Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series
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To create a forum for scholars, researchers and students with interests in any aspect of contemporary China, the East Asia Program launched the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative in Fall 2014. In response to widely expressed needs and interests related to contemporary China across and beyond Cornell campus, CCCI invites excellent speakers to the university to give talks on an array of interdisciplinary issues about contemporary Chinese economy, politics and society. CCCI expands EAP’s intellectual engagement with a wide range of Cornell faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students, including those in the professional schools and STEM fields, in an active endeavor to reach across colleges and disciplinary boundaries and interact with a broader constituency at the university.
See http://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/cornell-contemporary-china-initiative.
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Item China's 'Leftover' Women and the End of the One-Child PolicyFincher, Leta Hong (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-03-07)Professor Leta Hong Fincher, Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor, East Asia Languages and Culture, Columbia University. Author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. Leta Hong Fincher critiques the vulgar state media representations of highly educated, urban single women in China and its effects on gender roles and discrimination.Item Access to Elite Education, Wage Premium and Social Mobility: The Truth and Illusion of China's College Entrance ExamJia, Ruixue (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-10-31)Professor Ruixue Jia, Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Global Policy & Strategy, UC San Diego. This talk examines the returns to elite education and their implications on elite formation and social mobility, exploiting an open elite education recruitment system -- China's College Entrance Exam. We conduct annual national surveys of around 40,000 college graduates during 2010-2015 to collect their performance at the entrance exam, job outcomes, and other individual characteristics. Exploiting a discontinuity in the probability of attending elite universities around the cutoff scores, we find a sizable wage premium of elite education. However, access to elite education does not promise one's entry into the elite class (measured by occupation, industry and other non-wage benefits) but parents' elite status does. Access to elite education also does not alter the intergenerational link between parents' status and children's status. The wage premium appears more consistent with the signaling mechanism of elite education than the role of human capital or social networks.Item TV Tears Made of Fear: Anatomy of the Spectacle of Power on Display in China's Forced ConfessionsFiskesjö, Magnus (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-11-14)Professor Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. After years of building a new system of courts of law, and after many solemn declarations to prohibit police torture and forced confessions (which both have been longstanding, publicly acknowledged problems in China), the Chinese authorities have recently reverted to extrajudicial show "trials" reminiscent of Maoist times. Select victims are detained and in due course forced to go on state TV and perform statements of self-incrimination which clearly have been rehearsed under duress. These choreographed spectacles of public confession are widely regarded as fake -- not least because several new witness accounts from former detainees emerged during 2016, which have revealed the current techniques used in some detail, and which unavoidably evoke Kafka's masterful allegory in The Trial on how self-incrimination is induced from the innocent, by the powerful. However, the question remains what is the purpose of this, and how we should interpret the case of contemporary China. This presentation will address the tragedy of historical antecedents as one part of the explanation, but also focus on sketching what power structures are built through these spectacles of forced confessions.Item Environmental Challenges and Policy Options in ChinaLi, Shanjun (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-11-21)Professor Shanjun Li, Associate Professor, Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management, Cornell University. The talk will first broadly discuss the important environmental and energy challenges in China. Then the presentation will illustrate how important economic principles combined with big data can be powerful tools to address some of these challenges in the context of traffic congestion in Beijing. Major urban areas in China are experiencing world’s worst traffic congestion due to the dramatic increase in vehicle ownership and travel demand in the past decade. Central and local governments have been employing various policies to address this challenge yet with little or no visible impacts because these policies fundamentally failed to get the price right for road usage. This paper provides the first empirical estimate of the marginal cost of traffic congestion and the optimal congestion pricing in China by estimating the relationship between average vehicle speed and traffic density using rich vehicle traffic density and speed data from over 1500 monitoring stations throughout Beijing. To identify the causal effect of traffic density on speed, we use the driving restriction policy that restricts vehicle driving based on the last digit of the license plate to generate exogenous variation. Our analysis shows that the average marginal cost of congestion is about 0.5 Yuan (or $0.08) per km, nearly three times as much as what OLS regressions would imply and larger than estimates from transportation engineering models. Based on the marginal cost estimates for different road segments and time of the day, we estimate the optimal congestion pricing, the resulting congestion level, and social welfare under various designs of the pricing strategy.Item Hukou and Suzhi as Technologies of Governing Citizenship and Migration in ChinaZhang, Chenchen (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-03-08)Chenchen Zhang, Lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University, Belfast. Abstract: This talk looks at the genealogy and contemporary configuration of two key concepts that are central to governing the “extent” and “content” of citizenship in China: hukou and suzhi. Whereas hukou, or the household registration system, functions as a formal meso-level citizenship that distributes rights and regulates internal migration, the concept of suzhi, loosely translated as quality, brings together various discourses about what a desirable citizen subject should look like. I conceptualize the two as technologies of citizenship, which are inherently interconnected to one another as the hukou policy that governs internal migration employs the language of suzhi to justify the regime of differentiated citizenship, rights and mobility. After presenting the historical evolvement of each concept in the Chinese political system, I will focus on the latest reforms of the household registration system and the role of suzhi in the discourse of hukou reforms, urban governance, and rural-to-urban migration. It is argued that the policy and discursive changes indicate a shift from the dualistic urban-rural segregation to a multiplication of legal statuses, boundaries and hierarchies of citizenship that do not operate exclusively along the line of geographical boundaries. These technologies of citizenship are also examined from a global comparative perspective. Whereas the hukou regime that offers internal migrants differentiated access to rights based on their assumed economic worth is reminiscent of the governance of international migration in other national contexts, the suzhi discourse can be compared to the idea of liberal improvement.Item Natural Infrastructure in China’s Era of Ecological CivilizationYeh, Emily (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-10-19)Speaker: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder Abstract: Although infrastructure is conventionally thought of in reference to human-designed systems such as railroads, pipelines, tunnels, and ports, landscapes, and nature itself are also increasingly being understood as infrastructure through terms such as “natural infrastructure” and “green infrastructure,” which tend to focus on the concept of ecosystem services. Taking an infrastructural lens onto natural infrastructure projects in the context of Xi Jinping’s call for ecological civilization, this paper argues that new calculative tools obscure the profoundly political nature of ecological red lines and ecological functional zones, which effectively enframe China’s national territory as an object of optimization. The paper then explores a specific aspect of the project of ecological civilization: campaigns to dismantle and destroy infrastructure deemed to be in violation of environmental regulations. I theorize this as a form of “destructive production” of natural infrastructure and provide two case studies of the dismantling of scenic areas not long after their reconstruction following the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan. Bio: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, and co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, and Rural Politics in Contemporary China.Item How Contemporary Chinese Art Became Global: Artists, Exhibitions, Markets, Mediators 1985-2015Tinari, Philip (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-04-25)CCCI Lecture Series: Philip Tinari (Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing) - "How Contemporary Chinese Art Became Global: Artists, Exhibitions, Markets, Mediators 1985-2015" April 25, 2016 Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing Philip Tinari highlights three watershed moments in the development of the contemporary art scene in China. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art and the Department of History of Art & Visual Studies. For additional resources: https://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/ccci-spring-2016Item China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and LawErie, Matthew (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2016-09-19)The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series, featuring interdisciplinary talks by scholars on issues in China today, runs every Monday this semester. Professor Matthew Erie - Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, Oriental Studies, University of Oxford; Cornell University Anthropology Ph.D. alum China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law examines the intersection of two critical issues of the contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian (unofficial) law in China, to pursue their respective visions of 'the good'. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, 'China's Little Mecca', this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the 'New Silk Road', female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and Comparative Muslim Societies Program.Item Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult MemoryXu, Bin (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2020-10-26)Speaker: Bin Xu, Sociology, Emory University October 26, 2020, Cornell University East Asia Program In the 1960s and 1970s, about 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to the rural areas and the frontiers. In his forthcoming book Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory (Cambridge), Bin Xu tells the story of how this “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) generation, including China’s top leaders, have come to terms with their difficult past in various forms of memory in the past 40 years, including personal life stories, literature, exhibits, museums, and commemorative activities. At the core of this lasting memory boom, however, is their struggle to deal with the tensions between two entangled aspects of memory: their desire to remember their youth and confirm their worthiness on the one hand, and their difficulty in evaluating the controversial send-down program and other political upheavals in the Mao years on the other. Their memory is used by the state to construct an official narrative, which weaves the leaders’ “adversity-to-success” personal experiences into an upbeat story of “China dream” but avoids addressing the controversial event. The memory boom also marginalizes those zhiqing who are still suffering from the harmful impacts of the program and veils voices of self-reflection on their moral responsibility during the political upheavals in their formative years. This generation of “Chairman Mao’s children” are still caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma. Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association. His second book, tentatively titled Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press). His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals. Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Development Sociology Co-sponsored by: Cornell Department of Global Development, Environment and Sociology Major, The Polson Institute for Global DevelopmentItem Everyday Erotics: Older Lesbians and Bisexual WomenTang, Denise (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2022-02-21)Everyday Erotics: Ethnographies of Older Lesbians and Bisexual Women in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan Denise Tang, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Associate Dean, Arts Department Lingnan University, HK This talk presents the life stories of older Chinese lesbians and bisexual women (born in the 1940s and 50s) in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan through an interdisciplinary ethnography combining fieldwork and cultural analysis of inter-Asia mediations of femininities and masculinities. Tang examines the figure of the Chinese lesbian as both real and imagined in our historical narratives and contemporary social worlds.Item Provincializing China: Race and Architecture in Colonial-era PenangChua, Lawrence (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2022-03-14)Lawrence Chua, of Syracuse University speaks on "Provincializing China: Race and Architecture in Colonial-era Penang." This presentation examines the role of architecture in racialization in 19th and 20th-century Penang. It uses three case studies: the Khoo Kongsi (邱公司) (1850), a Hokkien clan temple; the Penang mansion of Cheong Fatt Tze (1898-1903), deemed “China’s first capitalist and last Mandarin”; and the mansions built by wealthy towkay or comprador families on Northam Road in the early 20th century. These three sites allow scholars to tease out the diverse histories of the region that the term “Chinese” often disguises. Racialized identities began to develop in mid-19th-century Penang that sought to consolidate diverse migrant groups into racial categories that could be more easily controlled and manipulated by the colonial state. Architecture became a key instrument in the racialization of urban space and the built environment but it also expressed ambivalence towards official categories of race. Lawrence Chua, is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Syracuse University.Item CCCI Tani Barlow: Instinct and SocietyBarlow, Tani (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2022-04-25)Tani Barlow, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University speaks on, "Instinct and Society." When Li Zehou burst onto the scene during the 1980s ‘culture fever’ he dragged back in altered form a much earlier foundational debate over evolution and instinct theory launched in the new social theory and human science movement during the May Fourth era. Barlow's general research question now is how society got ontologized a century ago. This lecture was recorded on April 25, 2022.Item Hukuo and Suzhi as Chinese Technologies of Governing Citizenship and Internal Migration in ChinaZhang, Chenchen (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-03-08)Chenchen Zhang, Lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University, Belfast - this talk looks at the genealogy and contemporary configuration of two key concepts that are central to governing the “extent” and “content” of citizenship in China: hukou and suzhi. Whereas hukou, or the household registration system, functions as a formal meso-level citizenship that distributes rights and regulates internal migration, the concept of suzhi, loosely translated as quality, brings together various discourses about what a desirable citizen subject should look like. I conceptualize the two as technologies of citizenship, which are inherently interconnected to one another as the hukou policy that governs internal migration employs the language of suzhi to justify the regime of differentiated citizenship, rights and mobility. After presenting the historical evolvement of each concept in the Chinese political system, I will focus on the latest reforms of the household registration system and the role of suzhi in the discourse of hukou reforms, urban governance, and rural-to-urban migration. It is argued that the policy and discursive changes indicate a shift from the dualistic urban-rural segregation to a multiplication of legal statuses, boundaries and hierarchies of citizenship that do not operate exclusively along the line of geographical boundaries. These technologies of citizenship are also examined from a global comparative perspective. Whereas the hukou regime that offers internal migrants differentiated access to rights based on their assumed economic worth is reminiscent of the governance of international migration in other national contexts, the suzhi discourse can be compared to the idea of liberal improvement.Item CCCI Kimiko Suda: Ant Tribes (Yizu) in China's Contested Urban SpaceSuda, Kimiko (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2022-04-11)CCCI welcomes Kimiko Suda, Ph.D. Post Doc researcher, National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) speaking on, 'Ant Tribes'(Yizu) in China´s contested Urban Space: A Discourse Perspective.' In 2009 the term "Yizu" (Ant tribe) was selected as one of the ten most popular terms in China´s social media discussions. It was coined by the economist Lian Si to provoke a discussion about the social group of migrant graduates from China´s rural areas, working and living in precarious situations in China´s biggest cities, often in so-called urban villages. The term was taken up by various actors from governmental strategists, scientists, social media influencers, TV-script writers, novelists, to critical media activists. They functionalized the figure of the "Yizu" to tell their version of the story about the "Chinese Dream“, urban transformation processes, social stratification, social mobility, new emerging collective identities, and different shades of the brightness of the future. When analyzing the different variations of the narratives about "Yizu", it all boils down to one question: how to keep your human dignity in a social context, in which an increasing economization and mediatization of almost everything shapes everyday life, and makes it impossible to create a stable, publicly respected and self-determined social identity and position. Kimiko Suda´s talk is based on a chapter of her book "Das Phänomen Yizu“ (published in September 2021 by transcript) CCCI spring 2022 is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of History, Asian Studies, The Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Migrations initiative.Item CCCI: Shelley RiggerRigger, Shelley (2021-11-15)Is China a Part of Taiwan? was the talk title given by Shelley Rigger, Professor of Political Science, Davidson University on November 15, 2021.Item