Past Events

Cultural China Reexamined: The Question of Identity

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institue and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard

Prof. Tu Weiming (Director, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University; Senior Fellow, Harvard University Asia Center)
Chaired by Prof. Elizabeth Perry (Dept. of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Date: Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Time: 12:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

Since the publication of Tu Weiming's essay “Cultural China: the Periphery as the Center” (Daedalus, 1989), each of the three symbolic universes as distinct and yet inseparable dimensions of Cultural China has undergone major transformations. The first symbolic universe, consisting of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore, has so profoundly reconfigured that the original essay's subtitle must be fundamentally reformulated.  The assertion that the center is nowhere whereas the periphery is everywhere may be restated as follows: “the Center is Everywhere and the Periphery Has Also Become the Center”. The most significant development of the second symbolic universe is that the Diaspora (Cf. works of Wang Gungwu) has become the focus of increasingly fruitful interdisciplinary Diasporic studies. Perhaps the most challenging change in the third symbolic universe is now concentrated in the so-called Sinicization (Cf. the recent works of Peter Katzenstein) of fruitful discourses in China. In Professor Tu's reexamination, attention will be directed to the possible emergence of a  “we” that is open, pluralistic, and self-reflexive.

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Welfare and Labor in East Asia: Various Regimes, Common Challenges

Co-sponsored with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Kamimura Yasuhiro (Welfare Sociology and Comparative Social Policy, Nagoya University)
Discussant: Professor Mary Brinton (Department of Sociology, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

While economic interdependence among East Asian countries has deepened, there has also been an increase in political tensions within and among countries in East Asia. Under these circumstances, furthering market liberalization without adequate social protection may easily cause international friction. Maintaining regional peace requires us to pay attention to the social situation in neighboring countries. Thus it is very important to understand welfare and labor in East Asia from a comparative perspective. Are there any common features among the countries? What are the challenges for the future? In this talk, Professor Kamimura argues that it is crucial to find a political way to overcome the informality of employment.

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Chinese Cities: Booming Growth or Doomed to Fail?

Co-sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School; East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard; Harvard School of Public Health China Initiative; Harvard-Yenching Institute; Kennedy School Student Government; and the Social and Urban Policy Professional Interest Council

Meg Rithmire, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School, and Faculty Associate, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Tony Saich, Daewoo Professor of Public Affairs, and Director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

Date: Monday, April 29, 2013
Time: 4:10 - 5:30 pm
Location: Land Hall, 4th Floor, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School

China's cities have reportedly been driving the country's decades-long economic miracle. But behind this veneer of economic stability lies a system of mass migration and debt that appears to be collapsing under the weight of its own success. Join us as Tony Saich, director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, and Meg Rithmire, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, discuss the future of Chinese cities.

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Cross-National Lessons: What are East Asian Countries Learning from Each Other Today?

Harvard-Yenching Institute Annual Roundtable

Co-sponsored with the Harvard University Asia Center

Date: Monday, April 22, 2013
Time: 2:00 - 5:00 pm
Location: Lower Level Seminar Room, Center for European Studies/Busch Hall, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

This roundtable, organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored by HYI and the Asia Center, brings together a group of distinguished scholars (Sebastian Heilmann, Lan Pei-chia, Nishino Junya, Park Tae-gyun, Zhu Feng and Zhu Xufeng) to focus on how and what East Asian countries are learning from each other in the realms of culture, economy, social policy and politics.

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What is China? Rockhill's polyglotic approach as an example

Co-sponsored with the Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University

Chen Bo (Anthropology, Sichuan University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Leonard van der Kuijp (Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

In 1882, the United States and Korea signed a treaty according to which both exchanged diplomatic representation on the ground of equality. However, in 1887, the Korean king drafted the “sovereign” (君主) of the United States a note (照会), informing that Korea was a dependent state of China (朝鲜素为中国属邦), enjoying independent rights in its civil and foreign affairs; that the treaty between United States and Korea would be observed on equal grounds, and that affairs concerning the dependence of Korea to China had nothing to do with America. 

W.W. Rockhill (1854-1914) spent the last half of his life (1884-1914) interpreting this system, or what China is--a project that shifted most of his interest away from his Tibetan studies. Tackling the relations between China and Korea, China and Tibet, China and Europe, and China’s sea connections to Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Africa, he suggested different “Chinas”, such as a tributary China, an imperial China, a ritual China, and a trading China. They remain relevant for the 21st century in that these “Chinas” are not based on ethnicity, but rather on a notion of being hua (华) , for a long time misunderstood to be “Chinese”, just as zhongguo (中国) was misunderstood to be “China”.

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Intra-cohort Growth in the Inequality of Mathematics Achievement:Taiwan, the U.S., and the State of Massachusetts from an International Perspective

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Huang Min-Hsiung (Professor of Sociology, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Mary Brinton (Department of Sociology, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, April 10
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

This talk will present findings from a cross-national study of more than twenty countries, with a focus on the widening-gap phenomenon in mathematics performance among Taiwanese students as they progress through the grades. Student performance in mathematics in the state of Massachusetts, and in the United States as a whole, is also investigated. In Grade 4, students in Massachusetts and Taiwan perform equally well in mathematics. However, four years later, when the students are in Grade 8, a significant performance gap emerges between these two jurisdictions, due to a substantial improvement in performance among Taiwanese students. This performance gap between Taiwan and Massachusetts, which emerges over just four years, has implications for policy and research. The presence of a remarkable performance gap in mathematics between Massachusetts and the U.S. as a whole also calls for further investigation.

A participating country in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Taiwan has earned a reputation as one of the top-performing countries in multiple survey years. However, a much less known TIMSS finding peculiar to Taiwan was the remarkable contrast between Grade 4 and Grade 8 in terms of the inequality of student achievement in mathematics. Taiwan stands out from other countries as it exhibited a very narrow dispersion among fourth-graders, but an extraordinarily wide dispersion among eighth graders. This talk investigates the widening-gap phenomenon in Taiwan with respect to (a) its presence in different studies; (b) its magnitude and pattern; (c) its reappearance among students in different birth cohorts and different levels of schooling; and (d) its relevance to performance gaps on the basis of student family background, gender, the rural-urban divide, as well as between- and within-classroom differences. Some of the research questions listed above are addressed through international comparisons.

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Cultural Change from Aboriginal Man (蛮) to Immigrant Han (汉) in Southern China: An ethno-archaeological study on snake divinity worship

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the East Asian Archaeology Seminar Series at Harvard 

Wu Chunming (Archaeology and Museology, Xiamen University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Rowan Flad (Department of Anthropology, Harvard University)

Date: Friday, March 29, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

In southern China, cultural change from the aboriginal Baiyue (百越) and Nan Man (南蛮) to the immigrant Han took place during the Han to Tang dynasties. The snake totem is one of the most distinctive native cultural artifacts of southern China, and is different from the dragon totem of the Han nationality. Snake totems took on different forms, reflecting the cultural change from aboriginal Man (蛮) to immigrant Han (汉) in ancient southern Chinese societies. The “positive snake divinity” originated from an indigenous totem culture. The “evil snake” originated from cultural interaction between the native Yue and the immigrant Han after the Han became the majority in the south, at which point the snake divinity changed into a negative role. Since the Tang-Song Dynasties, an “improved" snake divinity has appeared, showing both the transformation of the “evil snake” to a rehabilitated snake divinity and the history of Han cultural assimilation in southern China.

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I中国土地改革运动的再认识——基于县级档案的研究

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Prof. Cao Shuji (Chinese History, Shanghai Jiaotong University) and Liu Shigu (PhD candidate, Shanghai Jiaotong University)
Discussant: Prof. Li Lifeng (Dept. of Political Science, Nanjing University; HYI Visiting Scholar)

Date: Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

*Please note: Talk will be given in Chinese*

传统中国的“押租”与“典卖”导致地权分化并形成以下结构：普通租佃—永佃—相对田面—公认田面—绝对田面，与这些权利关系相匹配的权利所有者，构成乡村的“阶级”与“阶级关系”，才是乡村社会关系的根本。实际上，新中国的土地改革并不主要针对“封建剥削制度”与“地主阶级”。在土地改革的三个阶段中，以攫取粮食与货币为内容的“大户加征”与“减租退押”具有财政应急的性质，才是土地改革的目的所在，而“分配土地”以虚拟的封建制度与阶级关系为对象展开，只具有象征的意义。为了缓解由“大户加征”与“减租退押”导致的粮食危机，新政权默许农民进城，采取“清算”的方式从工商业者及其他自由职业者手中夺取粮食与货币。这一看起来像是“被迫之举”的临时行为，却成为新政权解决财政问题的常规措施。中国经济的重心和中国财政的重点从工商转为农业，“粮食立国”的方略由此而形成。

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Roppongi through Photographs: Tokyo’s Emerging Cultural Treasure

Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Prof. Aoki Tamotsu (Director, National Art Center, Tokyo)

Date: Monday, March 25, 2013
Time: 1:00 pm
Location: Sever Hall 113, Cambridge, MA

About the speaker: Dr. Aoki, Director General of The National Art Center, Tokyo, is a Former Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan. He was awarded a Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2000 by the Government of Japan. A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Aoki has taught at Osaka University, The University of Tokyo, and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. He has conducted extended anthropological fieldwork in Southeast Asia, China, and Europe. He was once ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk in Bangkok. Among his many publications, two of Dr. Aoki’s books received awards: “Changes of the Discourse on Japanese Culture since the End of War in 1945” received the Yoshino Sakuzo Prize, and “The Symbolism of Ritual” received the Suntory Academic Prize. His most recently published books are “The Age of Cultural Power: Asia and Japan in 21st Century” (2011, Tokyo) and “Contemporary Japanese Writers Are Migrating” (2010, Tokyo).

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HYI Reception at the AAS Annual Meeting

Date: Friday, March 22, 2013
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Location: Del Mar Room, Manchester Grand Hyatt, One Market Place, San Diego, California

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Economic Aspects of Population Aging in China and India   

Sponsored by The Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the South Asia Initiative, the Asia Center, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Harvard China Fund, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (all at Harvard University), and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (at Stanford University)

Date: Thursday, March 7, 2013
Time: 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street, Stanford University

More information: http://aparc.stanford.edu/events/population_aging/

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Globalization of Law and Diffusion of Cultures — Glocalization of Arbitration From an East Asian Perspective

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the East Asian Legal Studies Program, Harvard University

Fan Kun (Faculty of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Bill Alford (Harvard Law School)

Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

Arbitration has developed significantly in recent years as the preferred method of dispute resolution for international commerce. In the context of harmonization of arbitration law and practice worldwide, what is the relevance of non-Western legal origins and traditions on the contemporary arbitration structures and practices? Will the efforts of harmonization of national laws lead to the emergence an ‘international arbitration culture’ at a global level?

Through the example of arbitration development in East Asia, China and Japan in particular, this paper illustrates the forces of legal globalization and forces of divergent cultures. On the one hand, global norms are localized with adaptations to accord more closely with local cultures — ‘localized globalism;’ on the other hand, through interactions with different cultures, local practices may produce shared norms and expectations, and eventually form a common culture — ‘globalized localism.’  It argues that the development of international arbitration will continue to be influenced by the combined forces of globalism and localism — a process of ‘glocalization’. It questions the inevitability of a worldwide convergence around Western values, and suggests a diffusion of cultures around the globe, bridging the Western and non-Western differences. 

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How to Make a World of Perpetual Peace

Prof. Zhao Tingyang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Professor of East Asian Thought)
Discussant: Professor Stephen Angle (Philosophy and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University)

Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Time: 4:15 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

The new problem of our times is that of a failed world rather than failed states. Globalization has brought us to the unpleasant fact that our supposed world is actually a non-world. Rather than dealing with the problems of globality by means of modernity, we must make a world, one of perpetual peace, with an ‘all-under-heaven’ system that reaches beyond the nation state system, with relational rationality emphasized more than individual rationality. 

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This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land: Negotiating between Physical Geography and Political State in Yi Sang’s “Miscellaneous Writings by Autumn Lamplight”

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute

John Frankl (Korean and Comparative Literature, Yonsei University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor David McCann (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

The enigmatic Yi Sang (1910-1937), despite his brief life and career, is widely regarded as both tortured genius and Korea’s premier modernist. Though best known for his experimental poetry and fiction, Yi was a complete artist who also produced award-winning paintings and rendered sketches to accompany his own literary works and the works of his most renowned peers. He was also an architect whose designs were acclaimed by his Korean peers and the Japanese colonial government alike. Finally, later in his career, Yi turned to the essay as a vehicle for expressing his musings on various aspects of 1930s Korea and Japan in a manner much more explicit and clear than in his other works. 

This talk will focus on Yi’s multiple identities as government architect and idiosyncratic artist, colonial subaltern and loyal subject. Although many critics, most often trying to confine Yi within a postcolonial nationalist paradigm, find these identities mutually contradictory, Yi himself appears to have moved rather seamlessly among them. Examining certain of his representative essays reveals a sort of situational identity based upon and changing according to geographical and emotional locations as well as real and imagined interlocutors. In particular, his essay “Miscellaneous Writings by Autumn Lamplight,” written in October 1936, the same month he would venture for the first time to Tokyo, where he would meet his untimely end only a few months later, Yi surefootedly negotiates a rugged terrain of competing identities as a modernist writer, an ethnic Korean, and a subject of Imperial Japan. Interrogating his various stances provides small but important glimpses into modernism’s movement from Europe to Asia, its adoption and modification in Japan and Korea, as well as how it informed the sensibilities of colonized artists who worked under the disquieting condition of artistic freedom coupled with political repression. 

