2020-21 LRCCS Event Videos

Michael Hathaway, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Simon Fraser University

Description: Over the last few decades, scholars from several disciplines have shown increasing interest in moving beyond anthropocentric studies to explore how animals have played a role in their own right in shaping larger social and historical outcomes. At present, China studies scholars have just begun this work. Dr. Hathaway’s talk describes some of these efforts and introduces his own studies on how wild elephants motivate and challenge international conservation efforts, as well as how a wild mushroom is shaping an important part of the rural economy in Southwest China, thus expanding attention beyond our animal kin.

Michael Hathaway received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2007, and shortly thereafter began teaching at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently an Associate Professor, director of SFU's David Lam Centre for the Asia-Pacific, and the editor-in-chief of "American Ethnologist" (with Stacy Pigg). His award-winning first book, "Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China," was published in 2013 by the University of California Press. One of the three core members of the anthropological collaborative, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, he has led research in China on the social worlds made through the creation of the wild matsutake mushroom economy. Anna Tsing's book, "The Mushroom at the End of the World" was the first book in the trilogy, and Michael has just completed the second volume.

Bryan K. Miller, Lecturer, Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan

Description: The Great Wall regions of northern China have long been characterized as frontiers of political and cultural expansion in which steppe groups were acculturated and assimilated into Chinese society. Yet examinations of individual communities and persons in the frontier demonstrate overarching vacillations of political sovereignties and varied mélanges of cultural practices. This lecture engages historical and archaeological discussions of the Southern Xiongnu (ca.50-200 CE) as one example of local leaders who navigated their presence between exterior competing regimes through a suite of hybrid cultural mediations to successfully maintain independent political power.

Bryan K. Miller received a MA in Archaeology from UCLA and a PhD in East Asian Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. His research investigates the history and archaeology of early empires in East Asia, focusing on intrapolity social and economic developments that occurred over the course of large polities as well as the interaction between regimes of Mongolia and China. His publications include studies of political substrata and the roles of local elites in regional polities, alternate models of interaction for frontier matrices of cultures in contact, functions and configurations of urban settings, and the interplay between local politics and larger processes of globalization. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the Xiongnu Empire for Oxford University Press.

Yi-Li Wu, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History, University of Michigan

Description: This talk will challenge the widely-held stereotype that Chinese doctors were historically interested in the body's dynamic functions, but indifferent to its anatomical structures. Using examples drawn from the history of Chinese traumatology during the 7th to 18th centuries, Dr. Wu will discuss the place of the physical and material body in Chinese medical thought and show how awareness of body structure was in fact intertwined with understandings of function.

Yi-Li Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research investigates the intersections of society, culture, and the body in the history of Chinese medicine, with special emphasis on the late imperial period (16th to 19th centuries). Her publications include “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010), as well as articles on medical illustration, forensic medicine, bone setting, breast cancer, and Chinese views of Western anatomical science. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of traumatology in China.

Silvia Lindtner, Associate Professor in the U-M School of Information

Description: How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? This talk, based on Professor Lindtner’s most recent publication "Prototype Nation" (Princeton University Press, 2020) offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Professor Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–08, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Silvia Lindtner is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. She researches, writes and teaches about DIY (do-it-yourself) maker culture, with a particular focus on its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. Drawing on her background in interaction design and media studies, she merges ethnographic methods with approaches in design and making. This allows her to provide deep insights into emerging cultures of technology production and use, from a sociological and technological perspective.

Together with Anna Greenspan (NYU SH) and David Li (XinCheJian), Professor Lindtner is also the co-founder of the Research Initiative Hacked Matter. Hacked Matter. It has, since its inception in 2011, organized a series of workshops, lectures, public panel discussions as well as hands-on engagements with questions of DIY making, manufacturing, and innovation ecosystems.

归途列车 Gui tu lie che (original title) | Directed by Lixin Fan

China Ongoing Perspectives ~ CHOP
U-M Film Series co-sponsored by the Asia Library
and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for
Chinese Studies (LRCCS)

1 hr 25 minutes; Chinese with English subtitles.
Followed by discussion with U-M Professor Mary Gallagher (Political Science, International Institute Director).
Last Train Home (2009) documents a couple embarking on a journey home for Chinese new year along with 130 million other migrant workers, to reunite with their children and struggle for a future. Their unseen story plays out as China soars towards being a world superpower.

Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University

Based on her recently published book, Dr. Ren will talk about the different ways that China and India govern their cities and how this impacts their residents.

