联系我们
邮箱：shanghai.cga@nyu.edu
电话：+86 (21) 20595043
微信公众号：NYUShanghaiCGA
地址：
上海市浦东新区杨思西路567号
W822室
© 2025 All Rights Reserved
China Studies Reading Group
Organized by:
Mengdie Zhao, Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Global China Studies
Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia
地点： S307, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus
Eric Schluessel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia
Discussant: David Atwill, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai
Eric Schluessel explores the late nineteenth-century encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, recasting the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism.
Reviewed by David A. Bello 和 Joshua Bird
Date & Time: October 31st, Friday | 12:00pm – 13:00pm
Jennifer Yip, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945
Discussant: Selda Altan, Professor of History, Randolph College
China’s war against Japan was, at its heart, a struggle for food. As the Nationalists, Chinese Communist Party, and Japanese vied for a dwindling pool of sustenance, grain emerged as the lynchpin of their strategies for a long-term war effort. In the first in-depth examination of how the Nationalists fed their armies, Jennifer Yip demonstrates how the Chinese government relied on mass civilian mobilization to carry out all stages of provisioning, from procurement to transportation and storage. The intensive use of civilian labor and assets–a distinctly preindustrial resource base– shaped China’s own conception of its total war effort, and distinguished China’s experience as unique among World War Two combatants. Yip challenges the predominant image of World War II as one of technological prowess, and the tendency to conflate total war with industrialized warfare. Ultimately, China sustained total war against the odds with premodern means: by ruthlessly extracting civilian resources.
Date & Time: November 21st, Friday | 12:00pm – 13:00pm
Dali Yang, Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control
Book Image
Discussant: Amir Hampel, Clinical Assistant Professor of Global China Studies
Dali L. Yang’s Wuhan offers a penetrating study of China’s management of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a momentous event that has reverberated globally as the most severe pandemic in a century. Yang’s work sheds light on the advantage Chinese health decision makers had, including access to the novel coronavirus’s genomic sequences from several laboratories, as early as the end of December 2019. At this time an emergency action program was initiated to combat the burgeoning outbreak in Wuhan. Regrettably, the severity of the outbreak was grossly underestimated, leading to the adoption of measures that failed to effectively contain the virus. It was only in response to urgent warnings from sources outside Wuhan that national health authorities were spurred to take more decisive action, culminating in the Wuhan lockdown. Wuhan delves into the political, bureaucratic, and cognitive impediments that stymied the flow of crucial information, cultivated an atmosphere of organized silence, and facilitated the uncontrolled escalation of the outbreak in the weeks preceding the lockdown. The book highlights the detrimental effects of fragmented authoritarianism within the Chinese party-state and the strategic leadership weaknesses evident during the outbreak’s early stages. Moreover, it offers fresh insights into the formidable political, organizational, and health-related challenges involved in implementing the mega-lockdown. By examining the crisis’s progression, Wuhan allows readers to evaluate whether and how much of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been prevented. It emphasizes the necessity of transparency, adaptability to emerging information, and candid risk communication during public health crises.
Date & Time: February 27th, Friday | 12:00pm – 13:00pm
Joan Judge, The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894–1954
Discussant: Tianyun Hua, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS)
In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge traces the unfolding of a consequential politics of accommodation that engaged commoners as knowers rather than as an unenlightened mass. A response to the institutional failures of the era, this politics was enacted through an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national network. As yet unstudied, this infrastructure produced and circulated up to ten times the number of books as official, mainstream channels.
Date & Time: March 27th, Friday | 12:00pm – 13:00pm
Ying-chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making
Discussant: Yutong Li, Postdoctoral Fellow of Center for Global Asia
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, is a subject of fascination and controversy, at turns vilified for her political maneuvering and admired for modernizing China. In addition to being an astute politician, she was an earnest art patron, and this beautifully illustrated book explores a wide range of objects, revealing how the empress dowager used art and architecture to solidify her rule.
Reviews by Alison J. Miller 和 James Hevia
Date & Time: April 24th, Friday | 12:00pm – 13:00pm