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Developments in Chinese Bronze Production

Co-sponsored by the East Asian Archaeology Seminar Series at Harvard 

Zhang Changping (Professor of Archaeology, Wuhan University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Rowan Flad (Department of Anthropology, Harvard University)

Date: Friday, March 1, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: VANSERG Common Room, Vanserg Hall, 25 Francis Ave.

The bronze ritual vessel, as the main body of bronze artifacts in the Chinese Bronze Age, bore many social meanings. It accelerated the large-scale production and usage of bronze artifacts. Under this special social background, it could be said that the social meaning of bronze ritual vessels led to the formation and development of bronze casting technology. Casting technology affected the type and decoration of bronze artifacts, and influenced the way in which these ritual vessels were used.   

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Reality and Reproduction: Aspects of Sino-Vietnamese Relations as Reflected in a Fourteenth-Century Handscroll Painting

Professor Nam Nguyen (Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City)
Discussants: Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai (History, Harvard University) and Professor Eugene Wang (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, February 28, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

The talk concentrates on a handscroll painting entitled The Mahasattva Truc Lam Coming Out of the Mountains 竹林大士出山圖 dated back to 1363 and attributed to a Chinese artist by the name of Chen Jianru 陳鑑如.  "Truc Lam" (Bamboo Grove) is the style name of the Founding Patriarch of the Vietnamese Zen school named after it, King Tran Nhan Tong (1258-1308).  After abdicating the throne to his son, Tran Nhan Tong retreated into the mountainous region of Vu Lam – Yen Tu to practice Zen Buddhism.  In 1304, the Patriarch came out of the mountains at the request of his son, King Tran Anh Tong (1276-1320), to confer the Bodhisattva commandments on him and his court.   The painting in question describes this historical event.  

This talk is an attempt to read the inner text (the painting) with the support of outer texts (Chinese and Vietnamese referential sources). Due to its artistic features, handscroll paintings embedded with colophons by literati from different settings should be “read” in a quite specific way that generates multi focal points during the course of reading. Thus, the talk is an interpretation of selected focal points identified in this work of art. By reconstructing the background of the coming-out-of-the-mountains event and the composition of the handscroll, it will point out various politico-diplomatic, historical, cultural and religious aspects in Sino-Vietnamese relations during the transitional periods of the two realms under the Chinese Yuan and Ming and the Vietnamese Tran dynasties.

The Speaker

Nam Nguyen is a lecturer and the former Chairperson of the Division of Chinese Studies (Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City).  After earning his MA (RSEA) and PhD (EALC) from Harvard, he served as the manager of the Academic Program of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (HYI, 2004-2010).  His research interests focus on comparative literature (dealing mainly with China and Vietnam), and translation studies.  He is currently an associate of the HYI. 

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A Study of Cultural Exchange between Korea and China during the 18th and 19th Centuries: The Fujitsuka Chikashi Collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute

Jung Min (Korean Literature, Hangyang University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Wai-yee Li (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

This talk proposes a new resource for studying cultural exchange between Korea and China during the 18^th and 19^th centuries by introducing the Hujitsuka Chikashi collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Fujitsuka Chikashi (藤塚隣 1879–1948) was a Japanese scholar who specialized in the Qianlong (乾隆) and Jiaqing (嘉慶) Schools of Qing China. Around 1926, when he was appointed as a professor of Chinese philosophy at Keijo Imperial University (Seoul National University), he collected a large number of books concerning the Qianlong and JiaqingSchools in Korea and China. His collection included over 10,000 rare books and more than 1,000 calligraphy manuscripts and paintings, some of which were exchanged between Korean and Chinese literati. Unfortunately most of the books were lost in a fire caused by American air raids on Japan in 1945. The remaining books were sold or donated to South Korea and the United States. The Hujitsuka collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library will shed new light on the study of cross-cultural exchange between Korea and China during the 18th and 19th centuries.

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浅谈满族的“国家认同”问题

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Ding Yizhuang (History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Coordinate Research Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Mark Elliott (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Please note: Talk will be in Chinese

Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

在中国，所谓“种族”、“民族”乃至“国家”、“国族”，这些名词和概念的应运而生都有着特定的历史背景，但学界对晚清时期这一“国族塑造”的过程尚未予以充分的关注，其中一个未曾被很多人注意的现象，那就是晚清知识分子面对西方世界的步步紧逼，感受到“亡国灭种”威胁时，为构筑“国族”所作的努力。就是晚清时期，当汉族建构自己“民族”的活动风起云涌之时 “满洲”或曰“旗人”却既没有这种自觉，也没有这种行动，而只能以鼓吹“立宪”和“满汉一家”来予以消极而无力的回应。这个报告就是想从满族自身的历史特点出发，探讨他们在这个特定的、关乎他们生死存亡的关头，却有如此表现的原因。

 

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蒋介石如何选择接班人——台湾时期的蒋介石与陈诚 (1949-1965)

 

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Chen Hongmin (Professor of History, Zhejiang University)
Chair: Professor Elizabeth Perry (Government Department, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Please note: Talk will be in Chinese

Date: Thursday, December 13, 2012
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

陈诚是蒋介石在大陆时期刻意培养高级将领。到台湾时期，陈诚成为蒋介石最倚重与刻意栽培的人，担任国民党副总裁与副总统，党政地位仅次于蒋，似乎有“接班”的架式。但《蒋介石日记》与《陈诚日记》揭示出他们关系的另一面：蒋对陈诚一直心存不满，在日记中时常责骂，二人甚至有过正面冲突。蒋陈关系的复杂性，一方面是蒋介石的私德所致，更深的层次上则反映了中国近代以来在最高领导人交接问题上的制度困境。

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Old Peasants and New Migrants: Social Practices in the Little Tradition and China’s Modernity Problems 

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Song Ping (Professor of Anthropology, Xiamen University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Nicole Newendorp, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Over the past three decades, a radical modernist ideology and attendant practices have produced deep and distinctive problems in China. This talk will examine the contemporary discourse of Chinese modernity, particularly the norms and policies co-created by socialism and neoliberalism. It will explore debates about civil society, citizenship and community, with a focus on the meaning of social practice at the grassroots level. It will also discuss Chinese migrants (primarily ex-peasants from rural areas of Southern China) who have recently emigrated to Western countries, particularly the US, and have revived local cultural and social patterns while constructing transnational self-ruled communities to realize their vision of modernity and a better life. Their rich experiences inspire us to look more deeply into the little tradition of southern China as a source of possible solutions as China seeks to balance its pressing problems of modernity.

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Detecting Vices: An Analysis of John Burdett's Bangkok Trilogy

Co-sponsored with the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Suradech Chotiudompant (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Chulalongkorn University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: David Damrosch (Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

John Burdett’s trilogy -- Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, and Bangkok Haunts -- may be little known outside Thailand. But for those in the know, the trilogy is often regarded as a literary gateway to Bangkok, with such stereotypical figures as dark, mysterious femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, and inscrutable shamans, as well as iconic spaces of the Thai capital, ranging from such red-light districts as Patpong, Nana, and Soi Cowboy, to such unique, exotic locations as world- renowned Oriental Hotel, Lumphini Kick-Boxing Stadium, and Khaosan Road, a haven for backpackers. Analyzing the trilogy as a crossover between detective fiction and travel writing, Suradech will discuss the relationship between transcultural politics and narrative poetics in the author’s portrayal of Bangkok and its “vices”. 

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The Sacred Wudang Mountain: Secular villagers, Wild Foods and Daoist heritage

Professor Wu Xu (Department of Anthropology, East China Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Professor Robert Weller (Department of Anthropology, Boston University)

Date: Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Wudang Mountain, a Daoist sacred site in central China, attracts numerous pilgrims each year. Since 1994, when the mountain became a UNESCO World Heritage site, the local Daoist temple complexes have been protected. Local villages, especially ones near the temples or along the main pilgrimage roads, were considered secular and asked to disappear. Through examining villagers’ food-related activities and TEK, this study demonstrates how villages and villagers have profoundly contributed to maintaining the pilgrimage culture in the mountain. Pilgrimage culture has been the most important part of the Wudang Daoist heritage, giving rise to temple complexes in the past and providing an irreplaceable context for protection of the temple complexes in the future.    

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Two Categorically Different Ways of Focus Realization in Intonation: Evidence from 19 Languages Spoken in China

Co-sponsored with the Department of Linguistics, Harvard University

Wang Bei (Associate Professor, Institute of Chinese Minority Languages, Minzu University of China; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Maria Polinsky, Professor of Linguistics, Harvard University

Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Focus is one of the most frequently used communicative functions, highlighting a certain part of a sentence for pragmatic reasons, such as to make a contrast, to make a correction, or to provide information for a wh-question. In many languages, focus can be marked prosodically with lengthened duration, raised F0, expanded pitch range and a sharp post-focus compression in F0 and intensity (PFC). Recently, it has been found that the means of prosodic marking of focus are not universal. In many African languages and languages in South China, focus is mostly marked with lengthened duration and sometimes raised F0, but NOT PFC. In this talk, Professor Wang will present data from 19 languages spoken in China and will argue that the distribution of PFC and non-PFC languages may relate to language evolution and gene. Questions on the origins of Yi and Tibetan will be discussed. After reviewing how people learn to mark focus prosodically in a second language and how well people perceive focus in different languages, Professor Wang will show that PFC is effective on focus perception and is “easy to lose, but hard to gain”, which indicates that PFC is unlikely to appear automatically in a language and is not easily learned through language contact. As these two possibilities meet a big challenge, a third possibility deserves serious consideration, that is, PFC is probably inherited from a proto-language as proposed by Xu, Chen and Wang (2012). 

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Faith, Society and New Social Media

A special panel at the 2012 Beijing Forum, under the Panel Session of “Innovation and Change in the Age of Social Media”

Date: Saturday, November 3, 2012 
Time: 9 am - 12:15 pm
Location: Yingjie Exchange Center, Peking University, Beijing

Panelists: 
Wu Fengshi (Department of Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Yu Jianrong ( Rural Development Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Zeng Fanxu (School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University)
Zhou Fenghua (Public Policy, Huazhong Normal University)

Chair:
Elizabeth Perry (Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

For more information on the Beijing Forum, please visit: www.beijingforum.org

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Understanding North Korean Refugees' Education Experience: A contextual analysis of their hardships, failures, and resilience in South Korea

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute, Harvard University

Pak Soon-yong (Associate Professor, Department of Education, Yonsei University; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Avram Asenov Agov (Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Korea Institute, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Issues concerning the education of resettled refugees within the same ethnic group but in a culturally novel situation differ significantly from those who experience transnational migration or minority status. The North Korean refugee case is thus vastly different from inter-ethnic attitudes and behaviors that often result in within-group favoritism and out-group rejection. It is expected that the cumulative number of refugees from North Korea who have fled to South Korea since 1990 will exceed 25,000 by the end of this year. Most have found adjusting to new life in South Korea to be a daunting challenge. Especially vulnerable are the young refugees in their teens and early 20's. Many experience severe hardship, if not failure, in their transition from a strictly controlled socialist track of education to an open competition-based capitalist education system. 

The talk will address the patterns of failure among the young refugees and analyze them in the light of their previous educational and social environments in North Korea. The narratives on the realities of schooling in North Korea, as experienced by former teachers from North Korea, will provide the contextual base for understanding the hardships of the young refugees. Initial findings suggest that the academic failure or resilience of the young Korean refugees can be best explained along the lines of the relational dimensions of cultural competence. 

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Globalization and Social Transformation: China in the 21st Century

The Fourth International Conference on Chinese Society and China Studies

Organizers (in alphabetical order): 
Harvard-Yenching Institute 
Nanjing University: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of history
Shanghai University: School of Sociology and Political Science
University of Freiburg: Department of Sinology
University of Sydney: China Studies Center 
University of Tokyo: The Institute of Oriental Culture 

Date: Saturday, October 27 and Sunday, October 28, 2012
Location: Heren Building (The School of Social and Behavioral Sciences), Xianlin Campus, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

Additional information (in Chinese and English)

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Tibetan House Space at Labrang: An Architectural Inquiry into the Everyday Sacred and the Mundane

Co-sponsored with the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum

Maggie Mei-Kei Hui (Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Discussant: Janet Gyatso (Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School)

Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Labrang, located on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, has always been an important Tibetan Buddhist monastery since its establishment in the early 18th century. It has since then attracted lay Tibetans to settle in close proximity and produced relatively dense lay villages surrounding the monastery. The settlement has continued to grow and respond to social changes through time. In the present day, local Tibetans continue to carry out their religious practices daily. How do religious practices influence the everyday architectural experiences of these locals, which extend from the domestic space to the public realm, and at times, into the monastery? It is argued that there are priorities and rules governing the interchange of the sacred and mundane space between the religious and daily living tasks. Such response influences the spatial organization, such as the reading of house form and settlement pattern. In this presentation, an overall view on the house space novice monks, nuns and the lay Tibetans will be rendered, followed by an introduction to three nunneries next to Labrang that were established at different time in history.

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中华人民共和国第一次普选运动中的上海底层社会 

(Shanghai Grassroots Society in the First General Election of the PRC)

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Zhang Jishun (Professor of History, East China Normal University; HYI Coordinate Research Scholar)
Chair: Elizabeth Perry (Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Please note: Talk will be given in Chinese/本演讲将用中文进行

Date: Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

中华人民共和国建国后第一次普选运动常常被书写为人民当家作主的体现，是最为广泛的、真实的民主。而随着大量档案史料的发掘，类似的书写应受到质疑。人民有没有当家，能不能作主？谁是普选运动的主体，何谓人民？人民民主是真实的，还是被权力话语建构起来的？第一次普选是革命的继续，还是宪政的开端？作为中国最具现代特征的大都市，上海的普选运动足以成为解析上述问题的最重要的案例之一。已经公开的档案及相关的文献、报刊资料，为我们走出概念的“人民民主”，从底层社会的政治生活中去发现真实的人民，提供了极大的可能性。

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Mass Movements and Rural Governance in Communist China

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Li Lifeng (Professor, Department of Political Science, Nanjing University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2012-13)
Discussant: Elizabeth Perry (Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Successive mass movements spread like wildfire across China’s urban and rural areas after the founding of the People’s Republic, setting the tone for the nation’s domestic politics until late 1970s. Mass movements had already been adopted as an unconventional political strategy during the revolutionary era and continued to be practiced as an effective strategy of mobilization and governance long after the revolutionary victory. Building upon his earlier research on land reform, the first among dozens of nationwide political movements, Professor Li will examine the features and functions of mass movements in Communist China, especially the close and complicated connections between mass movements and rural governance and the lasting impact of such legacies in contemporary China.  The goal is to shed new light on political operations in both revolutionary and post-revolutionary China.