Xuefei Ren is a professor of sociology and global urban studies at Michigan State University and a center associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective. She is the author of two award-winning books: "Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China" (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and "Urban China" (Polity Press, 2013). Currently she is working on several comparative projects, on urban redevelopment (China, India, Brazil, and the US) and culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities (Detroit, Harbin, and Turin). She is a recipient of a number of distinguished fellowships, including from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and American Council of Learned Societies. She received her MA in urban planning from Tokyo Metropolitan University and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. The talk will be based on her new book "Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance and the War on Air Pollution," published by Princeton University Press in 2020.

Jaymin Kim, Assistant Professor of History, University of St. Thomas

Using hundreds of Manchu-language archival materials from the Qianlong period, this talk will focus on the Kirghiz, who have largely been overlooked in scholarship on Qing Xinjiang. More specifically, it will argue that there was a group of people Dr. Kim calls "inner Kirghiz" who were firmly incorporated into Qing Xinjiang, thereby bridging the Qing world and the Central Asian world. The case of the inner Kirghiz highlights the blurred boundary between Qing and "foreign" as well as the plurality of Qing Xinjiang society.

Jaymin Kim is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He received his PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 2018 and has been a LRCCS Center Associate since then.

Nicholas Howson, Pao Li Tsiang Chair Professor of Law, Michigan Law School

Description: The PRC’s post-1978 court bureaucracy is assumed to be the cat’s paw of an all-encompassing and authoritarian system of social control—lacking everything from political independence to the technical competence required to play a robust role in contemporary China’s increasingly complex economic system and contentious civil society. This easy appraisal of the function and performance of the People’s Courts at all levels in contemporary China is not accurate now, if it ever was, and ignores concurrent developments in the surrounding political legal system, including the application of a new generation of substantive and procedural laws and regulations, the rise of a private bar intent on pushing the boundaries of professional autonomy, the increased (legal) sophistication and autonomy of PRC judicial officials, and the expansion of the public law and administrative law spheres. Professor Howson will review what the PRC People’s Courts have become in the civil, criminal and administrative law spheres over the past 40 years along three distinct lines of inquiry – (technical) competence, (bureaucratic) autonomy, and (political) independence, and make an argument as to how this key institution may shape the future of China’s “Socialist Legality” and the national governance system.

Nicholas Howson is the Pao Li Tsiang Chair Professor of Law at the Michigan Law School. A specialist in Chinese law and legal institutions and developing Chinese jurisprudence, he is a former partner of the New York based international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where he was a managing partner of that firm’s Asia Practice based in Beijing. Starting in the late 1970s, he has spent more than a decade as a student, scholar, and practicing lawyer resident in Beijing and Shanghai, has been active in the Chinese courts and US and international judicial fora as both an advocate and expert witness on Chinese law, and since the late 1990s has advised the National People’s Congress and PRC ministries on the drafting and amendment of key Reform era statutes and administrative regulations, including the 1999 PRC Securities Law, the 2006 PRC Company Law and the 2020 PRC Securities Law.

Wen Yu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan

“What is the ‘Chinese way’? How should China’s traditions speak to its future?” During the past three decades, China’s intellectuals have been increasingly preoccupied with defining the country’s cultural identity in its pursuit of political modernity. While their positions vary, intellectuals share the assumption that there are unique elements to China’s historical and cultural institutions, and that China’s future ought to be based on this legacy. This exceptionalist turn is unfolding at a time when the party-state is in search of a new ideology based on nationalism. Understanding this recent turn and its continued political force requires us to revisit the deeper roots of modern Chinese national thought. Diverging from the dominant view that modern Chinese nationalism is a product of Western-style modernization, this talk explores how the quest for a Chinese cultural identity became central to debates over political and moral values. This century-long pattern can help to shed light on where China’s intellectual and political life is heading.

Wen Yu is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2018. Her research focuses on China’s social and political thought, ideological movements, and intellectual culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Her dissertation, "The Search for a Chinese Way in the Modern World: From the Rise of Evidential Learning to the Birth of Chinese Cultural Identity,” explores the roots and development of modern Chinese exceptionalism by tracing how the search for a Chinese cultural identity has become central to the intellectual debates over shared values in modern China. Her dissertation was awarded the 2017 Harold K. Gross Dissertation Prize.

Yun Zhou, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan

Reproduction links the personal and the political. Through policies that promote or limit births, the state attempts to regulate individuals’ reproductive behavior. At the same time, individuals make reproductive decisions guided by their own fertility intentions and the meaning they attach to children and parenthood. A puzzle remains: Why does active pro-natalist state policy fail to achieve fertility recovery? This talk centers on urban Chinese individuals’ fertility decision-making under the 2016 universal two-child policy. By examining the meaning of children, Dr. Zhou highlights how a gendered pursuit of individualism underlies women’s and men’s fertility aspiration and behavior. In turn, she sheds light on the question of why state policies promoting births may not resonate on the individual level.

