Harvard Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies

Speakers: Fred Hu, Founder and Chairman, Primavera Capital Group Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College David Daokui Li, Founding Dean of the Schwarzman Scholars program, Mansfield Freeman Professor of Economics, and Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE), Tsinghua University Yuan Ming, Dean of Yenching Academy, Peking University Moderator: William Kirby, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University; Chairman, Harvard China Fund Introductions by: Winnie (Chi-Man) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard-China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Speaker: Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and of the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.

Speakers: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Duke University Mary Augusta Brazelton, The University of Cambridge Miriam Gross, The University of Oklahoma Elanah Uretsky, Brandeis University Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Mary Augusta Brazelton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge. Miriam Gross is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. Elanah Uretsky is an Associate Professor of International and Global Studies at Brandeis University.

Speaker: Kristen Looney, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government, Georgetown University Moderator/Discussant: Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business of Administration, Harvard Business School This talk tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaign

Speaker: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University Pardee School of International Relations and Political Science.

Moderator: Arthur Kleinman, Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Panelists: Xiao Shuiyuan, Professor, Central South University, Xianya School of Public Health. Yifeng Xu, President, Shanghai Mental Health Center; Head & Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; Director, WHO/Shanghai Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Mental Health. Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Co-Founder and Member of Managing Committee, Sangath. Cindy Liu, Director, Developmental Risk and Cultural Resilience Laboratory, Brigha

Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School. Moderator: Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University; Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton; Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama. Introduction by: Winnie Chi-Man Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population; Faculty Director, Harvard China Health Partnership, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Interim Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, Harvard Kennedy School.

Speaker: Covell Meyskens, Assistant Professor of Chinese History, Naval Postgraduate School In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of15 million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. Drawing on a rich collection of archival documents, memoirs, and oral interviews, Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change. Covell Meyskens is Assistant

Speakers: Judith Shapiro, Director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service, American University Yifei Li, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai,Global Network Assistant Professor, New York University; Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. In the 2020-2021 academic year, he is also Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. His research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, the University of Chi

Speaker: Jeffrey Bader, Senior Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution Jeffrey Bader is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. From 2009 until 2011, Bader was special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs at the National Security Council. In that capacity, he was the principal advisor to President Obama on Asia. Bader served from 2005 to 2009 as the director of the China Initiative and, subsequently, as the first director of the opens in a new windowJohn L. Thornton China Center. During his three decade career with the U.S. government, Bader was principally involved in U.S.-China relations at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In 2001, as assistant U.S. trade representative, he led the United States delegation in completing negotiations on the accession of China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization. Bader served as a F

Speakers: David Fedman, Assistant Professor of History,University of California, Irvine Ian M. Miller, Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College David Fedman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020). His other publications include “The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Article Prize. Ian M. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at St. John’s University in New York. He is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020). His current research is on the role of lineage organizations in regulating village environments, provisionally titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in South China. This lect

Speaker: Fei-Hsien Wang, Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington Examining a wide range of cultural products and genres from the late nineteenth century to the present, this talk traces the evolution of the vernacular myths and popular fantasies about Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). As China’s cultural economy and political climate transforms overtime, new stories and myths about Qianlong emerge to satisfy the changing desires of the audience as well as the political authorities. These popular cultural products have gradually shaped a common historical memory that takes the place of Qing “history” in most (Han) Chinese audience’s minds, despite generations of specialists’ effort to debunk it. The voracious fascination with this most accomplished Manchu emperor, however, has been an uneasy one. At the core of the vernacular fantasies of Qianlong lies the unsolved tension between the modern Han/Chinese nationalism and the legacy of a non-Han “prosperous age” (shengshi). The uno

Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School. This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore Wang Gungwu is University Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2007, and Emeritus Professor of Australian National University since 1988. He is Foreign Honorary Member of the History Division of the American Academy of Arts and Science and former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He received his BA and MA from University of Malaya (UM) in Singapore, and PhD at SOAS, London. His early teaching career was in the UM History Department at Singapore and then at Kuala Lumpur, and held the History Chair at UM in KL (1963-1968). He was then appointed to the Chair of Far Eastern History at The Australian National University (1968-1986). From 1986 to 1995, he was Vice-Chancellor (President) of The University of Hong Kong. In Singapore, he was Director of the East Asian Institute till 2007. His books include The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in th

Speaker: Suisheng (Sam) Zhao, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

Speaker: Gina Anne Tam, Assistant Professor of History, Trinity University Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, this talk will trace the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. It shows how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard 'variants' of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. I simultaneously highlight, on the other hand, the 1920s folksong collectors, communist-period playwrights, contemporary hip-hop artists and popular protestors in Hong Kong who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the present, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voi

Presenters: Peter Bol (Harvard University, China Biographical Database) Grace Fong (McGill University, Ming-Qing Women’s Writings) Andrew Gordon (Harvard University, Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project) Helen Hardacre (Harvard University, Constitutional Revision Research Project) It is difficult to start a digital scholarship project. Maintaining it for decades is even more difficult. In this year’s first forum of the East Asian Digital Scholarship Series, we invite the founders of four long-running North American-based projects. Peter Bol, Grace Fong, Andrew Gordon, and Helen Hardacre will share their experiences in building and leading digital scholarship projects. The East Asian Digital Scholarship Series, founded by Feng-en Tu and Sharon Yang, has been a monthly luncheon at Harvard-Yenching Library. This year, the Series will be conducted remotely and is sponsored by Harvard-Yenching Library with the support of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Ko

Speaker: Jorge Heine, Research Professor, Boston University; Former Ambassador of Chile to China (2014-2017), to India (2003-2007) and to South Africa ( 994-1999), and Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Rosemary Foot, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford; Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College; Research Associate of Oxford’s China Centre This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Robert S. Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate Part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Series, hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.