lecture at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.

Speaker: Kellee Tsai, Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The structural transformation of China over the past several decades has given rise to a fundamental tension between the pursuit of social stability and authoritarian resilience. On the one hand, repressive strategies enable the party-state to maintain its monopoly of political power (authoritarianism). On the other hand, the quality of governance is enhanced when the state adopts softer modes of engagement with society (resilience). This dilemma lies at the core of evolutionary governance under authoritarianism. This talk engages the vast “authoritarianism with adjectives” literature in the study of contemporary China and presents case studies of state-society interactions to offer insight into the circumstances under which the party-state exerts its coercive power versus engaging in more flexible responses or policy adaptations. This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard Univeristy.

There is an intense debate among experts over the likelihood of a near-term Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Senior US military officers have warned that a PRC military action could take place in the next six years. Such dire predictions are largely based on estimates of PLA capabilities. But even if China can seize and control Taiwan, will it do so? Assessing the potential for such an attack also requires an understanding of Xi Jinping's strategy toward Taiwan and his risk/benefit calculus. The policies of the United States and Taiwan, and how they are viewed in Beijing, also need to be taken into account. Speaker: Bonnie Glaser, Director, Asia Program, German Marshall Fund of the United States Bonnie S. Glaser is director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was previously senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ms. Glaser is concomitantly a nonresident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a senior associate with the Pacific Forum. For more than three decades, Ms. Glaser has worked at the intersection of Asia-Pacific geopolitics and U.S. policy.

Speaker: Jeffrey Lehman, Vice Chancellor and Professor of Law, NYU Shanghai Jeffrey Lehman is the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, where he oversees all academic and administrative operations. Lehman is an internationally acclaimed leader in higher education, having served as dean of the University of Michigan Law School, the 11th president of Cornell University, and the founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law. Prior to joining the University of Michigan Law School, Lehman served as a law clerk to Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. He then spent four years at Caplin & Drysdale, a Washington, DC law firm. Throughout his professional and academic career, Lehman has volunteered his time and energy to nonprofit organizations that share his commitments in the fields of higher education, law, and technology. Lehman received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cornell University, an MPP from the University of Michigan, and a JD from the University of Michigan Law School. He is a multi-award winner for his work both in the United States and abroad, including the Friendship Award, which is China's highest honor for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country's economic and social progress.” Lehman is also a recipient of an honorary doctorate from Peking University.

Speaker: Pang Laikwan, Professor of Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong This paper focuses on the wide popularity of the meme and buzzword jiucai, garlic chives, on China's internet to investigate the cultural and political subjectivity of the ordinary Chinese citizens in a time of fierce competition simply to survive, largely known as neijuan, involution. Through this investigation of the garlic chives meme, the paper also updates Foucault's theory of the biopolitics by investigating the deeply intertwined relation between the biological, the economic, and the political in contemporary Chinese governmentality. While the post-socialist PRC has developed a sophisticated economic rationality to legitimize its state sovereignty, this economic sovereignty also strains the ordinary subjects so much that it begins to pose serious challenge to this legitimacy. PANG Laikwan is Professor of Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of a few books, including, more recently, The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement (U of Michigan, 2021), The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China's Cultural Revolution (Verso, 2017), andCreativity and Its Discontents: China's Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Duke UP, 2012). She will be a CASBS fellow at Stanford University in the academic year of 2021-2022.

Speaker: Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization – but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia's economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China's economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without. Isabella M. Weber is a political economist working on China, global trade and the history of economic thought. She is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Speaker: Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh This talk showcases Ruth Mostern's new book: The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021). The Yellow River explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times. The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a history of water, and that some of the most important episodes in Yellow River history transpired on the semi-arid lands of the Loess Plateau, far from the riverbed itself. Using GIS and data analysis as well as close readings of historical sources, the book reveals that although the Yellow River floodplain was sometimes a site of frequent and devastating disasters, this was only the case at times of certain decisions about public policy and infrastructure design. Ruth Mostern is Associate Professor of History and Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE) (Harvard Asia Center, 2011) and the co-editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016). Her current book, Following the Tracks of Yu: The Imperial and Ecological Worlds of the Yellow River is in contract at Yale University Press. She is currently PI on two NEH grants: one to develop content and infrastructure for an ecosystem of digital historical gazetteers, and one to design and launch an interdisciplinary curriculum about water in Central Asia.