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Training Program: Social Sciences Approaches to Chinese Everyday Life since 1978: Family, Education, Religion and Consumption

Date: June 20 - July 3, 2012
Location: Johns Hopkins University - Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies

The Harvard-Yenching Institute, Nanjing University and the University of Sydney are pleased to announce a new training program on "Social Sciences Approaches to Chinese Everyday Life since 1978: Family, Education, Religion and Consumption". The aims of the program are to spotlight the international implications of Chinese experiences against the background of globalization; to provide young scholars of the world engaged in China studies an opportunity to understand China; to share academic wisdom with outstanding researchers and be enlightened by criticisms from the younger generation; to initiate world-wide communication and cooperation among institutes for China Studies; and to advance international studies of China and promote their intellectual accumulation.

Additional information

 

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Women in Academia: Meritocracy and Gender Equality

Date: June 18-19, 2012
Location: Seoul National University

Sponsored by Institute for Gender Research, Seoul National University, Harvard-Yenching Institute, and Korea Institute, Harvard University

Organizers: Sun Joo Kim, Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History, Harvard University; Chung Chin-sung, Professor of Sociology, Seoul National University; Lee Na-young, Sociology, Chung-ang University

Conference schedule

Women’s status in modern Korea has recently made much improvement, and now Korean women enjoy almost equal legal status as men in all aspects of life. With the legal inscription of gender equality in both domestic and public realms, women now have more representation in politics, business, and education. Discrimination of daughters in higher education has nearly disappeared as women comprise almost half of college students in Korea, and increasingly more women pursue graduate and professional degrees. Yet employment data, at the managerial and professional levels in particular, is not parallel to the educational level. In academia, institutional efforts have been made to hire more women faculty by assigning special employment quotas and by creating more congenial work environments for women over last decade. However, the representation of women in most departments and schools, except for a few women-dominated fields such as education, arts, and nursing, is still very meager and there are a number of departments at major universities that do not have a single woman faculty. More objective hiring and reviewing practices, such as grading publication records, have been introduced to put into practice true meritocracy. Whether adopting this type of conceivably more objective criteria in hiring and promotion practices has improved gender equality and meritocracy is controversial and questionable. This conference aims to analyze this discrepancy between legal and institutional prescriptions and employment practices in realizing gender equality, and tries to understand where the major obstacles exist. Comparative data and practices in China, Japan, and the United States will further enrich our understanding of the current status of gender equality in academia in these countries, and will give an opportunity to examine how different cultures and ideologies make impacts on policy making and practices.

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Social Welfare Development and Transformation of Governance: East Asian Drama

Date: June 2012
Location: Central China Normal University

This workshop will bring together scholars from different regions and areas of study, mainly the fields of political, sociological and public policy studies in East Asia, and will lalow for the exchange ideas on the following themes:

Theme 1: current trends and the future of East Asia welfare regimes
Theme 2: the inter-government relationship in social welfare provision
Theme 3: the role of the state and its relationship to civil society in social welfare provision
Theme 4: seeking good governance in social welfare development

For more information, please contact Zhou Fenghua (siluoip@163.com).

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Cultural Exchanges between Vietnam and East Asia

Date: May 14-17, 2012
Location: Institute of Culture, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi

For Chinese, Lingnan refers to southern China.  For Vietnamese, Linh Nam means “South of the border (with China)” in other words, the area now known as northern Vietnam. Whatever the exact geographical coverage of Lingnan/Linh Nam, it is clear that modern southern China and modern northern Vietnam share a common cultural heritage despite their divergent political histories after the tenth century.

During the 1950s, in both Vietnam and China the socialist state sought to radically transform local culture, by banning practices that were deemed superstitious and wasteful. Over the last three decades, economic reforms and political liberalization have led to the revival of traditional practices at the local level; in many cases, this revival is abetted by global actors such as UNESCO.

This workshop is intended to highlight some of the commonalities between the popular cultures of southern China and northern Vietnam and to compare the experiences of Chinese and Vietnamese in transforming, preserving and reviving local religio-cultural practices.  Above all, it seeks to bring together scholars of Vietnam and China with the idea that they can benefit from such connections and comparisons.

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Buddhism and the Production of Social Space in Yangtze Delta during 1368-1949: Focusing on Township Formation Based on Temple Locations

Co-sponsored by Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Zhang Weiran (Institute of Chinese Historical Geography, Fudan University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Peter Bol (Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages Civilization, Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, May 10, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

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State Capacity and Local Governance: China and India Compared

A roundtable organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the South Asia Initiative

Date: Monday, May 7, 2012
Time: 1:30 - 5:15 pm
Location: Lower Level Seminar Room, Center for European Studies (Busch Hall), 27 Kirkland St., Harvard University

This roundtable brings together a group of distinguished scholars of China and India to consider some of the major political problems and perils facing the Asian giants today.  How do the world’s two biggest countries compare in terms of their ability to manage and mollify their often unruly citizens?  How well does each of them cope on the ground with such enormous challenges as poverty and inequality, popular protest, ethnic conflict, and environmental degradation?  How effectively do central and local governments coordinate, complement, or contradict one another in meeting these challenges?  Can China and India’s relative successes and shortcomings shed light on prospects for democratic versus non-democratic governance in the twenty-first century? 

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China’s Urban Political Cultures: A Comparative Perspective

Sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, East China Normal University, and the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences 

Date: Friday, May 4 and Saturday, May 5
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

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Mass Torts in China

Co-sponsored by Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Zhu Yan (Law School, Renmin University of China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: William P. Alford (Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School)

*Please note different location*

Date: Friday, May 4, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Vanserg Common Room, 25 Francis Avenue, Harvard University

Mass Torts are concerned with legal accidents, which involve hundreds, thousands, and even millions of victims due to some risks which trace back to the uncertainty of industrial technology. The urbanization of demography and the globalization of marketing further increase the probability of mass torts.

In the past decade many mass torts happened globally, such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the 2008 contaminated milk scandal 2008 in China, and the 2011 Fukuyama nuclear leak caused by the earthquake in Japan. In the above mentioned accidents, more than 100,000 residents or consumers suffered personal injuries and economic losses to varying degrees. In oil spill accidents, environmental damage may not be restored in a foreseeable period. De facto, mass torts spawn new tasks for legal study, particularly for modern tort law, practically and theoretically.

In this talk Prof. Zhu will give an introductory analysis by means of statistics on recent mass torts cases in the past a few years in China, in order to demonstrate that mass torts constitute an important issue in modern Chinese tort law. Then he will explore this legal issue in terms of the specific characteristics of mass torts, such as losses and damage, causation, limitation of litigation, and class action as a lawsuit form. Due to the sophisticated implications of mass torts, Prof. Zhu will also analyze the influences of mass torts and their lawsuits upon the Chinese administration and judiciary. For example, he will argue that administrative resolutions dominated by central and local governments can’t efficiently, equally, and openly resolve the problems arising from mass torts. Although mass lawsuits will challenge the management and expertise of People’s Courts in different jurisdictions, refusing to open the court door to victims could result in more problems which may even threaten social stability.

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The Making of Post-Socialist Individuals: A Case of Border Crossers from North Korea

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Korea Institute

A talk by Prof. Won Jaeyoun (Sociology, Yonsei University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Martin Whyte (Professor of Sociology, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, April 26, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

This talk discusses the experiences and hardships that North Korean border crossers face upon arriving in South Korea. Arrival in South Korea is not the end of their hardship after a long journey, but only the beginning of something new. While the South Korean government provides subsidized housing, monthly stipends, and other benefits upon their arrival, many North Koreans have become desolate, suffering from job insecurity, low income, and concentration in lower-ranking occupations in South Korea due to their Northern accents, lack of support networks, and unfamiliarity with cultural and linguistic customs. To a very small number of North Koreans, South Korea might provide a chance to realize their dreams in the land of opportunity, but most have to face the harsh reality of the market economy as well as prejudices, biases, and stereotypes in South Korean society. This talk attempts to capture the complex process of unmaking “socialist” North Koreans and turning them into capitalist South Koreans.

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A Re-study of the “Daoguang Depression”

Co-sponsored by Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies 

A talk by Prof. Ni Yuping (History, Beijing Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Dwight Perkins (Harold Hitchings Burbank Research Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University)

Date: Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Since the late 20th century, especially with China's rapid economic rise through reform and opening-up in the 21st century, studies on Chinese economic history and China's position in the world economy have attracted increasing attention. The Jiaqing and Daoguang period (1796-1850) of the Qing Dynasty has always been considered the most important turning point in Chinese economic history. The Daoguang Depression theory believes that the amount of customs duties continued to decline at that time, due at first to food trade being pre-blocked, and then due to a market slump. However, by aggregating the national customs revenue, Professor Ni argues that during the Jiaqing and Daoguang period, the amount of customs duties still maintained a level of more than 500 million taels. In short, the amount of customs duties is not able to support the conception of the Daoguang Depression.

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The Unclaimed War: The Social Memory of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War in China and Vietnam

Ngo Thi Thanh Tam (Max Planck Institute for study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Gottingen, Germany)

Discussant: Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Twentieth century Asia was shattered by various devastating wars, some of which, such as the Japanese-Chinese war, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, has become foundational in national and international memories. Some other wars, however, have been hardly included in the memory politics in this continent. This is not because their role in national and international history is insignificant or that they have been forgotten. More accurate is perhaps that they are unclaimed wars. Like ‘unclaimed belongings’ such wars invite questions about why they are played down in national memory and why they ‘stand-in-the-way’ of proper national memory.

This talk addresses one of such wars; the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war. This destructive conflict erupted on 17 February 1979, officially lasted only 17 days but in reality dragged on for 10 full years in which tens thousands of lives of both side were lost or ruined. Thirty three years later, this war stands in both China and Vietnam as a war that-you-aren’t-supposed-to-talk-about which is barred from the states’ permitted national realm of memory and commemoration. For the people whose lives were devastated by it, the daunting memory of this war continues to haunt their daily existence today. The intensity of their suppressed memory is startling especially in the present context of a thriving politics and culture of war commemoration in both China and Vietnam.

In this study, I follow the life stories and narratives of different kinds of people whose lives have been defined by this war, such as the veterans, inhabitants of the borderland both ethnic minorities and Kinh and Han majority groups, the ethnic Chinese people in Vietnam, the ethnic Vietnamese people in China. I seek to understand the political context that led to the outbreak of the war and how its participants understood that context. How did that understanding impact the motivation to join the war and the formation of a sense of defiance, or to find a way out of it, or to endure the suffering caused by it, or to make sense of loss? To what extend social memory can persist independent of public commemoration? In this research I aim to contribute to a new understanding of how the memories of such unclaimed war impact local resistance to the center. In this project  I pursue a dual aim. While I want to use the repression of this memory to reflect on the dominant discourses of the present regimes, I also want to reflect on truth-seeking and commemoration as currently dominant modes of coming to terms with past violence.

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哪里是中国？—— 有关“中国”论述的再思考
(Where is China? Rethinking the Theories of ‘China’)

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Ge Zhaoguang (Fudan University)

Chair: David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

*Please note: Talk will be in Chinese*

Date: Thursday, April 12, 2012
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

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How Did Medieval Chinese Learn Epistemology from Indian Buddhism? – A Study of Jingying Huiyuan’s Treatise on the Three Measures of Valid Cognition

Co-sponsored with the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum

Chen-kuo Lin (National Chengchi University)

Discussant: James Robson (Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Date: Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

The wide-spread consensus about Buddhist epistemology (pramāṇa-vāda) is that it has never received any serious attention outside of the development of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. As clearly shown in the current scholarship, the study of Chinese textual sources in this field has been totally ignored owing to the untenable belief that it is unhelpful, if not entirely useless, for our understanding of Buddhist epistemology in the original form. In this talk, however, Professor Lin will try to demonstrate the opposite by presenting a textual and doctrinal study of Jingying Huiyuan (523-592)’s Essay on the Three Measures of Valid Cognition (Sanliang zhiyi), a gem of early Chinese Buddhist epistemological treatises. This study shall show that reception of Indian Buddhist epistemology in the era before Xuanzang was far more significant than what has been previously assumed.

Before exploring Huiyuan’s contribution, Professor Lin will give a brief historical picture of how Buddhist epistemology was introduced from India to China during the 5th-6th century. This picture will be drawn from two angles. The first is a brief chronological sketch, while the other is a topical reconstruction. Regarding the topical background, he has selected three topics that were extensively discussed in the early texts in Chinese translation. The first topic in those early materials addresses the theological issues, such as arguments for the existence of soul (ātman, puruṣa) and cosmic creators (Iśvara, Viṣṇu). The second topic concerns metaphysical problem of the existence of external world. The third topic focuses on the relationship between epistemology and meditation. Professor Lin's study will show that Huiyuan is in much favor of the third topic than the other two.

