Events
-
Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America
August 19, 2019 - 4:00pmLos Angeles, CaliforniaPlease join the USC U.S.-China Institute and Asia Society for a talk with Weijian Shan, one of Asia’s best-known financiers, as he recounts his remarkable personal story of his exile to the Gobi Desert for hard labor at the age of 15 amidst the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
Event Details -
The Transpacific Experiment: How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future
September 5, 2019 - 4:00pmLos Angeles, CaliforniaThe USC U.S.-China Institute presents a book talk with journalist and author Matt Sheehan. His new book chronicles the deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges between China and California.
Event Details -
China’s Rise in Historical Perspective
October 3, 2019 - 4:00pmLos Angeles, CaliforniaThe USC U.S.-China Institutes presents a book talk with Klaus Mühlhahn. Making China Modern provides a panoramic survey of China's rise and resilience through war and rebellion, disease and famine. At this event Professor Mühlhahn will focus on the lessons from history that provide insight into China's evolving international position and how the United States and others should respond.
Event Details
Is the process of state building a unilateral, national venture, or is it something more collaborative, taking place in the interstices between adjoining countries? To answer this question, this book takes a comparative look at the state building process along China, Myanmar, and Thailand's common borderland area. It shows that the variations in state building among these neighboring countries are the result of an interactive process that occurs across national boundaries. Departing from existing approaches that look at such processes from the angle of singular, bounded territorial states, the book argues that a more fruitful method is to examine how state and nation building in one country can influence, and be influenced by, the same processes across borders. It argues that the success or failure of one country's state building is a process that extends beyond domestic factors such as war preparation, political institutions, and geographic and demographic variables. Rather, it shows that we should conceptualize state building as an interactive process heavily influenced by a "neighborhood effect." Furthermore, the book moves beyond the academic boundaries that divide arbitrarily China studies and Southeast Asian studies by providing an analysis that ties the state and nation building processes in China with those of Southeast Asia.
The Cleveland Museum of Art collaborates with the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland to mount the first solo US museum exhibition by internationally renowned artist Liu Wei (Chinese, born 1972). Works by Liu Wei will be presented concurrently at both institutions, offering an expansive view of the artist’s diverse artistic practice.
Gathering: Collecting and Documenting Chinese American History will tell the origin story of historical societies, museums, and organized projects that document and make public the history of Chinese throughout America.
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.
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.
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 Chinese American Musuem in Los Angeles presents an exhibition reimagining the iconic Chinese landscape paintings.
Craig Quintero, Associate Professor, Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance, Grinnell College
SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor, Theater Dance and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley