Category: Monthly Lectures

Chinese architecture stands across Eurasia, not only in China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, but much farther West. This lecture focuses on a tomb structure found from Gansu to Korea, paintings of Chinese buildings in tombs built for non-Chinese occupants, and a few decorative motifs in murals and textiles across Asia to explore why the Chinese building is used for so long and across such great distances.

Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author or co-author of Chinese Traditional Architecture (1984), Chinese Imperial City Planning (1990), Liao Architecture (1997), Chinese Architecture (2003), Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (2011), Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 (2014), China’s Early Mosques (2015), Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Lectures (2017), and Chinese Architecture: A History (2019) and more than 100 scholarly articles or essays. Steinhardt is a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, American Council of Learned Societies, Getty Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Philosophical Society, Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, Max Van Berchem Foundation, and Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art.  In 2019 she received the Distinguished Teacher of Art History from the College Art Association and the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph. D. Teaching and Mentorship from the University of Pennsylvania. She does fieldwork in China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia. 

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Joanna Waley-Cohen, Provost and Affiliated Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, tens of thousands of European Jews fleeing Nazi genocide found a temporary safe-haven in Shanghai. They were able to do so crucially because Shanghai was an open city under divided governance and because China was at war with Japan and could not exercise sovereign control over its borders. In this talk, the speaker ponders the moral lessons from this fortuitous episode of humanitarianism through the lens of moral philosophy and moral psychology. Using the Canadian-Chinese writer Bella’s novel A Cursed Piano as my textual anchor, the speaker argues that fiction, even if counterfactual, is an aid to the affective, imaginative, and reflexive exercise of moral reasoning. It is thus critical in helping us overcome what Zygmunt Bauman calls “adiaphorization,” or the abeyance of individual moral agency, that pervades the modern condition.

Haiyan Lee is a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2014). 

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Tansen Sen, Area Head of Global China Studies, Director of the Center for Global Asia, and Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

Xiao He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with rural-to-urban migrant entrepreneurs in Shanghai since 2010. This presentation examines how they distinguish between “dead money” and “live money” in their daily social organization of labour and work. With this distinction, they create the possibility of actualizing entrepreneurial aspiration. We often attribute the embrace of entrepreneurial aspiration to the pathological effects of neoliberal capitalism and state power—but is this enough?

Xiao He is a postdoctoral researcher in Development Institute at Fudan University, Shanghai. In 2017 he completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Utrecht University/Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. His dissertation is titled Entrepreneurial Aspiration: Money and Social Life among Rural Migrants in Shanghai. His research areas are economical anthropology, migration, money and entrepreneurship.  

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Leksa Lee, Clinical Assistant Professor of Global China Studies and Anthropology, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

Sun Yat-sen was perhaps the first modern Chinese leader to wax rhapsodic about water. In a June 1894 letter to the official Li Hongzhang, he had celebrated its possibilities, observing that, unlike coal, it was an inexhaustible source of electricity. It would take another two decades for China’s first hydro-electric dam to appear. Built with German expertise and machinery, the Shilongba—Stone Dragon Dam—came online in the first year of the new Republic (1912), powering the street lights of nearby Kunming. In the one hundred years since, China has become the world’s leader in dam building: there are an estimated 90,000 dams in China today. This exploratory talk will offer a discussion of how we might quantify China’s dam building over the past one hundred years and situate it within a larger global history. It will operate on two levels: one of relative abstraction where the speaker will begin a preliminary assessment of macro trends and broader conceptual questions surrounding the history dam building (in China); and a second, which provides some snippets from the speaker’s ongoing archival work, focusing on two periods (the late Qing and the 1950s).

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford, PhD Columbia) is an associate professor in the History Department at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, his interests include social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, and transnational history. Ghosh’s first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early PRC, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press (March 2020). Articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Osiris, BJHS-Themes, EASTS and the PRC History Review. His current projects include: a history of Chinese dam-building in the twentieth century; a history of China-India scientific networks, ca. 1900-1980; and a collaborative archival project on the China-related materials within the Nehru Papers.    

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Duane Corpis, Area Head of Humanities & Associate Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

This talk examines the interpretation and appropriation of Burning Man, a transformational event culture and globalizing social movement, from its American origins to its hybridizing expressions in China. Based on years of action research within Burning Man’s global network—including in Black Rock City (Burning Man’s annual week-long urban agglomeration in the Nevada desert, with 80,000 participants) and Dragon Burn (China’s official regional event in Zhejiang Province, with 800 participants), as well as accounts of several ambitious recent ‘shanzhai’ (copycat) efforts in Inner Mongolia, the talk will trace the role of capital—financial, social, symbolic, and otherwise—in mediating Burning Man’s discursive and material circulations in China.