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Suffering Bodies during the Sino-Japanese War: 1931-1945

Date: April 6-7, 2012 
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

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Power, Status and Space in East Asian Art

Date: April 6-7, 2012 
Location: William James Hall 1550, Harvard University

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Forest or Not? Contentious Discourse on Expansive Oil Palm Plantations in Southeast Asia

Co-sponsored by the HKS Indonesia Program, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

A talk by Prof. Okamoto Masaaki (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussants: Deborah Gewertz (G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College) and Frederick K. Errington (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Trinity College

Date: Friday, March 30, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

This talk will focus on the contentious discourse regarding the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia. With the rapid rise in global demand for Crude Palm Oil (CPO) as the cheapest vegetable oil, oil palm plantations are sometimes devastatingly causing deforestation in Southeast Asia. CPO is used not only for cooking oil, but also for various usages including bio-diesel.  This has sparked serious debates between pro-expansion (the government and business sector) and anti-expansion groups (environmental NGOs and indigenous communities). The Indonesian government and business sector shrewdly moved to define plantations as forests, so that the expansion of oil palm plantations is no longer deforestation but rather "re"forestation. If a REDD++ scheme is implemented, plantations could even obtain carbon credit as forests.

Of course, global NGOs are harshly criticizing this movement and the contention is becoming sharper and sharper, as CPO is very lucrative for the government and business sectors in Indonesia, while NGOs view the movement as environmentally devastating. This talk will cover the development of this contentious discourse and present the emergence of a strange but positive dynamic equilibrium or consensus among stakeholders.

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中国传统法律观念与清代婚姻类案件的审理

(Chinese Traditional Ideas of Law and the Judgment of Marital Legal Cases during the Qing)

Zhao Weini (Associate Professor, School of Law, Sichuan University; Visiting Scholar, Stanford University)

Date: Monday, March 26, 2012
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Please note: talk will be in Chinese

中国传统法律观念是一个仿佛十分清晰，但事实上却十分含混的问题。一直以来，各路学人都从不 同的角度不断努力使这一问题变得更加明晰。传统司法是传统法律观念的具体落实过程，经过对清代地方婚姻类案件的诉讼过程、审理特点的考察发现，清代的司法 中固然包裹着我们所十分熟悉的内容：男女、老幼、士庶法律地位的不平等，刑讯和脱离法律条文的裁决等等，但从中的确也有不少出乎意料的发现：矜恤、慎杀， 以及对“最高法律”（天理）的信仰。

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后冷战之后的中国主体想象
(Visualizing Chinese Subjectivity in the Wake of the Post-Cold War Era)

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Dai Jinhua, Peking University

Please note: talk will be in Chinese

Date: Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Time: 4:15 pm
Location: CGIS South, Belfer Case Study Room (S020), 1730 Cambridge St.

讲者拟在21世纪变化中的世界语境中，探讨中国社会及其文化政治的演变。讲者拟结合相关大众文化文 本，联系着全球变局、中国崛起/中国威胁的话语讨论中国想象、中国的自我想象的变化；拟在冷战、后冷战、后冷战之后的、关于历史与时间的异质性话语脉络 中，探讨中国主体呈现的多重社会症候意味。

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Reception at the AAS Annual Meeting

Date: Friday, March 16, 2012
Time: 7:00  - 9:00 pm
Location: Conference Room B, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel

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A Han vs. Minorities Dual System in Chinese Society

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Studies

Ma Rong (Professor of Sociology, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, Peking University)

Date: Thursday, March 8, 2012
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

In academic studies of the structure of Chinese society and discussions of main social contradictions in contemporary China, most attention has been paid to the “urban-rural dual structure”.  This talk sets out to discuss a different “dual structure” of segmentation within Chinese society, the systemic institutionalized separation in many spheres between Han and “ethnic minority” citizens. This group differentiation has simultaneously divided Chinese society into two parts in various dimensions, thus not only deeply interfering with the fostering of Chinese national identity, but also bringing about a number of social contradictions, conflicts of interest and a lack of cultural understanding, and even national separatism. This talk reviews the history of the formation of this structure since 1949, and how this system divides Chinese society into two parts in terms of administration, schooling, elite groups, academic community, and even entertainment. It seems that this structure is harmful to the overall construction of the unified nation of China and must draw close attention from all of society in the 21st century.

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A Study of the Interchange of 5th-7th Century East Asian Gilt Bronze Buddhist Sculptures

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Korea Institute

A talk by Prof. Yang Eun Gyeng (Archaeology, Pusan National University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Rowan Flad (Anthropology, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, March 8, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

This talk will focus on the comparison of gilt bronze Buddhist sculptures from Korea’s Three Kingdoms period and the Shandong region, especially Buddhist sculptures with halos. Existing studies on 5th-7th century international exchange in Shandong, an important center of cultural interchange between China, Korea, and Japan and the place of origin for Buddhist sculpture, seem insufficient. Identifying the exact characteristics of Buddhist sculptures from Shandong will provide vital information for understanding the exchange of Buddhism and Buddhist sculptures at the time. In previous studies on the origins and stylistic changes of Buddhist sculptures and cultural interchange in East Asia, Northern Dynasties gilt bronze statues were compared with other Buddhist artworks because they were large in number, thus able to provide extensive and diverse data. As not many bronze statues survive from the Southern Dynasties, making comparisons or doing research on them was virtually impossible.

Through the analysis of small 6th century gilt bronze Buddhist sculptures, Prof. Yang will examine whether gilt bronze Buddhist sculpture from the Three Kingdoms period and those of the Shandong region are similar. Second, she will explore the possibility of another origin of the Shandong Buddhist sculptures, since they differ somewhat from Buddhist sculpture of the Northern dynasties. Third, she will examine why Buddhist sculptures from two different regions look similar.

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A Camouflaged Military: The Japanese Self-Defense Forces and Globalized Gender Mainstreaming

Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

A talk by Prof. Sato Fumika (Sociology, Hitotsubashi University ; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Mary Brinton (Sociology, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Along with the global gender mainstreaming of militaries, recent sociological studies have directed increasing attention to the patterns of gender integration in the military. However, most of them focus on Western militaries, leaving a dearth of scholarship about Asian militaries.
Japan presents a particularly interesting case, in view of the constraints that Article 9 of the Constitution, which renounces the right of belligerency, places upon its military. In illustrating the history of women in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, Professor Sato will focus on the reasons of Japanese policy makers for introducing women into the SDF and will argue that they are not necessarily relevant to gender equality. She will apply a framework of "camouflaging" as she discusses these reasons, while exploring issues that concern globalized gender mainstreaming of militaries in the 21st century.

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Were There New Women and Moga in the Japanese Community of Colonial Korea? Exploring Gender Politics and Colonialism

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

A talk by Prof. Kweon Sug-In (Anthropology, Seoul National University ; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Carter Eckert (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Date: Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Professor Kweon's talk will examine gender politics within the Japanese colonial settler community in Korea in the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, it looks at urban middle class Japanese women, who were of a significant number in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s and who actively practiced and enjoyed modern ways of life comparable to lives in major metropolitan cities of Japan. These women were, on the other hand, under conservative gender ideology and paternalistic community scrutiny to maintain women's virtues and morals. Existing data seem to show that Japanese women in Korea, as members of the colonizer community, benefited in areas of education, occupation, and family lives, on more favorable terms inaccessible to many women in the metropol, but could not create a separate space and arena where they could raise questions and speak for themselves about issues of their own.

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China’s future: Smart State and Strong Society--a Review of the Wenchuan Earthquake Response

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Zhang Qiang (Government, Beijing Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Arnold Howitt (Harvard Kennedy School)

Date: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Frequent catastrophes have challenged China’s public policy and social management. Various policy dilemmas caused by specific crises and the limitation of the top-down policy-making system urge us to reconsider the interaction among state strength and social power while coping with disasters. Due to heavy social impact and economic damage, the government cannot take on full responsibility, and the boundaries between government and society need to be redefined. 2008 has been called the first year of an era of civil society (volunteering) in China because of the huge impact of the Wenchuan earthquake and the Olympic games on civil society development. By integrating a series of empirical studies on the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, this talk aims to explore a possible roadmap for transition from a model of “strong state and weak society” to “smart state and strong society” in China. Professor Zhang attempts to reveal the corresponding challenges and opportunities through reviewing the development of China's emergency management system.

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Civil society and grassroots politics in new democracies and hybrid regimes (Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia and China)

A Training Program

Date: January 7-13, 2012
Location: Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

Organizers: Professor Grzegorz Ekiert, Department of Government Harvard University and Professor Sunhyuk Kim, Department of Public Administration, Korea University

This training program is for young scholars interested in one of the key issues of contemporary democratic theory: the relationship between civil society and democratization. The program is designed to bring together scholars working on projects focusing on grassroots politics, civil society formation and its impact on various political regimes. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from leading scholars from Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan as well as from the US and Central Europe. The training program will facilitate the exchange of ideas and learning about the issues critical to the understanding of contemporary civil societies and their role in different political and cultural contexts. Through lectures by leading academics, discussion seminars, and workshops evaluating participants’ research projects, this training program will offer a unique opportunity to young scholars to learn about the state of the art research and theorizing in this field. The program will also offer the opportunity for established scholars from Asia, Europe and the US to discuss issues of common interests and to build foundations for future cooperation and exchanges.

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Historical Materials and Methods: the New Horizon for Research on 1950s China

Date: January 10-16, 2012
Location: Fudan University, China

Organizer: Prof. Feng Xiaocai, History Department, Fudan University

In recent years, China has attracted attention from all corners of the globe; however, academia still needs to strengthen its understanding of the political, economic, social and cultural changes in post-1949 China. Undoubtedly, China’s more than sixty years of changes and experiences have raised a host of challenges to theories in both the humanities and the social sciences, and have provided an excellent opportunity for research on contemporary China to be integrated into the international mainstream discussion in these fields.  In the face of this vast amount of new historical material, we hope that scholars in this field, whether based in China or overseas, will be able to form a new research network, using the most complete set of new and old historical sources to further the development of research on China and thereby move the field towards a new horizon.
    
For this purpose, Fudan University and the Harvard-Yenching Institute have cooperated to convene an advanced training workshop entitled “Historical Materials and Methods: The New Horizon for Research on 1950s China” at Fudan University from January 10-16, 2012. We plan to enroll about 20 young scholars (including current doctoral students and young faculty and researchers) to participate in an intensive one-week training program. The workshop will invite 6-10 Chinese and foreign senior scholars to deliver special lectures, in which they will share their personal research experiences and their practical experiences directly related to the use of new historical sources, including how to consult, decode, and analyze materials. The workshop will also set aside time for attendees to discuss and explore how to employ new materials in academic research, particularly how to utilize new research methods and develop original perspectives from primary source materials.
    
Throughout the training process, attendees will be encouraged to draw upon their personal academic backgrounds and research interests to come up with original research agendas and innovative ideas. After the workshop finishes, the program will select a very small number of exceptional attendees from Asian Universities to spend the following academic year (2012-13) at the Harvard-Yenching Institute to pursue additional studies. Through this kind of positive academic exchange, we hope to significantly improve the quality of academic studies on the early history of the People’s Republic of China. 

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The Moon-window as interface with ancestral altars

A talk by Prof. Wang Yuan (Art History, Shanghai Jiaotong University; HYI Art History Training Program Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Prof. Eugene Wang (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University) 

Date: Friday, December 16, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

The traditional Chinese interface with ancestor sacrifice space normally has a specific and consistent modality. In this talk, Wang Yuan will take a particular motif, the moon-window, which appeared in the residential ancestor hall of a Hakka immigrant village in south Zhejiang province during the Qing Dynasty, as an example. Her talk will look at how and why the sacrificial space took on an innovative form, and will trace the innovation of the moon-window back to a long tradition in Chinese etiquette and custom. Professor Wang also seeks to restore the relationship between the use of moon-windows in different contexts and the illusion of natural moon.

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Yunnan and the Bengal Bay

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Yang Bin (History, National University of Singapore; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Michael Witzel (Wales Professor of Sanskrit, Harvard University) 

Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Yunnan, a frontier province in southwest China, has long been placed in Chinese historical narration. This talk aims to bring back its medieval connections to Southeast and South Asia.  It first introduces the use of cauri (cowrie or cowry) currency in Yunnan and other areas around the Bay of Bengal, and then construct historical routes linking the Bengali world and Yunnan, both by land and sea. The spread of Buddhism into Yunnan will be discussed to highlight the Bengali cultural influence. Keeping these reflections in perspective, Yang Bin calls for a reconsideration of the current so-called Chinese frontier studies.

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The Rise of Industrial Policy in China: Japanese Lessons, Chinese Adaptations, 1980-2012

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

Sebastian Heilmann
Professor of Comparative Government and the Political Economy of China, University of Trier, Germany

Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Time: 12:15 pm                 
Location: S050, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

This talk will present new findings on the emergence of large-scale industrial policy programs in China during the past decade and their proliferation since 2009. Two processes will be at the center of the presentation: the absorption and accommodation of Japanese industrial policy experiences by Chinese economic planners that started in the 1980s (explaining transnational policy adaptation); the failure of pioneering industrial policies during the 1990s and the forceful comeback of targeted national programs in China in recent years (explaining domestic policy breakthroughs and advocacy coalitions).

