Events
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Screening: Daughter of Shanghai
November 7, 2019 - 4:00pmLos Angeles, CaliforniaEvent DetailsThe USC U.S.-China Institute and the USC East Asian Library present a screening of Daughter of Shanghai, a documentary featuring actress Tsai Chin talking about her life, scenes from the films and series she has starred in, and footage of celebrities talking about Tsai’s influence on them.
The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century brings to life the art of the feast during three transformative Chinese dynasties, the Song, Liao, and Yuan, which together enjoyed a thriving economy, cultural flourishing, and the intermingling of foreign and native traditions. Focusing on a rare group of surviving paintings from the period—along with ceramic, lacquer, metal, and stone objects as well as textiles—the exhibition reveals feasts to be singularly positioned to illuminate one of the most enduring and significant facets of the Chinese tradition: the continuum between life and the afterlife. The exhibition features fifty objects arranged in sections that focus on ladies banqueting in the past, gentlemen feasting in the present, and dining in the afterlife. Several other aspects of elite feasting—including costume, cuisine, music, and dance, as well as burial customs, architecture and gardens, artistic patronage, and painterly practice—are also explored, offering a window into life, death, and art during a time period whose cultural influence extends in China to the present day.
Coastal smuggling has been a thorny problem for successive governments in modern China. But, while smuggling might have operated on the margins of the law, it was far from marginal in driving important historical changes. Introducing his new book, Philip Thai explores how campaigns against smuggling transformed everyday economic life and amplified state power, thereby offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.
Professor Yeo will be discussing topics from his new book: Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific Century (Stanford University Press, 2019)
Rosemary Foot
St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK
International Relations Series
Rosemary Foot was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship of St Antony's College in October 2014. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations and a Research Associate at the Oxford China Centre.In 1996, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
What do we talk about when we talk about East Asia? Breaking news and newspaper headlines, or blogs and tweets, transmit sensational stories of a turbulent region full of storm and stress. But the same stories appear and reappear in these scripts, with surprising uniformity. We are worried about China’s emergence as an economic giant and military power. Much more mercurial, however, and therefore more frightening, is that riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma known as North Korea. And what has happened to Japan, that once mighty economic engine now reduced to a source of bleak news about stagnation and stagflation? Then there is South Korea, manufacturer of such technologically advanced products as smartphones, and lately a generator of transnational fads ranging from snail cream to K-pop. This lecture is a compressed but wide-ranging introduction to and interpretation of the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of contemporary Northeast Asia.
The Chinese government has become increasingly involved in global standards-making events such as the annual Internet Governance Forum and China’s Wuzhen Internet Summit (aka the World Internet Conference) that leverage China’s national standing in international standards-building events to shape global the future of global Internet governance. At the same time, Chinese regulators are also exporting standards not through national, or international governance frameworks, but through the community standards of individual platforms. This talk examines how the Chinese government is expanding its regulatory control over global consumer platforms through the expansion of Chinese-owned consumer platforms.
Ling Hon Lam, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
David Marno, Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In his book The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China, Ling Hon Lam gives an original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing 情境).
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In his book The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China, Ling Hon Lam gives an original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing 情境).
The Other Milk examines how, why, and through what means nutrition science came to matter in China by exploring the ways in which self-styled laymen and scientific nutritional activists re-invented the soybean, and soybean milk, for the modern age. I will talk about how Chinese intellectuals became concerned that the Chinese diet was deficient and insufficient for nourishing strong, modern citizens. The soybean, as a protein-packed and domestically grown food, became the nutritional solution to the perceived problem of the Chinese diet. In their search for a food would enable Chinese people, young and old, to compete in a rapidly industrializing global world, Chinese nutritional activists took a local food, doujiang, and transformed it into soybean milk, a dairy alternative that would fortify and strength the Chinese masses.
LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | Estimating the Unofficial Income of Officials from Large Asset Purchases
From a paper co-authored by Yongheng Deng (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Shang-Jin Wei (Columbia University, FISF, and NBER) and Jing Wu (Tsinghua University)
Professor Deng and his co-authors propose a method to estimate not only the relative size of unofficial incomes but also the pervasiveness of corruption based on large asset purchases. Additionally, they applied this idea to a unique Chinese data and provide a first estimate of the proportion of officials who take in unofficial incomes. They have found that an average official’s unofficial income is 83% of his/her official income, and 57% of the officials have an unofficial income and this proportion rises with the rank. They also tested and reject the notion that unofficial incomes are a compensation for below-the-market government salaries.