This account of Burning Man’s Chinese articulation by grassroots Chinese and international participants, authorized by the San Francisco-based non-profit organization Burning Man Project, as well as attempts at appropriation by China’s state-backed culture industry, including for-profit businesses supported by the Ministry of Culture, China Merchants Group, and China Capital Group, provides a colorful counterpoint to popular narratives of the US-China trade war and debates about the propriety, provenance, and influence of Chinese industry.

The talk will further consider the cultural economy of China’s industrial sectors in light of Burning Man’s purported function, per Stanford scholar Fred Turner, as ‘cultural infrastructure for Silicon Valley’, following its initial years as an outsider counter-cultural ritual. China, despite its increasingly powerful art and technology industries, has no autochthonous event culture with similar functional role or iconic status, allowing a strategic opening for a variety of actors with contending agendas. This demonstrates not only the increasingly uneasy imbrication of Chinese and American industry and cultural economy, but the diversity, tension, and creativity of contemporary Chinese society.

Ian Rowen is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Geography and Urban Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he holds cross-appointments in the School of Art, Design, and Media, and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. His work on culture, politics, and place-making has appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Annals of Tourism Research, Asian Anthropology, the BBC Chinese, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Complementing his academic endeavors, Ian currently serves as International Meta-Regional Representative for the Burning Man Project. In these capacities, he has designed interactive art pieces, founded events, connected communities, and continues to serve in an advisory role to Project founders, directors and staff.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Christina Jenq, Assistant Professor of Practice in Economics, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

To schedule a meeting with the speaker, please email CGA (shanghai.cga@nyu.edu).
Time available (First come first serve):
Oct 29 2pm-4pm
Oct 30 10am-12pm (noon)

The language and visuality of nationalism and social identity are often constructed through gendered performances of the body. This talk examines the gendered construction of nationalism and transnationalism in media products from contemporary China and South Korea. The hypermasculinity and militarism of Wolf Man II is contrasted with the hybridity and gender-bending culture of K-pop commercialized music performances that have global reach.

Mayfair Yang is Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. She specializes in the Anthropology of Religion, modernity and the state, China Studies, Gender and Media Studies. She was Director of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia in 2007-2009. She is the author of Gifts, Favors, & Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China (Cornell University Press, 1994) (American Ethnological Society prize) and Re-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2020). She is also the editor of Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity & State Formation (University of California Press, 2008), and Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She produced two documentaries: Through Chinese Women’s Eyes (distributed by Women Make Movies) and Public and Private Realms in Rural Wenzhou, China. Her book in-progress is: Religious Environmentalism in the Anthropocene: Potentialities and Actualities in China and the U.S.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Leksa Lee, Clinical Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

If you wanted to know what’s going on inside your body, where would you look? Bodily discharges seem like an obvious place. Hippocrates and Galen routinely scrutinized sputa, stool and urine, and by and large these practices still appear to make sense to us today. But the intuition to search for signs of physiological processes in bodily outflows is not universal. Classical Chinese doctors paid scant attention to the appearance of excrement. Its sensory qualities, as perceived by sight, smell, and structure of bodily discharges outside of the body, were first described in 1327, in a treatise on phlegm. Many concepts and practices in this treatise, composed by the Daoist recluse Wang Gui 王珪 (1264-1354), were entirely unprecedented in Chinese medicine. At the same time, they resembled core concepts and practices of Greco-Islamic medicine.

This lecture will analyze Wang Gui’s conceptual and diagnostic innovations. It will situate them in the context of contemporary Chinese medical debates and compare them to like practices in Galenic medicine. It suggests to understand Wang Gui’s innovations as a response to his encounter with Galenic diagnostics, as they were practiced by Islamic doctors in Mongol Yuan China (1271-1368). At the same time, it draws attention to the different meanings of Wang Gui’s vs Galenic examinations of bodily discharges. Which concepts and practices were transmitted in this instance of a practical (and likely non-textual) knowledge transmission? And why?

