2021-2022 LRCCS Event Videos

Kenneth Lieberthal, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan

The Getting China Right Conference 2022 is a Luce Foundation-funded series of workshops for political scientists studying China. The workshop brings together scholars at US universities who study China to discuss fieldwork strategies, data access and methodologies, collaboration, and troubleshooting problems related to the pandemic and travel constraints. The keynote speech of the Getting China Right Conference 2022 is open to the public. The Keynote Speaker is Professor Emeritus Kenneth Lieberthal.

This conference is cosponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, the University of Michigan International Institute, the U-M Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS), and the U-M Office of the Provost.

Yuhua Wang, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University

60th Anniversary Alumni Lecture Series

China was once the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? Yuhua Wang will discuss his new book "The Rise and Fall of Imperial China," which offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth.

Miles Osgood, Lecturer, Stanford University

Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremonies still boast the largest live audience in history: a TV crowd of some 2 billion people. This also makes the event one of the most widely misunderstood pieces of political theater in our time. Drawing from his shifting career as international laureate and state artist, director Zhang Yimou put together a double act for a double audience. In this discussion with Ann Lin, LRCCS Director, Dr. Osgood will discuss the legacy of Zhang Yimou’s historic show and the significance of its 2022 sequel.

Miles Osgood is a Lecturer at Stanford University whose research focuses on the intersections between international sports, world literature, and the arts. His work on the Olympics has appeared in The Washington Post, n+1, and Public Books, with an article forthcoming in Modernism/modernity. He is currently writing a book about the Cultural Olympiad of 1968 in Mexico City, provisionally titled The Artist’s Torch. His recent article about the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony appeared in Slate.

Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of Asian Art, MacLean Collection

Description: In the first decades of the nineteenth century, large-format woodblock-printed terrestrial and celestial maps were produced in bright blue in China. These visually striking maps in addition to their physical scale are unique in the history of not only East Asian but world map making traditions. This presentation introduces these blue maps, historicizing them from the late Ming through Qing dynasties and considers numerous aspects of their production especially in light of recent analysis performed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art Conservation Center and the Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard University.

Richard A. Pegg is currently Director and Curator of Asian Art for the MacLean Collection, an Asian art museum and separate map library located north of Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Pegg has a BA and MA in East Asian Literature from The George Washington University and a PhD in East Asian Art History from Columbia University. He has written and lectured widely on the visual, literary, cartographic and martial arts traditions of East Asia. His most recent research has been focused on the cartography of East Asia, authoring two books: "Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps" (2014) and "The Blue Maps of China" (forthcoming). Co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

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

After the death of George Floyd, practitioners of traditional Asian medicine began to examine some of the racist biases that affected their own field. It quickly became apparent that the contributions of Black communities to both the practice and popularization of Asian medicine were missing from the histories that most practitioners know. Yi-Li Wu, associate professor of history and women's and gender studies and faculty associate at LRCCS, will discuss the role that the Black Panther Party and the Black Acupuncturist Association have played in bringing alternative Asian medical treatments to the United States. She will also discuss the process of self-reflection and study that led the journal, Asian Medicine, to critique its own racialized dynamics and commit to producing a special issue on this subject.

Open Access edition of African American Contributions to American Acupuncture.

Yi-Li Wu is the author of Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (UC Press). She holds a BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in international relations and a PhD in history from Yale University. She was a faculty member at Albion College for thirteen years and subsequently a researcher with the EASTMedicine group at the University of Westminster (UK). Her publications on society, culture, and the body in late imperial China have examined breast cancer, medical iconography, forensics, bone setting, the circulation of Chinese medicine in Korea, and Chinese views of European medicine. She is completing a monograph on the history of medicine for injuries and wounds in China, using this subfield of literate medicine to explore how experiences of the material and structural body shaped the development of Chinese medical thought.

Joseph W. Ho, Assistant Professor of History, East Asian History, Albion College.

Cameras and visual technologies accompanied American missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products, however, ultimately escaped their missionary mold and entered global imaginations, coloring American views of modern China alongside Chinese engagements with the world. In this talk, Professor Ho explores intersections between image-making, contested identities, and transnational ways of seeing – many of which transformed 20th century Sino-US encounters on both sides of the lens.

Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History and Associate Director of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program at Albion College, as well as a Center Associate at the LRCCS. His research concerns transnational visual culture, histories of photography and film, global Christianity, and Sino-US experiences in modern East Asia. Professor Ho is the co-editor of "War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938" (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and the author of "Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China" (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Peter Ho Davies, U-M Charles Baxter Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature.

Description: The Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) 60th anniversary programming will feature best-selling author Peter Ho Davies as he offers a reading from The Fortunes, a novel that recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational story through the fractures of immigrant family experience. Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this work captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood. Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.

The reading will be followed by a discussion with Twila Tardif, U-M Professor of Psychology and Chinese Studies.