Speaker: Yeiling Tan, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon Professor Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet current economic tensions between the US and China indicate that this integration process has run into trouble. To what extent has the liberal internationalist promise of the WTO been fulfilled? To answer this question, this study breaks open the black box of the massive Chinese state and unpacks the economic strategies that central economic agencies as well as subnational authorities adopted in response to WTO rules demanding far-reaching modifications to China's domestic institutions. The study explains why, rather than imposing constraints, WTO entry provoked divergent policy responses from different actors within the Chinese state, in ways neither expected nor desired by the architects of the WTO. Yeiling Tan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and a non-resident scholar at the opens in a new windowUC San Diego 21st Century China Center. From 2017-2020, she was a fellow of the World Economic Forum's Council on the Future of International Trade and Investment. From 2017-2019, she was a member of the opens in a new windowGeorgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. In 2017-18, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the opens in a new windowPrinceton-Harvard China and the World Program in Princeton University. ​Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with an emphasis on China and the developing world. Two broad questions define her research agenda. First: how do the rules of globalization affect politics within authoritarian regimes such as China, given that these rules require increasingly far-reaching modifications to domestic institutions? Second, how do authoritarian regimes affect rule-making at the international level? She holds a PhD in Public Policy from opens in a new windowHarvard University (2017), an MPA in International Development from the opens in a new windowJohn F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2011) and a BA (Honors, Distinction) in International Relations and Economics from opens in a new windowStanford University (2002). Apart from research on globalization and China, she has also worked in the public and non-governmental sectors on a range of issues including economic development, international security policy, global governance and governance innovations.

Panel Participants: Sara L. Friedman, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University Russell King, Professor of Geography, University of Sussex Sarah Lamb, Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University Andrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University Nicole Newendorp, Associate Director and Lecturer, Social Studies, Harvard University Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University Nearly 4.3 million immigrants in the United States are age sixty-five and over. Research predicts that the number of nonwhite elderly immigrants will continue to grow, doubling to 36 percent of the senior population by 2050. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the lives of older migrants, the familial and social networks in which they are embedded remain in place and can translate into important protective resources. At the same time, Chinese societies – e.g., mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong – have experienced rapid and large-scale social and cultural transformation over the past few decades, resulting in complex feelings and competing perspectives by older migrants on their homeland(s). In this workshop, six scholars in the fields of migration, aging, and Chinese studies grapple with the new frontier of studies on migration and life transition by focusing on two recent ethnographies about transnational aging in the Chinese diaspora. One highlights Chinese immigrants who relocate to the US at a later life stage; the other examines long-term Taiwanese immigrants who spent decades navigating life in American society and transnationally. Through our conversation, we seek to collaboratively rethink major issues and the understudied dimensions of aging and migration.

Speaker: Laurence Coderre, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, New York University Whereas the contemporary era in China is often depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) is typically cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. I instead argue that the Cultural Revolution media environment and the ways in which its constituent elements engaged contemporaneous discourses of materiality and political economy anticipated the widespread commodification now so closely associated with the Reform Period (1978-present). To that end, this talk offers a brief history of the “newborn socialist thing” (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu), which, as a technical term originating in the 1950s, refers to a harbinger of a progressive future emerging in the present. Not only did newborn things, always at odds with “old things,” help define socialism as a transitional stage of development prior to communism, they also promised to integrate the material and the social under one conceptual roof. I develop a historical methodology inspired by the relational nature of the newborn thing, which traces fugitive constellations of objects, bodies, institutions, and social formations pertaining to the Cultural Revolution's media environment. Of particular interest are the forms of mediation enacted by and through these constellations and the dialectic they were often said to create with the commodity-form. Laurence Coderre is an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. She received her PhD in Chinese from UC Berkeley in 2015. Prior to moving to NYU, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. Coderre's work focuses on Chinese socialist and postsocialist cultural production. She is the author of Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke, 2021), which examines the material culture of the Cultural Revolution. Her research has appeared in Comparative Studies of Society and History, Journal of Material Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas, as well as numerous edited volumes. She is currently embarking on a new project on theory and the everyday in the late Mao era.