Natalie Köhle is a historian of Chinese medicine and the body with comparative interests in Indian and Greco-Islamic medical history. After receiving her doctoral degree from Harvard University in 2016, Natalie was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. She is now Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University and works on a global history of Chinese phlegm (tan 痰). Her work has been published in The Journal of the American Oriental Society and Late Imperial China.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor of History at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar in Residence, Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

Notions of modernity and modernization came to India as British rule established itself. These ideas were received enthusiastically by the urban elite. This reception is seen through the careers of three remarkable individuals of the 19th century—Rammohun Roy, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and R.C.Dutt. Roy was a social reformer who amongst other things advocated successfully in 1829 the law prohibiting sati (the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands). Vidyasagar was a traditional Brahmin pundit who worked selflessly in the field of education and social reform. He successfully moved the Hindu Widow Remarriage Bill in 1855. Dutt was a member of the Indian Civil Service who wrote two volumes on the economic history of India under British rule. On the basis of the careers of these remarkable individuals this presentation goes on to argue that these responses were partial and inadequate in their acceptance of modern ideas and received their counterpoint in the rejection of the modern in the writings and work of Gandhi.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee is Professor of History and the Chancellor of Ashoka University. He was the founding Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University. He taught history at the University of Calcutta and held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Manchester and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was the Editor of the Editorial Pages, at The Telegraph. He studied at Calcutta Boys’ School, Presidency College, Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He was awarded a D.Phil in Modern History by the University of Oxford in 1981.

He is internationally acclaimed as a historian of the revolt of 1857 in India. His first book Awadh in Revolt, 1857-58: A Study of Popular Resistance has become a standard reference on the subject. He has looked at the 1857 rebellion in four other books: Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres, Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?, Dateline 1857: Revolt against the Raj and The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857. He is the editor of The Penguin Gandhi Reader and Great Speeches of Modern India. His most recent books are Nehru & Bose: Parallel Lives, Twilight Falls on Liberalism and Oxford India Short Introduction: Jawaharlal Nehru.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Vidhya Raveendranathan, Center for Global Asia Doctoral Fellow, NYU Shanghai.

This talk examines the ways in which the political geography of the city and urban contentious politics are mutually constituted and mutually transformative over time. Through a paired historical comparison of Shanghai and Bombay in the twentieth century, Professor Frazier will show how changes in the political geographies of the city influence changes in grievances, claims, and strategies of popular protest. Social relations, inequalities, and political power are inflected in “urban forms”—civic spaces, factory districts, inner-urban neighborhoods, and informal settlements. These urban geographies do not define or determine social relations and political power, but they influence the outlooks and experiences of urban residents, and the grievances of protestors. The empirical focus of the talk will be on contentious forms of urban politics in the two cities during the 1960s, and in the 1990s-early 2000s.

Mark W. Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School, where he also serves as Academic Director of the India China Institute. His research interests focus on labor and social policy in China, and more recently on political conflict over urbanization, migration, and citizenship in China and India. His forthcoming book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010) and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is also Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (with Weiping Wu, SAGE Publications Limited, 2018). He has authored op-ed pieces and essays for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat.

Frazier has been a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations since 2005, and is co-editor of the journal Asia Policy. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow in China in 2004-05. Before assuming his current position at The New School in 2012, he held a chaired professorship in Chinese Politics at the University of Oklahoma and was the Luce Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of East Asia at Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Wisconsin.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Lena Scheen, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai, and Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

Among the 492 numbered Mogao Grottoes are dozens of miniature caves, facsimiles of life-size caves complete with visual programs, yet too small for a single individual to enter comfortably. In spite of more than a century of research on the Mogao Grottoes, scholars have neglected these small-scale caves, typically deemed unworthy of in-depth research. This talk explores these unique creations for the first time while setting them within the larger context of Chinese religious aesthetics of scale. Focusing on scale not only reveals how these smaller spaces functioned but also provides a theoretical framework for how larger, hitherto unexplored monumental structures operated among the Mogao Grottoes. This talk demonstrates that rather than mere archaeological curiosities, these miniature caves are crucial to revealing the conceptual dynamics instrumental to the Mogao Grottoes’ success as a site of religious devotion.

Neil Schmid is Research Professor at the Dunhuang Research Academy. His scholarship centers on Dunhuang and explores a range of topics, including the role of Buddhist literature in ritual and art, medieval economic development, esoteric Buddhism, and the ritual aesthetics of painting and architectural space of Mogao caves. He is currently at work on several monographs, including From Byzantium to Japan: Ritual Objects and Religious Exchanges Across Eurasia in Late Antiquity, tracing the flow of exotic goods and ritual paraphernalia along the Silk Road, and the first-ever critical bibliographical survey of Dunhuang materials, entitled The Comprehensive Guide to Scholarly Resources for Dunhuang Studies.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Zhao Lu, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

The Chinese Revolution, broadly defined, was the first national liberation in Asia which experienced cooperation between nationalists and committed communists. That the coalition ended in disarray highlighted the contradictions between forms of nationalism and revolutionary socialism. This talk, based on the speaker’s recently published monograph, explores the ways in which the Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen and subsequently shaped by the ideologies of Dai Jitao and Chiang Kai-shek, succeeded and failed to build a new society governed by what can be called “capitalism without capitalism.”

Brian Tsui is an assistant professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A historian by training, he is interested in the intersection between revolutionary politics and mobilization of cultures on both the left and the right in China’s twentieth century. His first book, China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) studies mass politics under the Guomindang, the dilemmas confronting Chinese liberal intellectuals caught between an authoritarian state and a supposedly untamable populace, and the Nationalist Party’s appeal to Pan-Asianism as a strategy to garner international support. His current research focuses on the advent of “New China” as an Asia-wide event, zeroing in on how the People’s Republic was interpreted by Indian nationalists and Asian Christians in the early 1950s.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia and Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

The North Vietnamese government failed to assimilate the Chinese community in North Vietnam before the late 1970s mainly because of the influence of China. The Vietnamese attempt to speed up the assimilation process and the collapse of Sino-Vietnamese alliance after the reunification of Vietnam in 1975 caused the exodus of most ethnic Chinese in North Vietnam to China. In general, the relationship between the Vietnamese state and the Chinese community in North Vietnam was shaped by the relationship between China and Vietnam, and as a community between two nations, the Chinese in North Vietnam both benefitted and suffered from the changing Sino-Vietnamese bilateral relations. 

Xiaorong Han earned his PhD in history from the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and is currently professor and head of Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has conducted research on the interactions between intellectuals and peasants and between state and ethnic minorities in China, as well as China’s relations with Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. His publications include Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900-1949 (SUNY, 2005), Red God: Wei Baqun and His Peasant Revolution in Southern China, 1894-1932 (SUNY, 2014), Zhongguo minzu guanxi sanlun [Essays on China’s Ethnic Relations] (Singapore, World Scientific, 2015), and numerous articles. He is also the editor-in-chief of China & Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia and Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

As early as the Bronze Age, a pattern that would go on to characterize Chinese society for millennia had already taken hold: polygyny at the top of the social pyramid; and competition for women, frequently leading to violence, at the bottom. Many aspects of sexuality in ancient China become comprehensible if one always bears this fact in mind. Pure arithmetic makes it impossible for all men in a society to engage in polygyny, and thus one can use the number of women sexually available to a man as a rough but telling index of his social standing. For the overwhelming majority of males, this number would have been 0 or 1—but even those with one wife might have considered themselves fortunate. One of the most important milestones in a man’s life would have been attaining the requisite wealth and stability to support a wife; the thousands, if not millions, of males who could never afford a family had little to lose and became a permanent source of social unrest. It stands to reason that almost all healthy females were married at least once during their lifetimes, typically at an early age—either as wives, if their families were relatively prosperous, or as concubines, if their families needed the cash that would be offered for them.

Paul R. Goldin (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1996) is Professor of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1996. His main area of research is Warring States China (5th to 3rd centuries B.C.). Although his focus is intellectual and cultural history, the study of this period is necessarily interdisciplinary, and his work also involves archaeology, art history, literature, philosophy, and religion. He is the author of more than two dozen articles and several books including The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (Hawaii, 2002), After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Hawaii, 2005), and Confucianism (California & Acumen, 2011; rpt., Routledge, 2014).

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Zhao Lu, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Assistant Professor, NYU.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.

This talk investigates the visual configurations, rhetorical conventions, and fundamental concepts underlying China’s portrait photography in the early twentieth century. By surveying pictorial magazines, photo albums of courtesans, and poems written about new visual experiences, it addresses issues of how portrait photography was understood and practiced in the flourishing urban culture, and how traditional aesthetics and visual tropes were involved in adopting and indigenizing the new visual media. The complex interactions of modern technology and aestheticism, image and text, reveal that aesthetic tradition was deeply implicated in the cross-cultural exchanges of technology and power in the formation of China’s urban culture and visual modernity.

Shengqing Wu is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to joining the faculty of HKUST, she taught at Wesleyan University for eight years. She was an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.  Her first book Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937(Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2013) illuminates the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic. She is completing her second book manuscript, which is titled “Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media” (under contract with Columbia University Press).

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Francesca Tarocco, Visiting Associate Professor of Buddhist Cultures, NYU Shanghai.

This event is co-sponsored by the Global China Studies program.