public talk
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.
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).
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).
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.
Professor Gao’s talk lifts out of the dustbin of history the life and career of Liu Liangmo, a talented musician, prolific journalist, and Christian activist. Liu agilely navigated slippery trans-Pacific political and ideological landscapes throughout the World War II and Cold War. After “coaxing the Chinese (civilians and soldiers) into mass signing” and helping to invent the new genre “songs of resistance” to promote national morale and unified resistance against Japan, Liu sojourned to the United States. There, despite close surveillance by the FBI, he formed an unusual alliance with African Americans by contributing a weekly column to the biggest black newspaper “Pittsburgh Courier” and cooperating with Paul Robeson, the world famous singer and actor, in popularizing Chinese songs of resistance. Robeson and Liu brought the future national anthem of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into global circulation. Meanwhile, Liu traveled more than 100,000 miles to speak and sing about China to grassroots white Americans on behalf of the United China Relief. Later, as a top official representing Protestant denominations in the PRC, Liu helped to bring Christianity into line with the new regime, served China as its authoritative interpreter of the United States, and facilitated the alliance between the PRC and such African American cultural giants as W.E.B Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Paul Robeson.