Speaker: Zhang Meng, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University Part of the Environment in Asia lecture series In the Qing period, China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation. The reality was more complex: as old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged to develop renewable timber resources. Timber and Forestry traces the expansion of an interregional trade network to cover the entire basin of the Yangzi River. Of driving concern were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a business network across a thousand miles? Delving into rare archives to reconstruct property rights systems and business histories, the book considers both the formal legal mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance economic profit with environmental management. This case from China has important implications for world-historical conversations on resource management, commercialization, and sustainable development. Meng Zhang (張萌) is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in economics from Peking University (2010) and Ph.D. in history from UCLA (2017). Zhang is a historian of late imperial China, with particular interests in economic and environmental transformations and transnational dynamics in the rise of global capitalism. Her first book, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (University of Washington Press, 2021), reveals the complex reality of timber trade and resource management during the flurry of commercial development in Qing China. She is working on a second project that follows the social life of edible bird's nests through the transnational construction of knowledge, desire, trade, and credit across early modern China and Southeast Asia.

How significant were the events of June 1989 in the broader span of recent Chinese history? How does the aftermath of the Beijing massacre help to explain events since then, including what is happening in Hong Kong today? How deep is the state-imposed amnesia about Tiananmen? What is the future of June Fourth Studies? Join authors Jeremy Brown and Louisa Lim for a discussion about these and other questions. Jeremy Brown is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 and City Versus Countryside in Mao's China: Negotiating the Divide. Dr. Louisa Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and the author of The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. She was a correspondent for NPR and BBC based in China for a decade. Her new book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong will be published in April 2022. Part of the Modern China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, five men have principally shaped the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the nation: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. David Shambaugh analyzes the personal and professional experiences that shaped each leader and argues that their distinct leadership styles had profound influences on Chinese politics. David Shambaugh is Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science, & International Affairs and the founding director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Before joining the GW faculty, Professor Shambaugh taught Chinese politics at the University of London's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and was editor of The China Quarterly. He also worked at the U.S. Department of State and National Security Council. He served on the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Asia-Pacific Council, and other public policy and scholarly organizations. A frequent commentator in the international media, he sits on numerous editorial boards, and has been a consultant to governments, research institutions, foundations, universities, corporations, banks, and investment funds. Professor Shambaugh has published more than 30 books and 300 articles. His latest book, China's Leaders: From Mao to Now(Polity Press, 2021), is now available in hardback. The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted and produced by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Research for this episode was provided by Connor Giersch, and the episode was edited by Mike Pascarella.

Panelists Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine Discussant Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan This roundtable discussion brings together past and present Hou Family Doctoral Fellows in Taiwan Studies at the Fairbank Center, to discuss current methodological approaches and emerging thematic directions in the study of Taiwanese history, society, and politics. Bridging across disciplinary fields such as media studies, history, and political science, the panelists will share their research experiences amid resurging interest in Taiwan, and envision how this renewed conversation can help jumpstart the next generation of Taiwan studies.

