Digital Dialogues: Nationalism in China and Europe: Global Divergence and Convergence of an Idea
2022-07-06 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Berlin) | Oec 0.169, Platz d. Göttinger Sieben 3, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, 37073, Germany
Nationalism in China and Europe: Global Divergence and Convergence of an Idea

Stefan Berger Professor of Social History, Ruhr Universität Bochum
Xin Fan Associate Professor of History, State University of New York (Fredonia)

July 06, 2022, 2:00 PM (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: Oeconomicum 0.169 (University of Göttingen, Platz d. Göttinger Sieben 3, 37073 Göttingen)
On Zoom: For registration, please use this zoom link.

Nationalism as a concept is often considered to be rooted in European experience. However, the introduction, translation, and appropriation of nationalism have also changed the course of history in East Asia. On this panel, Stefan Berger and Xin Fan contrast and compare the role of nationalism in the making and unmaking of modern China and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, and they ask, ––What is the role of nationalism in unifying or dismantling political formations? Why did it break Europe into multiple states but hold China together as a unitary political entity? To answer these questions, they return to the historical writings about the nation during the twentieth century and re-examine the global divergence and convergence of nationalism as an idea. Getting beyond the ethnic-centric framework of historical interpretations, the presenters attempt to forge a truly global dialogue on nationalism studies in the twentieth-first century.

The speakers:
Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr Universitaet Bochum. He is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr in Bochum and a Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has worked extensively on comparative labour history, the history of historiography, nationalism, the theory of history, British-German relations, industrial heritage, the memory of social movements and the history of deindustrialization. His latest monograph is ‘History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Xin Fan is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Fredonia. His research areas include Chinese intellectual history, historiography, and global history. He is the author of World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and he also coedited Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018).
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This workshop is part of the Digital Workshop Series “Digital Dialogues 數字對話”..

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Organizers:

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Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China

Lecture: Empire of Paper. Missionaries, Diplomats, and Early Sinologists as Social Carriers of Translingual Practices and Worldviews
2022-07-07 18:00 - 22:00 | VG 3.103, Verfügungsgebäude, Platz der Göttinger 7, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, 37073, Germany
Empire of Paper. Missionaries, Diplomats, and Early Sinologists as Social Carriers of Translingual Practices and Worldviews

Eugenio Menegon
Associate Professor of History, Boston University

July 07, 2022, 06:00 PM (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: VG 3.103 (University of Göttingen, Verfügungsgebäude, Platz der Göttinger 7, 37073 Göttingen)
On Zoom: For registration, please use this zoom link.

Dictionaries compiled in the last phase of the manuscript age (late 16th to early 19th century) acted as metaphorical soldiers of the “empire of paper” that European observers in China – predecessors of the modern China watchers – enlisted to crack the secrets of the Chinese language and to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Through them, information on China, its language, and culture circulated in Europe, and assisted the birth of academic sinology. Such texts also reflect the role of missionaries, diplomats, and sinologists as “social carriers” of a hybrid cultural worldview developed between Europe and China, and their translingual practices. The story of a vocabulary preserved at the Vatican Library, the object of this study, illuminates the past of the Catholic mission in imperial Beijing during the eighteenth century, and in particular the operations of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith or de Propaganda Fide, the “ministry of missions” of the Holy See. It also shows how linguistic knowledge of Chinese was treasured and sought for by European diplomats, linguists, and missionaries alike, and how manuscript culture continued to have an important role in the cross-cultural circulation of knowledge about China well into the nineteenth century.
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This lecture is part of the lecture series Conceptions of World Order and Their Social Carrier Groups.

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Speaker:

Eugenio Menegon 梅歐金 (BA University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, Italy; MA & PhD, UC Berkeley) teaches Chinese history and world history at the Department of History at Boston University, and was Director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia in 2012-2015. His interests include Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, the intellectual history of Republican China, the history of maritime Asia, and Chinese food history. He has been Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Boston University Humanities Center Junior and Senior Fellow, a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.

He has published widely, including the book Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2009; recipient of the AAS 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize) centers on the life of Catholic communities in Fujian province between 1630 and the present. He is currently a Berenson Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies – Villa “I Tatti” (Florence).

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Organizers:

Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen
Benjamin Creutzfeldt, PhD, University of Göttingen

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Worldmaking from a global perspective: A Dialogue with China

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Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

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Sponsor:

University of Göttingen

Lecture: The World of Everyday Political Thought: A Transcultural History of a “Chinese” Rhetorical Curriculum, ca. 1200–1600
2022-07-11 13:00 - 14:30 | ERZ 1.201, Waldweg 26, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, 37073, Germany
The World of Everyday Political Thought: A Transcultural History of a “Chinese” Rhetorical Curriculum, ca. 1200–1600
Shoufu Yin
Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia

July 11, 2022, 01:00 PM (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: ERZ 1.201 (University of Göttingen, Waldweg 26, 37073 Göttingen)
On Zoom: For registration, please use this zoom link.