CCCI James Millward: Decolonizing Chinese HistoriographyMillward, James (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-10-25)Professor James Millward, Georgetown University gave this talk titled, "Decolonizing Chinese Historiography with special attention to Xinjiang." The talk was co-sponsored by the East Asia Program's Contemporary China Initiative and CAPS (China and Asia Pacific Studies) at Cornell University. Abstract: The current atrocities in Xinjiang, while marking a stark reversal of PRC diversity regime from the more pluralist approach of its earlier decades, are nonetheless also a continuation of the colonialist trajectory embarked upon by the Chinese Communist Party-state following its occupation of the region in 1949.CCP / PRC colonialism in Xinjiang is, moreover, in many ways a realization of the colonial project openly planned for Xinjiang by Guomindang ideologues, including Sun Yat-sen, who in his key writings advertised the Han dominated Republic's ambitious goals of railway infrastructure, resource extraction and massive Han colonial settlement in the Central Asian corner of the former Qing empire.Unlike Sun Yat-sen, the PRC does not refer to its presence in the former East Turkestan as colonialsm; rather, in white papers, official statements and state media it highlights economic development, on the one hand, and coopts the history of former empires, on the other, as justifications for its imposition of heteronomous rule over non-Han Central Asian peoples. This talk focuses on that use of history, and, more broadly, examines how common concepts and vocabulary used by nearly all China scholars teaching and writing in English not only mischaracterize the past of states and peoples on the East Asian mainland, but reinforce PRC justifications for its colonialism, now egregiously oppressive and verging on genocidal. The problematic terminology we all use includes the idea of "dynasties," "borderlands," "minorities," and even, as it is often employed, the word "China" itself.Item CCCI Gerald Roche Tibet, China, and Settler ColonialismRoche, Gerald (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-04-12)Tibet, China, and Settler Colonialism The term settler colonialism is increasingly being used to describe the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and its so-called ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of settler colonialism as both a framework for scholarly analysis and real-world practice of domination. I will also explore how this term is being applied to the PRC, with reference to Tibet, and discuss how describing the Tibetan situation as settler-colonial differs from other approaches to the Tibet issue. As a way of illustrating this approach, I will discuss urbanization in Tibet as a technique of settler colonialism, particularly the relationship between urbanization and migration.Item CCCI: Ana Candela From Compradors to HacendadosCandela, Ana (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2020-02-22)From Compradors to Hacendados Cantonese Merchants In Peru and the Expanding Settler Colonial Frontiers of the Cantonese Pacific. Ana Candela, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University Embracing the gendered and racialized settler colonial imaginaries that animated Peruvian nation-making, Cantonese merchants deployed new ideas about nature, labor, and technology to position themselves as ideal colonos Chinos (Chinese settlers) and overseas Chinese pioneers (xiangiao). Through these activities and imaginaries, Cantonese merchants brought greater coherence to a broader Cantonese Pacific world that linked South China and northern coastal Peru through migration and commerce during an era of expanding industrial capitalism.Item Natural Infrastructure in China’s Era of Ecological CivilizationYeh, Emily (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2020-10-19)Speaker: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder Abstract: Although infrastructure is conventionally thought of in reference to human-designed systems such as railroads, pipelines, tunnels, and ports, landscapes, and nature itself are also increasingly being understood as infrastructure through terms such as “natural infrastructure” and “green infrastructure,” which tend to focus on the concept of ecosystem services. Taking an infrastructural lens onto natural infrastructure projects in the context of Xi Jinping’s call for ecological civilization, this paper argues that new calculative tools obscure the profoundly political nature of ecological red lines and ecological functional zones, which effectively enframe China’s national territory as an object of optimization. The paper then explores a specific aspect of the project of ecological civilization: campaigns to dismantle and destroy infrastructure deemed to be in violation of environmental regulations. I theorize this as a form of “destructive production” of natural infrastructure and provide two case studies of the dismantling of scenic areas not long after their reconstruction following the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan. Bio: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, and co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, and Rural Politics in Contemporary China. Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Developmental Sociology This Cornell Contemporary China Initiative event is co-sponsored by Cornell Department of Global Development, Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), the Environment and Sustainability Major, and The Polson Institute for Global DevelopmentItem Reframing Disability: Manga's Portrayals of Deaf CharactersOkuyama, Yoshiko (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2021-10-18)Yoshiko Okuyama, a professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, discusses "Reframing Disability in Manga" (University of Hawaii Press 2020), which she wrote after interviewing manga artists, conducting archival research, and visiting events and organizations serving disability communities in Japan as a Japan Foundation fellow. This event took place on October 18, 2021. It was co-sponsored by the Central NY Humanities Corridor and the East Asia+ media collective. Focusing on the book’s chapter on the deaf community in Japan, she discusses their representation in manga using comic examples such as A Silent Voice (Koe no katachi) while sharing manga images and anecdotes she did not include in her book. She concludes with a discussion of emerging issues as the pandemic continues to impact disability communities in Japan. This event had RID/NIC certified ASL interpreters throughout and was EAP's first fully bi-lingual English-ASL event.