How did the People's Republic of China popularize basic legal knowledge after its founding in 1949? Jennifer Altehenger, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History and Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Oxford, explains how China's party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death. Professor Altehenger is a historian of modern and contemporary China, in particular the history of materials and industrial design in Chinese politics and everyday life, the history of law, propaganda and information under Communist Party governance, and the history of political language and cultural production. Her first book, "Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1989" (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) is now available in paperback: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983854 The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Speaker: Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies At a time when many are fixated on US-China strategic competition, how will China’s relations with the rest of the world shape its future power? From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its “Made in China 2025” strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to its significant economic reach into Africa and Latin America, China appears primed to become the world’s dominant superpower. But China also faces considerable new risks and challenges. Drawing on studies of selected countries in East Africa, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia, Luke Patey will discuss how many countries are recognizing that relations with China can undermine their independence and competitiveness and are working together to recalibrate their engagement Dr. Luke Patey is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Lead Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, University of Oxford. He is the author of the new book, How China Loses: The Pushback Against China’s Global Ambitions (Oxford University Press, 2021). His work focuses on the intersection of China’s trade, investment, and finance with its foreign and security policy. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Hindu, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. He holds a doctorate and MSc from the Copenhagen Business School and a bachelor's degree from Queen’s University. Patey’s last book was The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (Hurst, 2014).

Speaker: Wang Jisi, Professor in the School of International Studies and president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University Wang Jisi is a professor in the School of International Studies and president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies(IISS), Peking University(PKU). He is honorary president of the Chinese Association for American Studies, and was a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of China’s Foreign Ministry in 2008-2016. After working as a laborer in the Chinese countryside in 1968-78, Wang Jisi entered Peking University and obtained an MA degree there in 1983. He taught in Peking University’s Department of International Politics (1983-91), and then served as director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences until 2005. From 2005 to 2013, Wang Jisi served as dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University. He was concurrently director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China from 2001 to 2009. Wang Jisi was a visiting fellow or visiting professor at Oxford University (1982-83), University of California at Berkeley (1984-85), University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1990-91), and Claremont McKenna College in California (2001). He was invited as a Global Scholar by Princeton University in 2011-15 and spent 9 months in total there with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has served as an adviser to a number of international institutions and journals, including the Asia Society Policy Institute, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, the journal The American Interest, and the journal Global Asia. Professor Wang’s scholarly interests cover U.S. foreign policy, China’s foreign relations, Asian security, and global politics in general. He has published numerous works in these fields.

Speaker: Xiaotong Feng, Ph.D. Candidate, Communication University of China; Fairbank Center Visiting Scholar Discussant/Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University In the past few years, even the most optimistic scholars will not deny that China’s relations with Western countries have encountered big difficulties. Whether China accepts this willingly or not, the external conditions needed to maintain China’s past economic growth model are now absent. The “Rural Revitalization” strategy promoted by Xi Jinping is generally regarded as an internal social governance issue, aimed at promoting social equity, balancing urban-rural differences, and protecting the natural environment. However, can “Rural Revitalization” also be seen as a strategy to help China cope with “competition” from Western countries? Can it reduce China’s dependence on the US dollar? Does it represent a new and unprecedented development model?

Speaker: Jessica Chen Weiss, Associate Professor of Government, Cornell University How does China’s domestic governance shape its foreign policy? What role do nationalism and ideology play in Beijing’s regional and global ambitions? The Chinese leadership has been at once a revisionist, defender, reformer, and free-rider in the international system—insisting rigidly on issues that are central to its domestic survival while showing flexibility on issues that are more peripheral. To illuminate this variation and prospects for conflict and cooperation, Weiss will discuss her new book project, which theorizes and illustrates the domestic-international linkages in Beijing’s approach to issues ranging from sovereignty and homeland disputes to climate change and COVID-19. Jessica Chen Weiss is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). The dissertation on which it is based won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Security Studiesopens pdf file. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Cornell Einaudi Center, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Uppsala University, Princeton-Harvard China & The World Program, Bradley Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Weiss received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Before joining Cornell, she was an assistant professor at Yale University (2009-2015) and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford University. Learn more about her research and writing at www.jessicachenweiss.com.