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Political Legitimacy in China: A Confucian Approach

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Daniel Bell
Jiaotong University and Tsinghua University

Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Time: 4:15 pm                 
Location: CGIS South, Belfer Case Study Room (S020), 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

More information: http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/event/daniel-bell

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Whose Xinjiang? The Transition in Chinese intellectuals’ imagination of the “New Dominion” during the Qing dynasty

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Jia Jianfei (History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Mark Elliott (Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, EALC, Harvard) 

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Time: 11:30 am
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

Though Xinjiang (literarily the “New Dominion”) was incorporated into China’s territory permanently in mid-18th century during Emperor Qianlong’s reign, Jiayu Guan (嘉峪关) still marked a boundary between Xinjiang and China proper, much like Yang Guan (阳关) and Yumen Guan (玉门关) in the Han and Tang dynasties. Such a boundary was infused with cultural meaning since ancient times: it separated different cultures, and territories beyond the pass should accordingly not be regarded as part of China. This understanding of cultural boundaries deeply influenced Han Chinese officials and intellectuals; no wonder few Han Chinese supported the Qing emperors’ military plans in Xinjiang during the conquest. Even after the Qing conquest of Xinjiang, such conceptions remained relevant and fueled controversy over Xinjiang, lasting to the end of Qing dynasty and even to the Republic. However, these ideas gradually weakened over time, resulting in the re-conquest of Xinjiang during the 1860s and 1870s by Zuo Zongtang (左宗棠), a Han Chinese, the establishment of Xinjiang province in 1884, and the swift development of Xinjiang-studies during the Guangxu reign period (1875-1908). Indeed, the place of Xinjiang in Han Chinese intellectuals’ imagination had changed significantly, and this change played a key role in the final formation of modern China’s boundaries.

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Reshaping Collective Consciousness Towards Trauma: Hebrew and Chinese Narrative on the Holocaust and the Nanking Massacre (1960-1980)

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Zhong Zhiqing (Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussants: Prof. David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, EALC, Harvard) and Prof. Ruth Wisse (Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

This presentation will survey how historical trauma such as the Holocaust and Nanking Massacre was transferred into Hebrew and Chinese national literatures in post-Holocaust and post-Nanking Massacre periods. The focus will be on how literature functions in reconstructing national past and reshaping collective consciousness through viewing the relevant novels from the early 1960s to 1980s created by the authors who appeared on the literary scene starting from the 1960s.

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Politics of Life and Science: The Introduction of Hans Driesch’s Vitalist Biology and Philosophy to Post-WWI China

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Kevin Chang (History, Academia Sinica; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. William C. Kirby (T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School)

Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

Infected by the pessimism about Western Civilization and the value of science and technology that resulted from the destructive First World War, leading Chinese intellectuals started a debate about the limit and validity of science. One side of the debate asserted that there were subjective realms in human life that were not subject to scientific rule. The other side charged that the skepticism about science and the Western civilization would further delay China from embracing modernization. Both sides consisted of reform-minded intellectuals, and both resorted to Western authorities in science, philosophy and political institutions, including the model recently introduced by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Hans Driesch was noted in Europe and the US for his discovery in embryology and his vitalist philosophy that asserted the fundamental difference between the living organism and inorganic substances or machines. His stature in experimental biology lent him particular credibility in his assertions about science and life. His vitalism was used by his Chinese advocates to maintain that mechanical science could govern everything, not least human life. His Western origin served as a credential against the domestic proponents for the unlimited validity of Western science. He was among the international intellectual heavyweights--Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Tagore included--who were invited to and indeed visited China in the early 1920s.

This talk looks at the introduction of Driesch’s work and its different reactions in early 20th-century China in the global context in which political and scientific ideas were brought into action.

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Segmented Incorporation: The Second Generation of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in Shanghai

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Lan Pei-chia (Dept. of Sociology, National Taiwan University; Radcliffe Fellow in Residence and HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Martin Whyte (Sociology, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, October 27, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

Based on in-depth interviews conducted in Shanghai, Lan examines how second-generation rural migrants in urban China experience spatial, social segregation and channeling effects in the receiving context of education. Lan argues that the case of Shanghai characterizes a new regime of “segmented incorporation.” Hukou (household registration) is still a crucial social boundary embedded in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of educational resources and opportunities as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urban citizens and rural migrants. Systematic exclusion has given way to more subtle forms of institutional segmentation and channeling, reproducing cultural prejudices and reinforcing group differentiation.

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New Perspectives on Chinese Art -- An Auspicious Thing: The Bronze Tripod in the Eye of a Diviner

Jointly sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Fairbank Center

Tao Wang, University College London

Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Time: 5:00 pm                                 
Location: CGIS South, Belfer Case Study Room (S020), 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

Professor Wang will examine a divinatory text in the Zhou Yi (Book of Changes), in which the bronze tripod ding was described and used as a metaphor, and he will highlight the close link between the text and the real objects. For more details, go to: http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/event/tao-wang

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Constructing National Forms in 20th century China: Visuality, Aesthetics and Literature

A panel held at the New England Asia Studies Association (AAS)

Date: Sunday, October 23, 2011
Time: 10:45 am - 12:45 pm
Location: Pendleton West Room 117, Wellesley Campus, Wellesley, MA

Panel organizer: Dr. Tang Hongfeng

Panelists: Tang Hongfeng, Harvard-Yenching Institute
Ji Xiaoqian, University of Pittsburgh
Xia Fan, Columbia University
Lang Jin, University of Massachusetts
Chen Si, Harvard University

Discussant: Song Mingwei, Wellesley College

More information about the conference: http://web.wellesley.edu/web/Info/NEAAS

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Sociological Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Social Issues

A lecture series co-sponsored by the University of Social Sciences and Humanities - Ho Chi Minh City and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: October 3-8, 2011 (morning and afternoon sessions)
Location: The University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Due to their specific historical, cultural and socio-political backgrounds, contemporary Chinese and Vietnamese societies share a number of social issues in common. Boundary-crossing sociological approaches can help to understand these social issues within national, regional, and global contexts. The final session of the lecture series will consist of a roundtable discussion between Chinese and Vietnamese scholars.

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Women Playing Men: Same-Sex Relations in Republican Shanghai

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Jiang Jin (Dept. of History, East China Normal University; Radcliffe Fellow in Residence and HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Elizabeth Perry (Government Department, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Date: Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

Although we have pretty good knowledge about the homoerotic and homosocial world of Beijing opera of the late Qing, we know very little about the same-sex culture of women’s Yue opera that flourished in Republican Shanghai. This talk looks at the homosexual aspects in women’s Yue opera against the background of the general Republican reformation of sex and gender relations. By juxtaposing the opera’s stage representations of heterosexual love by the same-sex cast with the off-stage homoerotic and homosocial relationships within women's opera circles, we will explore a spectrum of possibilities for women in Republican-era Shanghai.

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International Conference on the Prehistory of the Tibetan Plateau

Organized jointly by the Center for Tibetan Studies of Sichuan University and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and funded by Harvard-Yenching Institute and Center for Tibetan Studies of Sichuan University.

Date: August 21-24, 2011
Location: Sichuan University, China

The Tibetan Plateau is one of the most challenging areas for human life, and also a region little understood by modern archaeology. Despite a series of explorations in recent decades, political and linguistic barriers make academic exchange extremely difficult. Therefore, the purpose of this international conference is to pull together current research focused on the prehistory of the Tibetan Plateau. Through this gathering we hope to provide a forum for direct exchange between scholars that crosses national, ethnic and political boundaries. We are especially interested to include research from Nepali, Pakistani, and Indian archaeologists and thereby build a foundation for future cooperation among the participants.

For more information, please contact Prof. Lu Hongliang (scottscu@gmail.com) or Prof. Li Yongxian (yongxianli212@hotmail.com).

To view the conference report, please click here.

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Social Stratification and Mobility in China:Urban Migration and Growth of the Middle Class

A Training Program organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute; China Studies Center, University  of Sydney; The Center for Modern China Studies, Nanjing University; and the Department of History, Nanjing Univeristy

Location: Nanjing University
Dates: June 16 - 30, 2011

For additional information, please visit: http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanities/sociology/article.asp?M_ID=37&A_ID=5005

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Creative Forms of Public Participation in China: From Everyday Politics to Media Agendas

A workshop sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: Saturday, June 4 and Sunday, June 5, 2011
Time: 9-5 pm (Saturday), 9:30-12 pm (Sunday)
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue

China has often been considered to be a country that has enjoyed rapid economic growth while suffering from very strict political constraints. Yet in recent years, many creative forms of public participation have emerged, especially from the grassroots level, which include not only significant media agendas but also everyday politics in rural and urban life. A fragile, nascent civil society and other various social players are now actively interacting with the state. Sometimes, they even successfully change the state's policy-making process.

How can we understand these creative forms of public participation in China? Who are the emerging players? What strategies and discourses are they using to mobilize public participation and promote policy pluralization? And what are the political potentials and limitations of these creative forms?

This workshop brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. Based on empirical research, it aims not only to illustrate new patterns of public participation and civil society development, but also to trace their impacts on the  political institutions in a country undergoing a transition from socialism to a market economy, and from administrative vertical integration to social horizontal solidarity.

Workshop Program

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Asian women and education: Asian, European and Other Perspectives

Hosted by the Vietnam Institute for European Studies
Co-sponsored by the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: June 3-4, 2011
Location: Institute of History, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences, 1 Lieu Giai, Ba Dinh, Ha Noi

The workshop is a chance for scholars from Asia (Vietnam, China, Hongkong, Korea, Japan), Europe (Denmark, France, Russia) and America to discuss issues related to Asian women and education in historical, sociological, gender, ethnical and religious perspectives. The workshop aims at seeking answers for questions:
-    How did Asian women access education/learning in the past and how can they at present?
-    Can education change and improve women’s lives in modern Asia? Can educated women change their economic, social, political status?

Contact: tranphhoa@yahoo.com

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Social Assistance in Urban China and its Effects

A talk by Professor Zhou Fenghua (Dept. of Public Policy, Huazhong Normal University; HYI Grassroots Program Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Nara Dillon (Government, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

This talk will first give a broad view of the development of the major social assistance scheme—the dibao program—in urban China, and then analyze its features in design and implementation. It is argued that, although this poverty-reduction program works well in terms of targeting the poor, it actually aggravates gender, regional and rural-urban inequality due to its drawbacks in design and implementation. In the long run, the program hampers the truly disadvantaged to lift themselves from poverty.  The implications of the dibao program and its implementation for family structure, social solidarity, and the legitimacy of the state are also discussed in the talk.

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Japan in Crisis: From Aftershock to Aftercare

Date: Friday, May 13 and Saturday, May 14, 2011
Time: 9:30-5:00 pm (Friday), 2-4:30 pm (Saturday)
Location: Room 105, William James Hall, Harvard University

The Heisei Era in Japan so far has experienced numerous crises on different dimensions, ranging from political, financial, and social turmoil to natural disasters, as if it has inherited the turbulence of the eventful Showa history. In the face of calamity, however, the Japanese people have always amazed the world with their extreme resilience and stoicism. It has been generally suggested that the Japanese people are impressively responsive to disasters, given their all too frequent experience of calamity in an island country. Although it is still too soon to comment on whether the recent catastrophe caused by the 3/11 Earthquake would be able to push the nation to change, it at least provides a good opportunity to re-examine the various crises that have haunted the modern Japan, and explore how the Japanese people have sought different ways of aftercare and overcoming the aftershocks. This workshop therefore aims to revisit both natural and man-made disasters from Meiji to Heisei, in order to investigate how Japanese reacted to or overcame these crises, and how these crises have shaped Japan’s national psyche and individual minds.

Conference website: http://www.kinnia.com/hyiworkshop2011

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Connections are Not Always Corruption: Vertical Ties and Civic Participation in Rural China

Professor Lily Tsai (Associate Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Jointly sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Date: Monday, May 9, 2011
Time: 4:15pm
Location: CGIS South, Doris and Ted Lee Gathering Room (S030), 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

Having “connections” to government officials is typically equated with the ability to pursue one’s interests through informal, and often illicit, channels.   If someone mentions that they “know someone” who works in government, we often assume that they have the kind of informal access to power and resources that, in the extreme, fall in the realm of cronyism, clientelism, and corruption.  This paper argues, however, that our current understanding of vertical ties between citizens and officials may be too simplistic.  Instead, vertical ties to government officials can be a valuable resource for civic participation concerned with public issues as well as for clientelistic activity motivated by particularistic concerns.  Particularly in transitional systems, vertical ties to government officials can provide political information and support that helps to overcome the risks and uncertainties of voicing one’s opinions in contexts where democratic institutions are unstable and the right to participate is insecure.  This paper draws on evidence from survey data on villagers in China to show that individuals who have vertical ties with higher-level officials are (1) just as likely as or more than individuals without these ties to express civic attitudes and support for democratic reforms and (2) more likely than individuals without these ties to participate in ways that make their concerns known to the government.

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Staging the Modern: Theatre, Intermediality, and Chinese Drama

Cosponsored with the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Date: May 6-7, 2011 (Friday afternoon, full day Saturday)
Location: CGIS South Building Room S050, Harvard University

Organizers: Professor David Der-wei Wang, Tarryn Chun

More information: http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/event/staging-modern-theatre-intermediality-and-chinese-drama

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How Ecology is Forgotten During the Process of Ecological Relocation: A Case Study of S Banner in Inner Mongolia from a Sociological Perspective

Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Professor Bao Zhiming (Department of Sociology, Minzu University of China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Mark Elliott, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Date: Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Time: 11:00 am
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Based on fieldwork carried out in Inner Mongolia’s S Banner region, Professor Bao’s study reveals that the implementation of ecological relocation policy is a social process involving the participation of multiple social agents including the central government, local governments, market elites, farmers and herdsmen. Their complicated interaction embodies the nexus of power and interests between government, the market and local people. Local governments occupy a central position in the relationship network which forms during the process and their conflicting dual roles of “agent political operator” and “profit-seeking political operator” causes great uncertainty for the direction of top-down government-led environmental policy.

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Neighborhood Governance in Urban Taiwan: Democratic Deepening in the Roots of the State

Professor Benjamin Read (Assistant professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz)

Jointly sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Date: Monday, April 18, 2011
Time: 4:15pm
Location: S050, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.

