Fei Hsien Wang, “Protecting Private Interests under the Shadow of the Law: Chinese Booksellers’ ‘Copyright’ Regime and its Anglo-American Copycat.”

The East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University, Bloomington presents the final talk of this semester’s Center for Law, Society, and Culture colloquium series. Professor Fei Hsien Wang will present, “Protecting Private Interests under the Shadow of the Law: Chinese Booksellers’ ‘Copyright’ Regime and its Anglo-American Copycat.”

The final talk of this semester’s Center for Law, Society, and Culture colloquium series will be held on Thursday, December 3 at 4pm in the 3rd floor Faculty Conference Room (#335) of the law school. Professor Fei Hsien Wang will present, “Protecting Private Interests under the Shadow of the Law: Chinese Booksellers’ ‘Copyright’ Regime and its Anglo-American Copycat.” A copy of her paper is available here.

Professor Wang is Assistant Professor in the IU Department of History. An historian of modern China who earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, she is currently writing a previously unknown history of how Chinese booksellers and authors built their own copyright regime and enforcement to declare ownership, define literary property, and create order in a changing knowledge economy when an effective state power was absent. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled, Hunting Pirates in the Middle Kingdom, explores how copyright was understood, appropriated, codified and, most importantly, practiced by Chinese as a new legal doctrine. Professor Wang is also the co-curator of the “History and the Law” digital project. Supported by the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University, this website aims to be a resource for emerging scholars working on law and history.