Speaker: Martin K. Whyte, John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus, and former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University As the People’s Republic of China has pursued economic development over the decades, a central dilemma concerns how to treat its massive rural population, and the extent to which its rural-origin citizens can contribute to, and benefit from, economic growth. In different time periods, there have been dramatic changes in the nature of rural-urban relations, often with paradoxical consequences for prospects for economic growth. The talk will examine the nature of rural-urban relations in different time periods, with a focus on post-1978 changes. The initial reforms, by freeing peasants from the “socialist serfdom” of the communes and allowing geographic mobility while maintaining the hukou system and systematic discrimination against those of rural origin, produced the primary engine of China’s post-1978 economic boom. However, by maintaining pernicious discrimination based upon hukou status, particularly regarding the educational opportunities of rural youths, China now faces a major human capital deficit that it is struggling to overcome. The talk concludes with a discussion of why it has been so hard to reform and eliminate hukou-based discrimination, and what more needs to be done for China to escape the “middle income trap” and continue its economic rise.

Speaker: Angela Zhang, Director of the Center for Chinese Law and Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong In this webinar, Angela Zhang will discuss her new book Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation (Oxford University Press). This book examines the unique ways in which China regulates and is regulated by foreign countries, revealing a ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ that is reshaping global antitrust regulation. Angela will provide a deep dive into Chinese bureaucratic politics while analyzing the power imbalances between businesses and the government in China. In addition to examining the challenges foreign multinationals have faced in complying with Chinese antitrust law, she will also explore the difficulties Chinese firms have encountered as U.S. and E.U. antitrust regulators tighten their scrutiny over Chinese businesses. Angela will conclude with her book’s implications for future Sino-American relations, as well as the recent events surrounding Ant Group’s IPO debacle and the Chinese regulation of big tech. Angela Zhang is an associate professor of law and the director of the Centre for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. An award-winning legal scholar, Angela is a highly sought-after commentator on Chinese antitrust issues. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, Angela taught at King’s College London and practiced law for six years in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Angela received her LLB from Peking University and her LLM, JD, and JSD from the University of Chicago Law School. She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Judge Richard A. Posner. To learn more about Angela, please visit angelazhang.net. Part of the China Economy Series Presented via Zoom Webinar

Speaker: Taomo Zhou, Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China’s most successful Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People’s Republic’s adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This talk examines prototypes of the SEZ in Bao’an County, the precursor of Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949-1976). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao’an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown Colony. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, communist cadres in Bao’an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the very hallmark of Deng Xiaoping’s economic statecraft. Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), was selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Taomo is working on a new research project on Shenzhen—the first Special Economic Zone of China—and its connections with the Export Processing Zones and free ports across Southeast Asia. This research is funded by a Tier 1 grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

Speaker: Eswar Prasad, Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy, Cornell University; Senior Fellow and New Century Chair in International Economics, Brookings Institution; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. This lecture will discuss China’s economic prospects, policies, and reforms, and their implications for its role in international finance. The lecture will cover China’s economy, financial markets, and the renminbi, and also touch upon the country’s new digital currency.

Speaker: David Dollar, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Global Economy and Development, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution China has gotten COVID-19 under control and is poised to bounce back strongly with 8% growth in 2021. But in the medium term, it faces daunting domestic and external challenges. On the domestic side, demographic shifts will result in a declining labor force and put a premium on geographic mobility, especially rural-urban migration. Also, over-reliance on investment has led to an alarming rise in debt to GDP, risking a financial crisis. To grow well while managing these issues of labor and investment will require more innovation as a source of growth. On the external side, the trade war with the U.S. is not likely to be resolved quickly with the new Biden administration. China’s recent agreements with Asian partners and Europe, however, provide new opportunities that complement domestic reforms. David Dollar is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, Dollar&Sense. He is a leading expert on China’s economy and U.S.-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s economic and financial emissary to China, based in Beijing, facilitating the macroeconomic and financial policy dialogue between the United States and China. Prior to joining Treasury, Dollar worked 20 years for the World Bank, serving as country director for China and Mongolia, based in Beijing (2004-2009). His other World Bank assignments focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. Dollar also worked in the World Bank’s research department. His publications focus on economic reform in China, globalization, and economic growth. He also taught economics at University of California Los Angeles, during which time he spent a semester in Beijing at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1986. He has a doctorate in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.