Yun Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research examines social inequality and state-market-family relations through the lens of gender, marriage, and reproduction. Her work combines statistical analysis of survey data, in-depth interviews, and agent-based computational models. With a focus on gender equity and authoritarian reproductive governance, Dr. Zhou’s current project investigates the intended and unintended consequences of China’s recent shift toward a universal two-child policy.

Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian Art, University of Michigan Museum of Art

The James Marshall Plumer Memorial Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art is consisted of Chinese ceramics, bronze wares, Buddhist sculptures, and other East Asian art works donated by his family and friends in memory of the prominent U-M professor of East Asian art, James Marshall Plumer (1899 – 1960). The collection shows an incredible network of scholars, collectors, and artists Plumer developed between 1930 and 1960, through his research of Jian (Tenmoku) and Yue wares, experience as a “Monument Man” in the occupied Japan of the post-World War II, and teaching at U-M. In this talk, Dr. Oyobe will highlight the Chinese ceramics in the Plumer Collection, and illuminate his remarkable scholarship and humanism that connected the people of diverse backgrounds from China, Japan, and the US.

Natsu Oyobe is Curator of Asian Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art, she has curated numerous Japanese art exhibitions, including "Wrapped in Silk and Gold: A Family Legacy of 20th-Century Japanese Kimono" (2010), "Turning Point: Japanese Studio Ceramics in the Mid-20th Century" (2010), and "Mari Katayama" (2019). Dr. Oyobe is also involved in cross-cultural projects from a variety of historical periods, including "Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930" (2013), "Xu Weixin: Monumental Portraits" (2016) and "Copies and Invention in East Asia" (2019). She served as the consulting curator for the Detroit Institute of Arts’ new Japan Gallery (2016 – 2017). Dr. Oyobe earned a PhD in art history from the University of Michigan in 2005.

Moderator: Dorinda Elliott--Senior Vice President for Programming, China Institute; Guest Panelist: Barbara Pollack--Journalist and Art Critic

Introductions: Carol Stepanchuk--Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan; Natsu Oyobe--Curator of Asian Art, Museum of Art, University of Michigan

Translator: Banyi Huang, Columbia University

Wang Qingsong is a contemporary Chinese artist whose large-format photographs address the rapidly changing society of China.
Although he was trained as a painter, Wang began taking photographs in the 1990s as a way to better document the tension of cultural shifts and global change.

In 2018, community participants from Metro Detroit and Ann Arbor were brought together in Wang's collaborative art installation on land reform presented as an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In this webinar, we are invited to take a tour of Wang's latest exhibition, "On the Field of Hope," at Tang Contemporary, Beijing, followed by an insider's visit to his Beijing studio. Noted art journalist Barbara Pollack together with China correspondent & China Institute's vice president of programming, Dorinda Elliott, will provide a multi-faceted view of China today and the contemporary visual arts scene.

Co-sponsored by China Institute, New York; U-M Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies; and University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA).

Emily Wilcox, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan

In 1958, the Matsuyama Ballet of Japan toured the first ever ballet adaptation of the classic Chinese land reform opera "The White-Haired Girl" in China. Examining Chinese-language sources such as newspaper and magazine reviews and rare original programs held in the University of Michigan Asia Library's Chinese Dance Collection, Professor Wilcox reconstructs the circulation and reception of this work in China, arguing that the production represented an attempt to create a leftist Sino-Japanese counter-public at a time of Cold War tensions between the two countries. She suggests that the Japanese ballet dancers' cross-ethnic performances of Chinese characters critically reconfigured pre-1945 Japanese imperialist discourses of pan-Asianism, leading them to be interpreted as acts of inter-ethnic solidarity in the context of 1950s Asian internationalism.

Emily Wilcox is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of "Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy" (University of California Press, 2019, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize from the Dance Studies Association) and co-editor of "Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia" (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Her articles, in English and Chinese, have appeared in "China Perspectives," "Inter-Asia Cultural Studies," "The Journal of Asian Studies," positions: asia critique, "TDR: The Drama Review," "Asian Theatre Journal," "The Journal of the Beijing Dance Academy," "Dance Review," and other venues.

As the story of COVID-19 continues to unfold, students at University of Michigan have had unique experiences as they restructured China-related research and the ways in which they preserved people-to-people exchanges with community, scholars, friends and family. In light of these varied perspectives and on-going challenges/solutions, Twila Twardif, Director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) and Lan Deng, Associate Director, will moderate a session with student panelists who will share their experiences on the impact of the pandemic on their work and everyday life and how they have adapted to it. Attendees will be able to submit written questions through Zoom during the session which will be answered at the Q&A period following the presentation.

Panelists: Fusheng Luo (Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Michigan); Yeori Park (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, University of Michigan); Wenjia Song (M.A. Candidate, Regional and International Studies); Sabrina Li (B.A. Candidate, Economics) Moderators: Prof. Twila Tardif (Director, LRCCS), Prof. Lan Deng (Associate Director, LRCCS)

Philip Bucksbaum and Bradley Farnsworth

As U.S.-China relations continue to deteriorate, two components of the relationship that have been successful in the past are increasingly coming under attack: higher education and scientific collaboration.

On August 6, 2020, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and Michigan-China Innovation Center held the final in a series of “Bilateral Breakdown” webinars exploring U.S.-China relations through the lens of disengagement. Speakers Philip Bucksbaum, who holds several positions at Stanford University and its SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and is also the current president of the American Physical Society, and Bradley Farnsworth, vice president of the American Council on Education, discussed the effects the downturn in U.S.-China relations is having on American innovation and competitiveness, international students and universities, and research and development. Mary Gallagher, director of the University of Michigan’s International Institute and the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor in Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights, moderated the discussion.

This is the third and final program in the Bilateral Breakdown series. You can view the first program here, and the second program here.

Featuring Artist Xu Weixin with Natsu Oyobe, UMMA Curator of Asian Art and U-M Panelists: Prof. Lihong Liu (Art History) and Angie Baecker (Asian Languages and Cultures) Translation with Yihui Sheng (Asian Languages and Cultures) Panelists: Lihong Liu (Assistant Professor, History of Art, University of Michigan) Angie Baecker (Lecturer, Department of Art History, University of Hong Kong)

Moderator: Natsu Oyobe (Curator of Asian Art, Museum of Art, University of Michigan)

Translator: Yihui Sheng (Ph.D. Candidate, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan)

Based in Beijing and New York, artist Xu Weixin is known for his stunning, large-size portraits of Chinese people who lived during the Cultural Revolution. In 2016, the series and portraits of contemporary miners were presented with great acclaim at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In this webinar, he will invite us into his studio in New York, and talk about his paintings in progress, some of which are directly concerned with the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand a larger context, we will invite two panelists to talk about Xu Weixin’s work in relation to Chinese contemporary society and artistic practice, followed by conversations with the artist. This webinar will illuminate art and artists’ roles during the global health crisis and the rise of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment in the US.

Andrew Chubb Gordon Houlden Daniela Stockmann

Although the majority of U.S. allies are increasingly worried by some of China’s discriminatory economic and trade practices, growing assertiveness in territorial and maritime disputes, continued human rights violations, restrictions in its domestic political and social spaces, and its dominance in the high tech space, none are interested in completely or substantially decoupling from China, as some in the United States have advocated. While U.S. allies agree that they do not want China’s influence and aggressive behavior to go unchecked, each has its own strategic national interests to consider in terms of its relations with Beijing.

On July 9, 2020, The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and the Michigan-China Innovation Center held the second in a series of three “Bilateral Breakdown” webinars exploring the current and future state of U.S.-China relations through the perceived lens of disengagement. Speakers Andrew Chubb, British Academy postdoctoral fellow at Lancaster University; Gordon Houlden, professor of political science at the University of Alberta, adjunct professor of the Alberta School of Business, and director of the University’s China Institute; and Daniela Stockmann, professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin; along with moderator Jan Berris, vice president of the National Committee examined the current state of Sino-Australian, Sino-British, Sino-Canadian, and Sino-German relations, respectively; some of the key red line issues at the heart of each country’s relationship with China; and how each country views the current state of U.S.-China relations and the consequences that flow from those views.

This is the second program in the Bilateral Breakdown series. You can view the first program here. 

The Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies brings together a panel discussion on the ongoing legal crisis in Hong Kong, stemming from the recent decision by China's Central People's Government to draft and impose a national security law. Experts discussed the recent decision and provide context about the basic law of Hong Kong, and analyze the implications of the decision on political movements in Hong Kong, and the effects on the lives of the people of Hong Kong. Featuring Sharon Hom, Nicholas Howson, Louisa Lim, and Martin Flaherty, with opening remarks from incoming LRCCS Director Twila Tardif.

The webinar featured each of the panelists individually, followed by a combined conversation between the panelists, and ending with Q&A from the audience. Audience members could submit written questions using the Q&A feature during the webinar.