Videos of Past Events

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

The People's Republic of China has had a statutory prohibition against "insider trading" (using material, non-public, information to trade securities with uninformed counterparties for individual profits) since the promulgation of its second securities law statute, the 2006 PRC Securities Law, some 15 years after stock exchanges were first established in Shanghai and Shenzhen. However, the provisions designed to battle insider trading built into Chinese law were a melange of ill-understood foreign (mostly US Supreme Court jurisprudential) doctrines, equally ill-suited to punishing insider trading (and "tipping" or "tippee trading") as it appears in China's contemporary securities markets. That dissonance led to what can only be understood as baseless, or illegal, enforcement of the prohibition by China's securities regulator and criminal prosecutors against types of trading not captured by the statutory (legal) prohibition, especially after the market crashes in China in 2015-16, when there was tremendous pressure on the Politburo to show state action in response to popular fury. In 2020, China revised its Securities Law, but in ways that still fail to address the rampant illegality of civil and criminal enforcement against trading behavior that is not, under any legal analysis, captured by the statutory insider trading prohibition. This presentation will describe the 20 year old problem, offer simple statutory and regulatory remedies that have so far escaped the Chinese legislator, and consider what this kind of legally baseless enforcement by the state in one corner of one post-Reform market means for China's Socialist rule of law program.

Canaan Morse, Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Virginia

This presentation reinterprets the richest account we have of oral storytelling in imperial China, the opening chapter of the 13th-century anthology The Drunken Man’s Talk (Zuiweng tanlu), from a perspective grounded in oral narrative studies. It advocates for reading this famous chapter as a “charter text,” a phenomenon of other oral traditions in which a textual narrative claims to represent a lost “original” text reconstituted via oral tradition. This reading demonstrates that of the chapter’s most confusing features—its exaggerated affirmation of performers’ literary erudition and access to rare books— denotes not an historical reality but a rhetorical mechanism, by which the storyteller invokes images of “literariness” as symbols of immanent culture and transforms them into sources of performative power through a “performance of reading” that is, above all, a display of verbal art. This vision of a symbiotic, non-teleological relationship between text and performance opens new perspectives on the communicative power of performance literature in imperial China and the narrative practices that created it.

Joseph Torigian, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun written in English. This biography is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party's demands.

Joys HY Cheung, Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology, National Taiwan Normal University

Datong Music Society, the most progressive native music group in Republican Shanghai and pioneer of modern Chinese music orchestra, produced many musical instruments during its heyday. Most were lost. A recent discovery (2023) of a set of its “ancient musical instruments” donated to the Deutsches Museum, Munich in 1925 has prompted new inquiries of the subtle relation between musical revivalism and reformism. This lecture probes Datong’s negotiation between historical allusion and experimental modification, theorizing its ancient music program as an invention of “heritage” that reveals the meaning and problematics of music in early Chinese modernity.

Emily Hannum, Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

The prenatal period and early childhood are critical periods of vulnerability to climatic and environmental hazards such as extreme heat. Many families can protect children from the negative impacts of heat exposure through adaptive strategies and technologies, but the most economically disadvantaged families may not be able to provide such buffers. This presentation will offer a national overview of children's changing ambient heat exposure in China. Additionally, it will present preliminary findings about adaptation and child development from a survey of early education in urban, suburban, and rural districts belonging to a city sometimes known as one of China's "furnace cities."