Taiwan's system of neighborhood-level governance has origins in institutions of social control employed by both the Republican-era Kuomintang and the Japanese colonizers. In more recent times, its local agents have been known for buying votes on behalf of politicians and mobilizing constituents in exchange for patronage. Yet over the past 25 years, elections for the "borough wardens" have become hotly contested, voter turnout has risen to remarkably high rates, and KMT dominance has given way to political pluralization. Neighborhood leaders of a new generation, with more women in their ranks than ever before, have taken on new roles and have different relationships with their communities, parties, and city governments compared to those of the older, often clan-based bosses. Drawing on ethnographic research, interviews, opinion surveys, public records, and other sources, Professor Read argues that the evolution of Taiwan's neighborhood organizati ons has deepened democratic practices at the grassroots level, even though they remain a highly statist institution.

For more information, please visit http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/calendar/upcoming

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Information technology and Public Protest in China

(信 息技术与中国民众的抗议行为)

Dr. Yu Jianrong (Professor and Director of the Rural Development Institute’s Social Issues Research Center, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Jointly sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Harvard-Yenching Insititute

Please note: this talk will be conducted in Chinese

于建嵘教授在这一演讲中试 图回答这么一个问题，即在目前信息技术革命背景下，中国民众的抗议行为是否发生了变化，并且这种变化将对中国政治发展产生何种影响。于教授借此机会与大家 探讨，在网络时代，中国政治是否有一条新的发展道路，并将如何利用互联网和新科技作为重构中国政治的力量。

Date: Friday, April 15, 2011
Time: 12:00 noon -- 2:00 p.m
Location: Room S250, CGIS, 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

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Out of Place: The New Woman and Chinese Cinema

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by Prof. Mao Jian (East China Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Prof. David Der-wei Wang, EALC, Harvard University

Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011
Time: 12:15 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

This is a study of the relationship between young women and the long Chinese revolution as portrayed on screen. From "revolution plus beauty" to "The Red Detachment of Women", from the "New Woman" to the "New Revolutionary Artist", from "the barefoot doctor" to "the bad female cadre", this talk, centering on Ruan Lingyu's and Xie Jin's films, attempts a typology of female characters by comparing young women characters from the left cinema of the thirties and forties with those of the socialist and post-socialist eras.

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Nation as an "Imagined" and "Melancholy" Community: Folklore and Ambivalent Cultural Unity in William Butler Yeats and Sowol Kim

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

A talk by Prof. Yoon Il Hwan (Pusan National University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Prof. David McCann, EALC, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

This talk aims to examine the ambivalent relationship between nationalism and myth and folklore in the works of William Butler Yeats(1865-1939) and Sowol Kim(1902-1934), one of Korea's most beloved and well-known poets. Drawing upon a varied range of materials from their poems, prose, essays, and letters, it attempts to demonstrate two distinct interplays between folklore and national consciousness. Under the yoke of colonization, both Yeats and Sowol sought after the link between literature and national identity, and found in myth, folklore, and symbolic landscape a subject ideally suited to express their respective efforts towards discovering a national character and spiritual foundation. Prof. Yoon argues that in regards to national identities Yeats substantially relies on the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols in folklore, as opposed to Sowol who struggles to create a core of national identity, despite keenly recognizing the absence of any master symbol in folklore to forge national identity. Yeats favors folklore imbued with spiritual power and creates Ireland as an "imagined community." Sowol, conceiving a sense of spiritual deprivation in folklore, substantially locates the nation's suffering under colonial state and paradoxically animates national spirit. While both poets try to create a cultural nexus around which various forces can congeal to resist colonialism, they also offer violent and irresolvable conflict behind such a nexus. Their assumption of a national identity does not fall into a national essentialism; their turn to folklore and symbolic landscape for nationalism contains ambivalent struggle between their efforts at cultural unity and the uncontainable problems of modernity, nation, community, and the role of culture in nationalism. To illustrate this ambivalence, Prof. Yoon adopts a few ideas from Benedict Anderson's "imagined community," Sigmund Freud's melancholy, and Jean-Luc Nancy's "the unsacrificeable."

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HYI Reception at The Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting

Date: Friday, April 1, 2011 
Time: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm 
Location: Room 317B, Hawaii Convention Center, 1801 Kalakaua Avenue, Honolulu, HI

Every year in the spring, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) holds its annual four-day conference devoted to planned programs of scholarly papers, round table discussions and panel sessions on a wide range of issues in research and teaching, and on Asian affairs in general. The conference is one of the most important annual scholarly events in Asian Studies. The HYI will host a reception at the meeting. The reception is an excellent opportunity for meeting other scholars as well as learning about new programs and opportunities at HYI.

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Jawaharlal Nehru and China: A Study in Failure, or Misrecognition?

Co-sponsored by the South Asia Initiative

A Talk by Ramachandra Guha

Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Time: 4:30 pm
Location: Tsai Auditorium, CGIS South, Harvard University

As both Prime Minister and External Affairs Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru closely directed his country's foreign policy in the crucial years after independence. In this period, India's relations with China moved from friendship to hostility, culminating in the war of 1962 in which Chinese troops put to flight their Indian counterparts. That military fiasco deeply damaged Nehru's standing and may have hastened his death. Within India, Nehru's China policy is widely regarded as his greatest failure. This lecture will argue that while Nehru undeniably made major errors of judgement, the conflict is best viewed in structural rather than personal terms, as emanating from the simultaneous emergence of two ambitious nationalisms which, as they expanded outwards, met and clashed on their contested borders.

For a bio of Ramachandra Guha, click here

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Asian Varieties of Socialism: China, India, Vietnam

Co-sponsored by HYI & the Harvard Asia Center

Organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: Monday, March 28, 2011
Time: 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: Lower Level Conference Room, Busch Hall/Center for European Studies, 27 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA

These days the rapidly rising nations of China and India are often contrasted as examples of "authoritarian" versus "democratic" paths of (capitalist or quasi-capitalist) development. But when their current political systems were first established, some sixty years ago, leaders in both countries were strongly attracted by the promises of socialism. The same was true of the reunified Vietnam in 1976, which – like China and India – subsequently embarked upon an impressive economic reform program. What did these various countries initially find so appealing about socialism? To what extent did their interpretations reflect Asian, as opposed to European, experiences and values? And what influence, if any, do such socialist legacies exert on contemporary practices in the three countries?

This roundtable brings together an inter-disciplinary group of distinguished international scholars and public intellectuals – based in India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the US -- to offer their perspectives on these complex questions.

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Perception of the Past and Reflection of the Present: World War II on Japanese, American and East Asian Screens

Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

A talk by Prof. YAU Shuk-ting, Kinnia (Chinese University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Professor Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

More than half a century has passed since the end of the Second World War. While there are worries that the series of events are going to be forgotten, we are actually more aware of the fact that the war is still being reconstructed and transformed by filmmakers, provoking widespread discussion and controversy. This presentation aims to examine how Japan, the United States and other East Asian regions such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea have presented WWII in their movies since the 1990s, and to investigate how politics influences the representation and dissemination of popular culture.

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Literary Theories and their Application 
A Lecture Series

Co-organized by the Vietnam Institute of Literature and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Co-sponsored by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: March 16-19 (mornings and afternoons), 2011
Time: Mornings 8:30 - 11:30 am; Afternoons 1:30 - 4:30 pm
Location: Vietnam Institute of Literature, 20 Ly Thai To Street, Hoan Kiem District, Hanoi, Vietnam

This series of lectures will take place after the March 14-15 workshop, providing its participants with in-depth knowledge of specific issues in the field of literary studies (or comparative literature). Harvard University Professors Stephen Owen, David Damrosch, and Karen L. Thornber will participate. The lectures will furnish young researchers, who are the majority in Vietnamese research institutes and universities but have not had a chance to study overseas, with excellent opportunities to approach new knowledge.

For more information, please contact haiyenti@yahoo.com 

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Functional categories in Korean agrammatism

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

A talk by Professor Lee Miseon (Department of English Language and Literature, Hanyang University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Jesse Snedeker (John L. Loeb Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

This talk will review experimental data from Korean-speaking patients with agrammatism and a theoretical interpretation. After a brief introduction to agrammatism and the Korean language, Professor Lee's talk will focus on Korean agrammatic patients' use and understanding of functional categories (i.e., sentence enders, tense markers, and complementizers).

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[Pre]Modern Asian Literature Read through Modern Western Theories: Applications, [In]Compatibilities, Challenges, and Opportunities

Organized by Vietnam Institute of Literature

Co-sponsored by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Japan Foundation

Date: March 14-15, 2011
Time: 8:30 am - 5:00 pm
Location:Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hall #3D, 1 Lieu Giai Street, Ba Dinh District, Hanoi, Vietnam

Workshop Objectives: Since the last century, literary studies in Vietnam have received, adopted, and applied Western theories and methods to reconstruct and interpret national cultural and humanistic values on the one hand, and to introduce and approach world literature on the other hand. However, reviewing the long road that we, Vietnamese literature scholars, have traveled, and broadening our view toward an international picture of the field, we find our approaches and applications entailing a series of questions: At which levels have Western theories been introduced into Vietnam? Is this introduction reasonable and sufficient? How should we receive and apply Western theories as efficient tools to explore and understand Eastern literary bodies, such as Vietnamese literature? (in other words, how (in)compatible are Western theories in the study of Eastern literature?) Are there any limits or shortcomings in such applications and approaches? What experiences and lessons should Vietnamese literat ure scholars learn from their Chinese, Japanese, and Korean counterparts, when carrying out their Western-theory based literary research? The workshop will serve as a forum to discuss case studies on specific premodern and modern East Asian literary works in the light of Western theories. Organizing the workshop in this line, we hope to balance its practical and theoretical aspects. Findings and conclusions drawn from the "close readings" of these case studies will surely enrich the applied theories and provide inspiring research models for future practices.

In efforts to bring the current state of Vietnam's literary studies up to regional and international levels, the Vietnam Institute of Literature has endeavored to introduce Western theories (in Vietnamese translations) to the circle of Vietnamese literary scholars (for example, the two-volume set Western Literary Theory and Criticism of the 20th Century published in 2007). The recent publication Literary Study in Vietnam: Possibilities and Challenges (funded by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2009) is also in line with our search for compatibilities between Western theories as research approaches and Eastern (or Vietnamese) literature as research objects.

For more information, please contact haiyenti@yahoo.com

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Reinterpreting Liang Shuming's Conception of Confucian Responsibility

A Talk by Professor Gu Hongliang (Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Michael Puett (Professor of Chinese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

How are we to understand the idea of Confucian responsibility in modern China? Liang Shuming, a forerunner of the twentieth-century New Confucian Movement, offers a unique perspective regarding this issue. This talk aims to evaluate Liang's conception of responsibility in terms of a relationality that focuses on three dimensions of responsibility in his Confucianism. In so doing, we can come to see the complexity of Confucian responsibility. This talk also seeks to examine Liang in comparison to Emmanuel Levinas so as to enrich our understanding of these thinkers and their thoughts on the ethics of responsibility.

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Islam in a Cross-Cultural Zone: Notes on Rev. Carter Holton's Photos in the Gansu-Tibetan Region

Talk by Professor Wang Jianping (Department of Philosophy, Shanghai Normal University; HYI Coordinate Researcher)

Date: Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

The Tibetan plateau by the up-reach of the Yellow River is a land of vast ethnic-racial, religious, social and economic diversity. Central Asian Muslims migrated into the region in the 13th century. Turkic Salars interacted with the Tibetans, Mongols, Han Chinese, Tus, and the Uighurs, Hui, Dongxiang and Bao'an Muslims have developed a hybrid complicated social-culture pattern. Regional Islam and Muslims have expanded into an extremely coherent Islamic communal structure, resulting in a hotbed of Islamic resurgence in northwest China. Pressured by external and internal environments, the people of this land have witnessed frequent arbitrary interference from inland China, Muslim insurgences, political turmoil, warlords' fighting, social riots, looting, famines and inter-ethnic massacres. The photos of Muslims in Xunhua and Linxia, taken by the American missionary Rev. Carter D. Holton, provide a recording of the tremendous vibrations in the spheres of religion, society, politics, economics and culture during the period of the Republic. They also illustrate a dynamic relationship between the local Muslims and the different forces from within and without.

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A Strange Encounter: "Blackness" and Postcoloniality in Korean Literature and Culture

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

A talk by Professor An Jee Hyun (Associate Professor of English Literature at Seoul National University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Karen Thornber (Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, February 24, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room

This talk will examine the racial representations of African Americans in a subgenre of Korean literature grouped under a loose rubric called gijichon (military camptown) literature, and also in popular culture. Based on close textual analyses of racial representations in Song Byoung Soo's "Shori Kim" (1957), Cho Hae Il's "America" (1972), Lee Moon Koo's "Haebyuk" (1974), Kang Suk Kyoung's short stories and finally Moon Soon Tae's "Moonshineuh Ttang" (1987), Professor An will discuss the significance of "blackness" and the ways in which racialized postcolonial subjectivity are negotiated in these textual representations. Going beyond identifications of racist depictions and portrayals of African Americans, Professor An will argue that these racist representations reveal an emergence of a complicated postcolonial subjectivity as the US presence looms over the Korean peninsula.

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Campaign Finance Regulations and Their Role of Consolidating a Representative Democracy: Evidence from the American States

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

A talk by Professor Kihong Eom (Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Kyungpook National University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor James Alt (Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Harvard University)

Date: Thursday, February 17, 2011
Location: Yenching Common Room
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Do campaign finance regulations help a representative democracy consolidate? The rationale of campaign finance regulations is to reduce political corruption, or at least the perception of political corruption, thereby reinforcing the level of trust and participation in a representative democracy. After a brief review of political corruption literature, Professor Eom will theorize how campaign finance regulations work on political corruption and the assumptions of a representative democracy. After providing the preliminary results of analyses in the American states, he will conclude the talk with a discussion of the future direction of his research.