Peter Ho Davies, U-M Charles Baxter Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, is the author of the novels A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (2021), The Fortunes (2016) and The Welsh Girl (2007), as well as the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and TLS, among others, and his short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 96 and 2001

Director Hao Wu with U-M guest panelists

Raw and intimate, this documentary--the first feature documentary on the COVID-19 pandemic to play at a film festival (Toronto Int’l Film Festival)--captures the struggles of patients and frontline medical professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.

1hr 33min; Chinese with English subtitles

76 Days was shortlisted for the Academy Awards and won an Emmy and a Peabody Award.

Discussants: Director Wu with Twila Tardif (Professor of Psychology) and Michael Imperiale (Professor of Microbiology and Immunology; Associate Vice President for Research, Policy and Compliance)

Twila Tardif is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Chinese Studies in the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include cross-language comparisons of Chinese and English speaking children and brain and behavioral bases of language and literacy development in bilingual children. She recently presented findings at the Ford School of Public Policy—along with other U-M researchers--on COVID-19 across the globe including worldwide anxiety about the disease, prevention efforts, vaccination, and blame, as well as how these issues vary across regions and identities.

Michael Imperiale is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Associate Vice President for Research – Policy and Compliance at the University of Michigan. He has served on National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committees addressing the issues of responsible conduct of research, dual use life sciences research, and the intersection of science and security, and has published extensively on these topics. This included chairing a study published in 2018 entitled “Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology.” He served as an inaugural member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity from 2005-2014, on the Planetary Protection Subcommittee at NASA, and on the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law at the National Academies.

His research interests focus on the study of DNA tumor viruses. He has made important contributions to our understanding of how these viruses regulate expression of their genes, how they contribute to oncogenesis, and how they interact with the infected cell in order to cause acute disease. Most recently his laboratory has been developing in vitro models with which to study the biology of polyomaviruses in healthy individuals and immunosuppressed patients.

Director Hao Wu with U-M guest panelists

Recorded on October 6, 2021

Two live streamers seek fame, fortune and human connection in China's digital idol-making universe, ultimately finding the same promises and perils online as in their real lives. The New York Times called the film “hypercharged,” while The Los Angeles Times said it’s “invariably surprising and never less than compelling.”

1hr 18 min; Chinese with English subtitles

Winner of Grand Jury Award (Documentary) at 2018 SXSW (South by Southwest Festival).

Discussants: Director Wu with Brian Wu (Professor of Strategy, Ross School of Business) and Sheng Zou (LRCCS Postdoctoral Fellow)

Xun (Brian) Wu is Professor of Strategy and a Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He serves as the faculty director of China Initiatives. His research examines the role of firm capabilities in influencing the dynamics of corporate scope and the evolution of industries. He also explores how competitive advantage is created and destroyed when industry landscapes are reshaped by economic, technological, and institutional factors.

Sheng Zou is a postdoctoral research fellow at the U-M Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. As a scholar of media and cultural studies, he has published works on Chinese digital culture and media industries, including the live-streaming boom. He is particularly interested in how digital technologies reshape modes of cultural production and governance in China and how they refashion subjectivities, mobilities, and social interactions.

CHOP (China Ongoing Perspectives) movie series, a collaboration between LRCCS and the Asia Library, will spotlight the films of award-winning director Hao Wu 吴皓, a U-M Ross alumnus originally trained as a microbiologist who followed the internet world before focusing on filmmaking.

Hao Wu takes a raw and human approach to story-telling in an era when culture evolves online and across borders. His recent films provide a critical examination of contemporary Chinese culture by covering China’s online universe, LGBTQ parenting, and the pandemic in Wuhan. U-M faculty and guest discussants will add their insights into the post screening Q&A, and Director Wu will be present at all events. The festival is being organized as a virtual mini film festival.

Panelists: Alan Mallach, Pratt Institute in New York City; Jianhui Yu 余建辉, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Lan Deng 邓岚, University of Michigan; Dr. Ying Long 龙瀛, Tsinghua University, China; Brent D. Ryan, MIT

Economic transformation in both the U.S. and China has created winners and losers in its respective society. While some regions are thriving, others have struggled. In this joint event organized by U-M Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, US Heartland China Association, and U-M Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, we have invited the leading experts on shrinking cities to explore the lessons learned from the post-industrial shrinking cities in both the U.S. and China and how both countries are learning to help the communities that are left behind in the face of technology and global changes.

Speakers: Alan Mallach is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Community Progress in Washington, and teaches in the Graduate Center on Planning and the Environment at Pratt Institute in New York City. Jianhui Yu 余建辉 is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Geographic Science and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lan Deng 邓岚 is a Professor of Urban & Regional Planning and the Associate Director for the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Ying Long 龙瀛 is a Research Professor at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, China. Brent D. Ryan is the Head of the City Design and Development Group and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.