Over the past three decades, China has become a major trade partner and investor for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. The region is also an important component of the BRI New Eurasian Land Bridge, providing alternative access to Western Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shaking up China’s plans and prospects in this part of Eurasia. With the closing of borders between Russia and the EU, China’s long-term interests are arguably at risk. The war is also resulting in geopolitical shifts and...

Speaker: Stephen Kaplan, Associate Professor of Political Science and Economic Affairs, George Washington University Discussant: Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School This book explores how China’s state-led capitalism affects national level governance. China, as the world’s largest saver, has more than doubled its overseas banking presence since the 2008 global financial crisis. Compared to the West’s private-sector capital, China’s...

Speaker: Cheng Li, Director, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution Moderator/Discussant: Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the opens in a new windowHarvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Li focuses on the transformation of political...

Speakers: Ashley Esarey, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta Joanna Lewis, Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA),Georgetown University Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus, Department of...

Speaker: Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective.She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational...

Speaker: Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations, Georgetown University Evan S. Medeiros is a professor and Penner family chair in Asia studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has published several books and articles on East Asia, U.S.-China relations, and China’s foreign and national security policies. He regularly provides advice and commentary to global corporations and international media...

Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats. Xiangmao soap was featured in the...

China is constantly in the global media limelight due to its growing presence and influence throughout the world. Journalists reporting on this rising superpower play a crucial role in explaining the complexities of its domestic developments and international activities to local publics. This is a formidable task, made even more difficult by the increasingly constrained environment in China forcing most critical journalists leave the country and work from outside its borders. This panel...

Speaker: Joan Judge, Professor, Department of History, York University What can we learn from intellectual detritus? Focusing on cheap print, vernacular daily-use knowledge, and common readers in the Long Republic (1895-1955), this talk argues that the books an age discards as slipshod and unscientific, and the readers it disparages as superstitious and ignorant, comprise the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change is actualized. Premised on the notion that what we currently...

Speaker: Scott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford University Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD...

Speaker: Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Notre Dame On July 30, 1979, Deng Xiaoping addressed the fourth national conference of Chinese writers and artists. Towards the end of his speech he stated, to collective sighs of relief, that “the Party’s leadership of literature and the arts does not mean issuing orders, nor requiring writers and artists to make themselves subservient to […] political tasks.” In doing so, he redefined the relationship between CCP...

Speaker: Naima Green-Riley, Ph.D. Candidate and Raymond Vernon Fellow, Department of Government, Harvard University; Former Consular Officer, US. Consulate General, Guangzhou, China This event is part of our Critical Issues Confronting China public lecture series.

China’s Hengtong Group—leading a consortium of telecom companies from Hong Kong, Pakistan, and East Africa—will soon complete installation of the Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) cable. Spanning the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, this cable will connect the three most populous continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, or what Halford Mackinder described as the “World Island.” The cable aims to provide these previously under-serviced regions with the shortest latency...

The Stone and the Wireless: Lyrical Media and Bad Models of the Feeling Women Ma Shaoling is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, and spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese...

Speaker: Bill Bikales, Principal and Lead Economist, Kunlun Associates Bill is a Harvard-trained economist and Asia specialist and has worked at the most senior level of government in Mongolia on comprehensive fiscal reform and restructuring insolvent bank and power sectors, and at grass roots level in rural China on increasing poor women’s uptake of maternal health services. This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese...

Speaker: Fang Xiaoping, Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During the 1961-1965 period, a cholera pandemic ravaged the southeastern coastal areas of Mao’s China which was already suffering from lingering starvation, class struggles, political campaigns and geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. This lecture focuses on the first global pandemic that had plagued China after 1949 and the resulting large-scale but clandestine...

Speaker: Kellee Tsai, Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The structural transformation of China over the past several decades has given rise to a fundamental tension between the pursuit of social stability and authoritarian resilience. On the one hand, repressive strategies enable the party-state to maintain its monopoly of political power (authoritarianism). On the other hand, the quality of...

There is an intense debate among experts over the likelihood of a near-term Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Senior US military officers have warned that a PRC military action could take place in the next six years. Such dire predictions are largely based on estimates of PLA capabilities. But even if China can seize and control Taiwan, will it do so? Assessing the potential for such an attack also requires an understanding of Xi Jinping’s strategy toward Taiwan and his risk/benefit calculus. The...

Speaker: Jeffrey Lehman, Vice Chancellor and Professor of Law, NYU Shanghai Jeffrey Lehman is the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, where he oversees all academic and administrative operations. Lehman is an internationally acclaimed leader in higher education, having served as dean of the University of Michigan Law School, the 11th president of Cornell University, and the founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law. Prior to joining the University of Michigan Law...

Speaker: Pang Laikwan, Professor of Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong This paper focuses on the wide popularity of the meme and buzzword jiucai, garlic chives, on China’s internet to investigate the cultural and political subjectivity of the ordinary Chinese citizens in a time of fierce competition simply to survive, largely known as neijuan, involution. Through this investigation of the garlic chives meme, the paper also updates Foucault’s theory of the biopolitics by...

Speaker: Isabella Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic...

Speaker: Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh This talk showcases Ruth Mostern’s new book: The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021). The Yellow River explains how environmentally transformative human activity has shaped the whole watershed and constituted the relationship between people and the river since Neolithic times. The book demonstrates that the history of the relationship between people and the river is a history of soil as much as it is a...

Speaker: Yeiling Tan, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon Professor Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet current economic tensions between the US and China indicate that this...

Panel Participants: Sara L. Friedman, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University Russell King, Professor of Geography, University of Sussex Sarah Lamb, Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University Andrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University Nicole Newendorp, Associate Director and Lecturer, Social Studies, Harvard University Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Assistant Professor of Sociology and...