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Booming Associational Cooperation and the Development of Civil Society in China

A talk by Professor Gao Bingzhong (Sociology, Peking University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Elizabeth Perry, Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute; Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University

Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.
Time: 12:00 pm

By paying attention to cooperation between and among NPOs, instead of asking questions such as 'how many NPOs exist' and 'how do they legitimize their existence and activities', we see a different landscape of Chinese civil society. This talk will present recent cooperation in Chinese NPOs, such as, the event against dam construction in Nujiang (反对怒江建坝) and the New Citizen project（新公民计划）. Professor Gao will then discuss how these horizontal links are important for Chinese civil society.

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Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition

Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Conference website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~eaah/conferences/fresh_ink/introduction.html

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Research on Local Social Structure under Urbanization: Ethnographical Research in Xiqiao Town, Pearl River Delta

A talk by Yang Xiaoliu (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Michael Herzfeld, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Talk synopsis: The Pearl River Delta is one of the most developed and financially active regions of China. Prof. Yang's research looks for new explanations of the process of urbanization in the region based on her anthropological background. She has conducted fieldwork in the town of Xiqiao in Foshan, a town famous for its textile industry since the Ming and Qing Dynasty. Her research aims to review urban change in Xiqiao during the 30 plus years of reform and opening up, and to reveal the interactive relationship between Xiqiao's economic development and social structure change. Prof. Yang will mainly focus on the local structure under urbanization in order to present the complex changes that have occurred in Xiqiao and to trace the integration of local people.

 

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Peasants, the Village World, and Beyond: The Living Space of a Peasant Family in Late Qing Huizhou, Middle China, 1838-1901

A talk by Liu Yonghua (Professor of History, Xiamen University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Professor Michael Szonyi, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Until recently the common image of late imperial Chinese peasantry is that their world was principally village bound, with little connection to the world beyond their villages and neighboring market towns. To what extent does this image fit historical reality? How were Chinese peasantry connected to distant villages, market towns, and sacred sites? How did socio-economic changes in the nineteenth century transform their living space? Based on a close reading of a group of diary-like documents penned by a peasant family in late Qing Huizhou, Professor Liu Yonghua will map out the living space of the peasant family and reconstruct the transformation it participated and experienced during the late nineteenth century.

 

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New Directions in the Study of Chinese Drama

Date: Wednesday November 10, 2010
Time: 9:00am-5:00pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

This workshop brings together prominent scholars from Mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States to discuss their latest research projects and new methods for the study of Chinese drama, both traditional and modern.

Speakers include: Bao Weihong 包卫红(Fairbank Center An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University), Chen Fang 陳芳 (National Taiwan Normal University), Cheng Yun 程芸 (EALC Visiting Scholar, Wuhan University), Huang Lin 黃霖 (Fudan University), Huo Jianyu (EALC Visiting Scholar), Lin Hong Lam (Fairbank Center An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University), Liu Zhen 劉禎 (China Art Academy, Beijing), Wang Ayling 王璦玲 (Academia Sinica), Tsai Hsin-hsin 蔡欣欣 (Fulbright Scholar, National Cheng-chi University, Taipei), Tseng Yong-yih 曾永義 (Shih-hsin University, Taipei), Ye Changhai 業長海 (Shanghai Academy of Theater), and Zhao Shanlin 趙山林 (Emeritus, East China Normal University).

Most papers will be presented in Chinese.

For more information and a detailed schedule, please visit the workshop website at: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k75571

Sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the CCK Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinology.

Please contact Tarryn Chun (tchun@fas.harvard.edu) with questions.

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“We the People” and the Post-1945 Constitutional Founding in Asia: A Comparative Perspective

An international workshop co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: October 29-30, 2010
Location: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, The Hague, Netherlands

Click here to read a report from the workshop.

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Kantian Cosmopolitanism

A talk by Qu Hongmei (Associate Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, Jilin University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussant: Christine M. Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Asia Center

Date: Thursday, October 28
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Asia Without Borders: a Workshop

Date: October 8-10, 2010
Location: Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

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Grammaticalization in Japanese

A talk by Professor Heiko Narrog (Linguistics, Tohoku University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11)

Discussants: Professor James Huang, Linguistics, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus Susumu Kuno, Linguistics, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute

Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Exploring the Ancient Ba-Shu Relationship from the Perspective of World-System Theory

Co-sponsored by The East Asia Archaeology Seminar Series and The Harvard-Yenching Institute

A talk by Professor Chen Pochan, National Taiwan University, HYI Visiting Scholar 2010-11

Date: Friday, September 17, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Peabody Room (14A), Peabody Museum

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Burmese Lives: Ordinary Life Stories under the Burmese Regime

Organized by Wen-Chin Chang (Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan) and Eric Tagliacozzo (Department of History, Cornell University, USA), and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica

Date: June 4-5, 2010
Time: 9 am - 5 pm (June 4), 9 am - 12:30 pm (June 5)
Location:Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Harvard University

This conference will gather together a group of eminent scholars who work on Burma to study the stories of Burmese people from different walks of life, using interdisciplinary approaches. Although Burma/Myanmar has been partially opened to foreign visitors since 1988, academic studies have largely centered on the ruling regime. What emerges is a lack of exploration of ?different versions of reality? as seen from the perspectives of the diverse ethnic groups that make up the Burmese people. Research into the life stories of Burmese people of different ethnicities, occupations, ages, and genders will help to reveal the multiplicities of Burma?s modern social history.

The conference will be open to the public.

Agenda

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18th Annual International Association of Chinese Linguistics Conference

Hosted under the joint auspices of the Department of Linguistics and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Insitute, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, and further supported by the Fairbank Center and Asia Center of Harvard University, and the Haide Foundation of Hong Kong.

Date: Thursday, May 20 - Saturday, May 22, 2010
Location: Harvard University
Conference Website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~iacl18/Site/index.html

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The Issue and Role of Xunzi Studies for the Articulation of the Confucian Values for the 21st Century

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by SATO Masayuki, Professor of Philosophy, National Taiwan University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Professor Michael Puett, EALC, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Vanserg Common Room, Vanserg Building, 25 Francis St.

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Social Suffering, the Culture of Compassion, and the Divided Moral Experience in China

Co-sponsored by the Asia Center

Date: Friday, May 7 - Saturday, May 8, 2010
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue

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Early Korea and Japan Interactions: New Perspectives on Old Issues

Date: Monday, May 3 - Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Time: 9 am - 5 pm (May 3), 9 am - 5 pm (May 4)
Location: Day 1 (May 3) - Room S250, CGIS South Bldg., 1730 Cambridge Street
Day 2 (May 4) - Room S153, CGIS South Bldg., 1730 Cambridge Street

This workshop is planned and hosted by the Early Korea Project (EKP) at Harvard. Generous funding is from the Northeast Asia History Foundation in Seoul, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard, and the Harvard Yenching Institute. Please note that presentations will be given in Korean and Japanese and will be supplemented in some cases with PowerPoint presentations that have English subtitles on the slides. Translated papers will be available on the day of the workshop sessions so that those who use English can follow.

Conference schedule

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HYI Literature Symposium: Culture at Intersection

Date: Saturday, May 1, 2010
Time: 9 am - 5 pm
Location: William James Hall 1550, Harvard University

Symposium Schedule

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Development of the legal and institutional concept of property in Cambodia, China and Vietnam

A talk by KUONG Teilee, Professor of Law, Nagoya University, Japan; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Professor Duncan Kennedy

Date: Thursday, April 29, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Politicization of Association in Modern China

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by FENG Xiaocai, Professor of History, Fudan University, China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Professor Elizabeth Perry (Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute; Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Inner Asia and China: Cultural and Historical Connections

Date: April 24-25, 2010
Time: April 24, 9:50 am - 5:45 pm; April 25, 10 am - 6:20 pm
Location: Belfer Room S020, CGIS South Building, 1727 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA

Conference website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sanskrit/conference2010/conference2010.html

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Antique Jades in Antiquity: Heritage? Collectible? or Material Resource?

A talk by Jenny SO (Professor of Fine Arts, Director, Institute of Chinese Studies, C.U.H.K., Hong Kong; Harvard-Yenching Coordinate Research Scholar)

Co-sponsored by the Harvard East Asian Archaeology Seminar and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: Friday, April 23, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Room 14A Peabody Museum

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~anthro/eaas/

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The Morpheme SU -- Determiner and Complementizer in Nuosu Yi Language

A talk by HU Suhua, Professor at the Institute for Chinese Minority Languages, Minzu University of China (formerly Central University for Nationalities); Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholar 2009-10

Discussants: Professor James Huang, Linguistics Department, Harvard University and Professor Feng Shengli, EALC Department, Harvard University

Date: Thursday, April 22, 2010
Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Trans-Himalayas Interaction during the First Millennium BC

A talk by LU Hongliang, Professor of Archaeology, Sichuan University, China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Professor Rowan Flad, Anthropology Department, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Case Study of a Lesbian Health Hotline in a Peripheral Chinese City

A talk by CAO Jin, Professor, School of Journalism, Fudan University, China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussants: Joan Kaufman (Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and founding Director of the AIDS Public Policy Training Project, Harvard Kennedy School) and Bradley S. Epps (Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University)

Date: Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: HYI-Vanserg Common Room, Vanserg Building, 25 Francis Ave., Cambridge

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The Sinic World in Perspective

A symposium in honor of Tu Weiming, Harvard Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Organized by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, in cooperation with The Harvard University Asia Center, The John K. Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and The Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Date: Saturday, April 10, 2010
Time: 9 am - 5 pm
Location: Boylston Hall (Fung Auditorium and Ticknor Lounge), Harvard University

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East Asian Programs Graduate Reunion

Date: Friday, April 9, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Location: Harvard Faculty Club, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA

For a schedule of events and information, visit: http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/alumni/east_asian_graduate_programs_reunion.php

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High Precision of Radiocarbon Dating for the Key Project of Origins and Development of Chinese Civilization in China

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

A talk by WU Xiaohong, Professor of Archaeology, Peking University, China; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Professor Rowan Flad

Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010
Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location:Vanserg Common Room, 25 Francis Ave., Suite 20

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How the East Was Won: "Imposed Constitutionalism" in Postwar Japan and Postcolonial Korea, 1945-1948

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

A talk by KIM Sung-ho, Professor of Political Science, Yonsei University, South Korea; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010

Discussants: Professors Carter Eckert and Andrew Gordon

Date: Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Explaining the Rise of China: A Challenge to Western Social Science Theories?

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Date: Monday, April 5, 2010
Time: 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Lower Level Conference Room, Busch Hall/Center for European Studies, 27 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA

What explains China's stunning economic record and continued political stability decades after most other Communist systems in the world collapsed? Does the Chinese case pose a challenge to certain basic social science assumptions about the relationship between economic and political change?

Is the People's Republic of China simply an example of "delayed democracy"? Or is China on a trajectory that defies standard Western predictions about the connection among markets, civil society, and democratization? If the Chinese case does indeed depart significantly from standard models of transition and transformation, what wider lessons can we draw from its experience -- for other developing countries as well as for social science theory?

This roundtable brings together an inter-disciplinary group of distinguished international scholars -- from China, Taiwan, Japan, Germany and the United States -- to offer their perspectives on these complex questions.

Following the panel, please join us for a reception in the lobby of Busch Hall.

This event is open to the public. Registration is not required.

Event poster

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Red Legacy in China: An International Conference

Co-sponsored by the CCK Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinology, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Date: April 2-3, 2010
Location: Belfer Case Study Room, S020, CGIS South Building 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

Red Legacy in China is a two-day conference that seeks to bring together an international group of scholars from various disciplines in Chinese studies to promote a lively exchange of ideas and perspectives. "Red legacy" refers to remainders and reminders of the Chinese Communist revolution in the post-Mao era. It encompasses three types of manifestations: remnant traces of the Communist revolution, contemporary reinventions inspired by the Socialist past, and ongoing process of the Socialist experience. Associated with persons and artifacts, texts and sites, politics and capital, individual and collective memory, red legacy has been exerting its influence on various dimensions in contemporary China: intellectual and mundane, spiritual and material, spatial and temporal, socio political and commercial.

Conference website

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Seeing Utopia, Past and Future: Wang Di and Xing Danwen Art Exhibit, Panel Discussion, and Lectures

Date: Wednesday March 31, 2010 (opening event)
Location: Fairbank Center office area (CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge MA)

This will be a week-long series of events, including an exhibition of photographs by two contemporary artists, Wang Di and Xing Danwen. Lectures and panel discussions will feature Yin Jinan, Dean of the School of Humanities, Central Academy of Fine Arts, as well as Wang Di and Xing Danwen.

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Re-examining the Relations between the Imperial Diet of Japan and Colonial Korea

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

A talk by LEE Sung Yup, Professor of History, Kyoto University, Japan; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History

Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: Vanserg Common Room, 25 Francis Ave., Suite 20

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HYI Reception at The Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting

Date: Friday, March 26, 2010
Time: 7 pm - 9 pm
Location: Liberty Ballroom Salon B, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market St., Philadelphia

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What is Chinese Philosophy? Four Expositions on its Characteristics by Scholars from National Taiwan University

Date: Friday, March 19, 2010
Time: 10 am - 4:15 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Taiwan, along with Hong Kong, was once known among scholars of Chinese philosophy as one of the two major "bases" of contemporary Neo-Confucianism. However, changes in the domestic socio-political environment and a drastic increase in international scholastic activities have caused considerable diversification in research topics and methods. In particular, there has been remarkable development in research on Daoism and Buddhism over the past twenty years, a trend best represented by the scholars from the philosophy department of the National Taiwan University (NTU).