Speaker: Chang-Tai Hsieh, Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor of Economics and PCL Faculty Scholar, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business We use administrative registration records with information on the owners of all Chinese firms to document the importance of “connected” investors, defined as state-owned firms or private owners with equity ties with state-owned firms, in the businesses of private owners. We document a hierarchy of private owners: the largest private owners have direct investments from state-owned firms, the next largest private owners have equity investments from private owners that themselves have equity ties with state owners, and the smallest private owners do not have any ties with state owners. The network of connected private owners has expanded over the last two decades. The share of registered capital of connected private owners increased by almost 20 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, driven by two trends. First, state-owned firms have increased their investments in joint ventures with private owners. Second, private owners with equity ties to state owners also increasingly invest in joint ventures with other (smaller) private owners. The expansion in the “span” of connected owners from these investments with private owners may have increased the aggregate output of the private sector by 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2019. Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development. His published papers include “The Life-Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity,” in the American Economic Review; “Can Free Entry be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry,” in the Journal of Political Economy; “What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence from the Factor Markets,” in the American Economic Review; “The Allocation of Talent and US Economic Growth,” in Econometrica; “How Destructive is Innovation?” in Econometrica; and “Special Deals with Chinese Characteristics,” in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank’s Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Elected Member of Academia Sinica, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy.

Speaker: Sheena Greitens, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School, as well as a faculty fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, authoritarian politics, and foreign policy. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Speaker: M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Moderator: Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes, (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other publications have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Studies Review, The China Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Current History, Asian Survey, Asian Security, China Leadership Monitor, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. Taylor is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Taylor is a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves as the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Awareness Project.

Speaker: E. Elena Songster, Professor of History, History Department, Saint Mary’s College of California The giant panda stumbled into ambassador work. Profoundly successful, its diplomatic roles multiplied and evolved, but its persistent existence as an animal repeatedly reframed its role as a diplomat and beyond. Songster discusses findings from her book, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon (Oxford UP), examining the history of the emergence of the giant panda as a national icon and the impact it has had on foreign policy and the natural environment. Elena Songster’s research focuses on the environmental history of modern China. She is currently researching medicinals found in nature through an historical lens. Other research projects include the history of snow leopard conservation and forestry history. Elena Songster teaches classes on Chinese History, Japanese History, Asian History, and World History. She has also taught in the Collegiate Seminar Program, and JanTerm and serves on the Advisory Board for the Global and Regional Studies Program.

Speaker: Anne-Marie Brady, Professor, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Professor Brady is a specialist of Chinese politics (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty scholarly papers. She has written op eds for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Financial Times. Her research has a strong policy focus. In 2017, Professor Brady put her conference paper “Magic Weapons: CCP Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping” online, as the topic was of public interest. The paper has been downloaded more 160, 000 times and has helped spark a debate in New Zealand, as well as internationally, that resulted in a Parliamentary Inquiry into Foreign Interference in New Zealand. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping Professor Brady is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. In 2014 she was appointed to a two-year term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Action Council on the Arctic. Her recent books include: Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), China’s Thought Management (Routledge, 2012), The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge, 2013), China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press and Wilson Press, 2017), and Small States and the Changing Global Order: New Zealand Faces the Future (Springer, 2019).

Speaker: Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Department of Political Science; Director, Stanford China Program, Stanford University China’s rapidly growing local government debt (LGD) is now branded a “grey rhino,” a known threat that has received little attention. Why did Beijing let LGD get so out of hand? What are the sources of LGD? There is evidence to suggest that no matter how honest and law-abiding local cadres might be, localities are likely to have local government debt. Prof. Oi will argue that LGD stems from a grand bargain between the center and the localities that were made to secure support for the 1994 fiscals reforms. This series of policy decisions institutionalized backdoor financing, creating a “win-win” solution that recentralized tax revenues to Beijing while countering the downsides of fiscal recentralization for the localities. The cost, however, was that China’s economic growth model was increasingly undergirded by mounting LGD, with little transparency and control by the center. Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor on Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi also is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the department of government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997. Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on China’s political economy and institutions in the process of reform. Fiscal politics and central-local relations in China are at the center of Oi’s research. Recent work delves inside local-level institutions to sheds new light on China’s authoritarian resilience by exploring how county governments through adaptive governance have been able to cope as the economy has grown exponentially and demands and needs from an increasingly complex society put more strains on resources and the political system. Most recently, she co-edited a volume that highlights the challenges China now faces after reaping record-breaking growth in the last 40 years by only tweaking the institutions that it inherited from the Mao period. Current leaders continue to kick the can down the road rather than tackle the most politically difficult part of the reform process. Instead, leaders seem to be “going back to the future,” relying on a playbook not seen since the Mao period. Current projects focus on growing local government debt in China and why there is so much when the law prohibits localities from borrowing and budget deficits. Moving beyond her earlier work, Oi also has begun a project to empirically assess the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Oi takes an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests.