This workshop will complement the "International Workshop on the Research of Chinese Philosophy: Critical Retrospection and Prospects", to be held at the Harvard-Yenching Institute on March 20-21, 2009. In that workshop, four NTU scholars will be reviewing the current issues and problems of Chinese philosophy research in Taiwan and Japan. In contrast, in this workshop, these four scholars will expound upon the characteristics of Chinese philosophy through discussions of the following four major subjects:

1. On Self-cultivation (by Bau-ruei Duh)
2. On Meaning of Life and Death (by Yao-ming Tsai)
3. On Language and Knowledge (by Wim De Reu)
4. On State and Society (by Masayuki Sato)

These lectures, while engaging topics close to the heart of scholars of Chinese philosophy, and both graduate and undergraduate students of the EALC and philosophy departments, also target a more general audience, and those who want a comprehensive introduction to the subject of Chinese philosophy are most welcomed.

Program Agenda

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International Workshop on the Research of Chinese Philosophy in Japan and Taiwan: With Critical Retrospections and future Prospects

Co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Date: Saturday, March 20 - Sunday, March 21, 2010
Time: Saturday 10:00 - 5:00 pm; Sunday 10:00 am - 5:40 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue

In the last several years, scholars in many fields have benefited from a worldwide exchange of research, and have begun to share their new findings and novel ideas with their colleagues in other countries. Yet the field of Chinese philosophy in East Asia has unfortunately lagged behind in this respect. Over the past few decades, scholars in this field have failed to take advantage of the resources offered them by the emerging global research environment, and have become more insular than ever before. This workshop aims to respond to this situation by providing Western scholars with comprehensive yet critical accounts of research on Chinese philosophy in Japan and Taiwan in four major research fields: early Chinese philosophy, Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism, Buddhist philosophy, and Contemporary Neo-Confucianism. The workshop will be momentous for Japanese scholarly circles in this area because it will be the first such workshop in which six Japanese scholars on Chinese philosophy will all present papers in English.

Program agenda

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The Impact of Market Reforms on the Health of Chinese Citizens: Examining Two Puzzles

A talk by Martin Whyte, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Date:Thursday, March 11, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Vanserg Common Room, 25 Francis Ave., Suite 20

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Institutions, Institutionalization, and Governance in China

A talk by Joseph Fewsmith.

Date: Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

There are many reasons to expect political reform of some sort to take place in China - the economy has grown rapidly over three decades, new generations of leaders have come to power, there are many demands for greater public participation, and there are numerous "mass incidents" that can seemingly be addressed only through political reform. By looking at a number of reforms, this talk will try to lay out the logic of the ever increasing number of political reforms in China as well as the limits to such reforms.

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Variation and change in language: an East Asian perspective

A talk by C.T. James Huang, Professor of Linguistics, Harvard University

Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Humanistic Buddhism and Its Global Philanthropic Reach

A talk by KUAH-PEARCE Khun-Eng

Discussant: Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University and Professor of Medical Anthropology in Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Director, Harvard University Asia Center.

Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Time: 12:00 - 1:30
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Is the Past Always Behind Us? A Past-Oriented Model for the Chinese Perfective Aspect Marker "Le"

A talk by WANG Wei, Professor of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussants: Professors Gennaro Chierchia and James Huang

Date: Thursday, January 28, 2010
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

It is generally believed that temporal meanings in human languages are universally construed in terms of space, and that almost equally universally, the past is construed as the world behind us whereas the future is the one in front of us. Professor Wang's talk, however, points out that in Chinese, it is very hard to associate the word qian (前 front/before) with the meaning of 'future' and the word hou (后 behind/after) with the meaning of 'past'--it is actually always the other way around. The underlying schema of the so-called 'universal' spatial construal of time involves a moving-ego metaphor in which time is a road the ego moves on. The talk manages to point out that the Chinese perfective aspect le (了) prefers the other metaphor of moving-object, in which time is a flowing river beside which the ego stands still.

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The Politics of "Illicitly Brewed Liquor" in Colonial Korea

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute.

A talk by ITAGAKI Ryuta, Professor of Anthropology, Doshisha University, Japan; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

Date: Friday, December 11, 2009
Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Ethnographic Biography: How the Personal Connects with the Professional

A talk by LIU Heng, HYI Coordinate Researcher 2009-2010.

Discussant: Michael Herzfeld, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

Date: Friday, November 20, 2009
Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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The Alchemy and Jouissance of Death: Sichuan Sarcophagi in New Perspective

A talk by Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University.

Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Proba's Virgilian Cento

A talk by GAO Fengfeng, Professor of Literature, Peking University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Richard Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin, Classics Department, Harvard University

Date: Monday, November 16, 2009
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Panel at the Beijing Forum: Grassroots Mobilization in 20th Century China: A Rural-Urban Comparison

Date: November 7, 2009
Time: 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Location: Beijing, China

This panel will be part of the session: Crisis and Mobilization in Twentieth Century China (under the sub-theme "Crisis and Opportunity -- Historical reflection on Contemporary Challenges").

Panel Chair: Elizabeth Perry
Panel Discussants: Michael Herzfeld and Elizabeth Perry
Presenters: Jeong Jong-Ho, Liu Jundai , Liu Chun (Brenda), Yan Xiaojun, Yu Jianrong, Zhou Yi

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Social Consequences of Rapid Expansion of Higher Education in South Korea

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

A talk by HAN Joon, Associate Professor of Sociology, Yonsei University, South Korea; HYI Visiting Scholar 2009-2010.

Discussant: Frank Dobbin, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Date:Friday, November 6, 2009
Time:11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location:Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

During the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea experienced an exceptionally rapid expansion of higher education, reflecting a sharp increase in demand for higher education among Korean parents. In this presentation, the social consequences of higher education expansion will be discussed, with a focus on inequality. Professor Han's research has investigated whether the expansion of higher education has affected class mobility among Korean males, finding that a mechanism of class inheritance has changed from direct inheritance to one mediated by education. He has also examined inequality among college graduates in the labor market and has found a substantial wage gap among different groups of college graduates. Results from previous research indicate that expansion of higher education in Korea did not alleviate the degree of inequality but rather modified the mechanism of generating inequality.

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"The Spirit of the Chrysanthemum" (Kiku no sei monogatari) and Flower Personification in Medieval Japanese Art

A talk by Melissa McCormick, Professor of Japanese Art and Culture, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Date: Friday, October 30, 2009
Time: Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

From as early as Ovid's representation of the goddess Flora, the personification of flowers by women appears throughout Western art and literature, signifying seasonal regeneration, fertility and reproduction, beauty, and its ephemeral nature. An equally common visual and literary trope in medieval Japan, however, is the flower who materializes in masculine form. "The Spirit of the Chrysanthemum", a sixteenth-century Japanese illustrated narrative scroll, provides the starting point for a consideration of how flower personification structures medieval Japanese illustrated narratives, metaphorically, allegorically, and symbolically.

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Alumni Conference: Multiple Perspectives on the Meaning of Community and Citizenship

Sponsored by Peking University and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: October 31-November 2, 2009
Location: Beijing, China

Conference description:

The conference aims to promote active discussion among scholars from universities and research institutes in East Asia on the topics of citizenship and community. The fast pace of economic and information globalization in the latter half of the 20th century has greatly influenced human development. In China, after 1949, and particularly after reform and an open policy were implemented in 1978, the fast pace of modernization has lead to rapid changes of the social structure. This conference will look at China's social progress and social development from the perspectives of community construction, citizenship, and civilian society. At the same time, the conference will enhance international understanding of China's situation by offering international comparisons. Scholars will further explore the ideas of community and citizenship development and evolution, and discuss contributions to world development and cooperation in the 21st century.

For more information, contact Guan Shijie, guansj@pku.edu.cn

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Religion and the Public Good in Modern Chinese Societies

A talk by Robert Weller, Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Research Associate, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, Boston University

Date: Friday, October 23, 2009
Time: Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

While during much of China's twentieth century religion was separated from broader society, the last few years have brought a reversal in all Chinese societies. Based on case studies from China, Malaysia, and Taiwan, this talk examines the new rise of religious philanthropy. It focuses on four core questions: (1) the influence of denomination (with particular attention to local temples, Buddhists, and various forms of Christianity), (2) the role of scale (the effects of large scale institutions vs. local and less institutionalized groups), (3) the power and ability of varying state/society relationships to affect the public role of religion, and (4) the revival of ritual, with its important implications for managing social relations between individuals and groups in a pluralist context.

Please feel free to bring your lunch with you; coffee and beverages will be served.

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Comparative World Literature: China and the United States

A talk by Professor David Damrosch, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Date: Friday, October 9, 2009
Time: Time: 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.

World literature is often regarded today as a global phenomenon, sometimes even seen as a cultural expression of an emerging "world system." Yet any view of the world is a view from somewhere, and in practical terms, world literature is experienced very differently in different places. It consists first and foremost of the body of material that is available to actual readers: works that are assigned in schools, sold in bookstores, and reviewed and analyzed in a country's journals. In this talk, the speaker would like to explore the shaping of world literature in a national cultural and institutional environment, looking at the United States and then at China. He will argue that the American and Asian cases show reciprocal possibilities and limitations and have much to learn from study of each others' approaches.

Please feel free to bring your lunch with you; coffee and beverages will be served.

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Self-reflection by Mirroring : Understanding the culture of China from Japanese and Korean Literature

A talk by GE Zhaoguang, Fudan University (2009 HYI Coordinate Researcher).

Date: Friday, October 2, 2009
Time: 11:30 am -1:30 pm
Location:Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.
Talk will be given in Chinese.

Please feel free to bring your lunch with you; coffee and beverages will be served.

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Twenty-First Century Urbanization: Social Science Perspectives on China's Urban Transformation

Sponsored by the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, the Association for Asian Studies and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Date: Saturday, October 3, 2009
Location: Ann Arbor, MI

Preliminary program schedule

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Meanderings Between Borders--Cultural Transmission and the Production of Knowledge in Contemporary East Asia

Held under the joint administration of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Taiwan University and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, with the assistance and backing of Taiwan's Ministry of Education as well as the National Science Council.

Date: Sept. 10-11, 2009
Location: National Taiwan University

Twenty papers will be presented over the course of the conference from scholars in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan. Two round table discussions will also be held, the first of which, "Revisiting Formosa," will focus on the issue of East Asian cultural transmission in Taiwanese literature.

The other round table discussion, "Borders, Meanderings, and Interdisciplinary Talks," will be a interdisciplinary forum. During this forum Harvard-Yenching Institute fellows involved in different fields of study will explore questions concerning the transmission of East Asian culture and the production of knowledge in and around East Asia.

For more information, contact Mei Chia-ling, meicl@ntu.edu.tw.

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13th Harvard (Biennial) International Symposium on Korean Linguistics

Date: August 8-9, 2009
Location: Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

For more information on Harvard-ISOKL, visit http://www.harvard-isokl.org/

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Ideas, Networks, Places: Rethinking Chinese History of the Middle Period

Date: July 7-8, 2009
Location: CGIS South, Room S020, Harvard University
Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University Asia Center and the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Introduction

Over the past few decades, there have been significant advancements in the scholarship of middle period China (roughly 8th-17th centuries), particularly in the areas of 1) intellectual history, 2) the study of social networks, and 3) local history. Although these approaches have often developed separately and with their own sets of paradigms, connecting them leads to new insights into the patterns of historical change. Professor Peter K. Bol has been a leading figure in the attempt to fuse the historical study of ideas with research on society and culture. On the occasion of Professor Bol's sixtieth birthday this conference aims to bring together these various approaches, delineating how the articulation and promotion of ideas influenced social structures, and how intellectual discourse in turn was shaped by historical and social developments. The papers for the conference not only will deepen our understanding of middle period history through the analysis of rarely used sources such as maps, architectural images, and archeological sources, but also will provide new perspectives on the significance of local dynamics within broader geographical and political configurations and the definition and status of the literati.

Program agenda

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Approaches to Chinese Material Culture: an Interdisciplinary Discussion

Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2:30-5:30 pm
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave.
Program agenda

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Media in Chinese Politics

Date: Saturday, April 25, 2009, 8:30 am-4 pm

Introduction:

In recent years a growing body of scholarship has emerged that examines the evolving role of media in Chinese politics. While traditionally the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, mass media have periodically performed a watchdog role by exposing governmental misconduct. The rising popularity of new media has also expanded public awareness of environmental problems, health threats, and natural disasters.

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies have invited scholars researching media and politics in the People's Republic to present papers at a workshop held at Harvard on 25 April 2009 for publication in a special issue of a refereed journal. Themes of particular interest include the effect of commercialization on media content, propaganda and public opinion, political expression and new media, interaction between new media and traditional media, governmental use of the internet technology, and journalists as actors in political and legal processes.

In addition to advancing scholarship, the workshop aims to increase awareness of the role of media in Chinese politics in the Boston area by hosting a round table discussion open to the public and the press.

For a program agenda and list of participants, please visit http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~fairbank/events/Postdoctoral_Workshops_Ashley.html

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East Asian Studies and Science & Technology: Towards Productive Cross-fertilization

Date: Friday, April 24, 2009, 12:00-6:00 PM
Location: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA
Program agenda

This conference aims to encourage interaction between EAS (East Asian Studies) and Science & Technology Studies, to appreciate the importance of science and technology in understanding the histories of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, to incorporate the multifaceted perspective of EAS into the analysis of science and technology phenomena in East Asian countries, and to promote the study of science and technology phenomena in East Asia.

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Asian Neighborhoods Research Group: "Mobility and Territory" Workshop

Date: April 17-19, 2009
Location: Yenching Common Room
Directed by Prof. Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University), Workshop
Assistant Chiara Kovarik

Click here for program agenda.

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2006-2008 HYI Past Events