Speaker: Kerry Ratigan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Amherst College China is widely known for its strong central government, but the center needs the provinces to implement policies using their knowledge of local conditions. However, provincial priorities sometimes conflict with those of the center. Drawing on research conducted for her forthcoming book, Let Some Get Healthy First: How Local Politics Shaped Social Policy in China, Ratigan shows how local politics have impacted social policy implementation in China. While some provinces tend to closely follow central directives, others resist central policy, sometimes subverting the goals of the central government. Although decentralization in contemporary China peaked in the early 2000s, the impact of local government is still salient despite recent efforts to reign in local actors. Dr. Kerry Ratigan is an assistant professor of Political Science at Amherst College where she currently teaches courses on Chinese politics and social movements. Her research has focused on Chinese politics, social policy, and state-society relations, including extensive work on health policy adoption and implementation in rural China. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Political Science and Spanish from Haverford College.

Speakers: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, New Silk Road Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs Björn Jerdén, Director, Knowledge Centre on China , Swedish Institute of International Affairs Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Foreign Policy and Diplomacy, Danish Institute for International Studies Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University Nordic and Baltic countries have struggled to develop well-calibrated approaches to cooperation with China and its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Economic incentives or disincentives, human rights, the EU dynamics, security arrangements, and global governance consideration have pulled the agendas of Northern European states in different directions. This panel will discuss the current state of affairs and the prospect of a coordinated Nordic-Baltic policy with regard to the BRI. Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Some states have always maintained a sense that they have a mission in the world well beyond the maintenance of domestic order, the United States, France and Britain among them. Japan, China and the Koreas also inherited a strong sense of purpose in the modern era, from Meiji modernization to Mao’s “Three Worlds” and the Belt and Road Initiative, ideas drawing on the longer past – yet the definition of that purpose has been in constant flux. What defines East Asia’s sense of purpose today, can we speak of it in regional terms, and how does it relate to its long history of aspiration to be an intellectual and moral exemplar? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.

Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Jie Li, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University LECTURE 2 OF 3: AN ERA OF EMOTION? One factor that defines Chinese engagement with the world today is its highly emotional character, in terms of self-presentation that can move from saccharine to shrill at remarkable speed. But emotion is not new – the use of the registers from exhilaration to depression defines the way that China, Japan and the Koreas have chosen to present themselves over the past century, whether through (often highly gendered) lenses of Asianism, revolution, martiality, discourses of “national humiliation,” or of global citizenship. How much of this draws on emotional registers defined by modernity, and how much from a repertoire shaped by a culture with much longer roots? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.

Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Odd Arne Westad, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University LECTURE 1 OF 3: HOW NEW IS THE NEW ERA? China’s leaders speak today of a “new era” – but East Asia has seen a range of “new eras” in the modern age, defined by Japan, China, and outsiders who encountered both. What defines that novelty and how familiar are the elements that form part of it? The mid-twentieth century saw war, social change and changing global encounters defined as moments when both China and Japan entered a “new” or “special” era in a global context. What continuities and contrasts are there between the past and the present, and what defines that “newness”? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is a three-part annual lecture series on East Asia at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center.

Speaker: Andrew B. Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India. Andrew B. Liu is assistant professor of history at Villanova University, where his research focuses on China, transnational Asia, political economy, and comparative history. This event co-sponsored by The Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University.