This talk has two goals. First, it develops a new approach to the studies of political theory and philosophy, one that I call everyday political thought. This approach invites us to explore how ordinary individuals were able to come up with remarkable ideas despite the fact that they were living under and working within different forms of oppressive powers. Second, employing everyday political thought as method, I provide a new narrative of the history of early modern political thought by excavating a rhetorical curriculum that flourished in East Eurasia. This rhetorical curriculum trained individuals to write official documents in literary Sinitic, a lingua franca of the regions. I use documents in Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, and Persian, among other languages, to reconstruct how the curriculum took its shape under Mongol-ruled China, flourished in post-Mongol East Eurasia, until it was finally restructured under the Manchu Empire. Practicing both close and distant readings of a large number of previously untapped sources that have survived in different parts of the world, I show that this form of education enabled individuals thus trained to philosophize the state, bureaucracy, and counterfactual histories in their everyday settings. In sum, this talk seeks to demonstrate how new method and toolkits, combined with large corpora of overlooked materials, will allow us to write new kinds of intellectual histories that decenters Western Europe and China while foregrounding the theoretical contributions of “everyday” thinkers of different locals and traditions.

This lecture is part of the lecture series Conceptions of World Order and Their Social Carrier Groups.

Speaker:
Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor in history at the University of British Columbia. His research and teaching center on Chinese and Inner Asian political culture and thought in global historical contexts. Specializing in areas where cultural history meets comparative philosophy, he works on a wide array of previously unknown, untapped, and understudied sources in different languages—literary Sinitic (classical Chinese), Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Latin, and Greek, to name a few. As such, his publications show that it is productive to engage the intellectual world of hitherto overlooked and marginalized groups—including peasant women who fought in wars, Manchu translators who processed imperial documents, and anonymous typesetters behind the production of books. Ultimately, his scholarly passion lies in writing new kinds of global intellectual histories that foreground the theoretical contributions of both “canonical” and “everyday” thinkers of different traditions.
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Organizers:

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Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China

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Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

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Lecture: Hun 魂 and Po 魄: An ancient Chinese approach to human psyche and soul
2022-07-13 10:00 - 12:00 | KWZ 0.701
Hun 魂 and Po 魄: An ancient Chinese approach to human psyche and soul
Dr. Dr. Dominique Hertzer
Visiting Lecturer, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

July 13, 2022, 10:00 AM (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: KWZ 0.701 Conference Room (University of Göttingen, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen)
On Zoom: For online participation, please use this zoom link.

Is there only one soul? What is the relation between body and mind or is there only a body? We will explore the meaning and function of the Chinese concept of the human soul, as it is represented in the dynamic relation between spirit (shen 神), hun 魂 (etheral soul) and po 魄 (body soul). We will look into the ideas underlying the differentiation of these three aspects and see what are the consequences for the relationship of body and mind. Finally, we will discuss which impact this may have for our own understanding of the human psyche.

This lecture announcement is beyond our currently running lecture series.

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Organizers:

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Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

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Lecture: Arab-Chinese Entanglement in the Age of Global Empires
2022-07-18 13:00 - 14:30 | ZHG 104, Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude, Platz der Göttinger 7, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, 37073, Germany
Arab-Chinese Entanglement in the Age of Global Empires
Shuang Wen
Clinical Assistant Professor of History, New York University Shanghai

July 18, 2022, 01:00 PM (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: ZHG 104 (University of Göttingen, Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude, Platz der Göttinger 7, 37073 Göttingen)
On Zoom: For registration, please use this zoom link.

This talk narrates four little-known stories of Arab-Chinese entanglement in the age of trans-imperial collaboration and competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although much attention is paid to China’s relationships with the Middle East today, I argue that this relationship did not emerge out of nowhere. Chinese and Arab lands were not entirely separate worlds until recently. Rather they have been entangled in complex ways well before the turn of the twenty-first century. The discovery of these episodes of largely invisible interactions resulted from my original juxtaposition of primary sources in Arabic and Chinese from multi-sited research in China, Egypt, Syria, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This lecture is part of the lecture series Conceptions of World Order and Their Social Carrier Groups.

Speaker:
Shuang Wen is a historian of modern China and the Arab world. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, Professor Wen held fellowships at the National University of Singapore and New York University Abu Dhabi. As a native Mandarin speaker, she received intensive Arabic-language trainings. Before switching her career to academia, Shuang was a broadcast journalist for Phoenix Satellite Television InfoNews Channel in Hong Kong, covering major breaking news events from the Middle East, and English-Mandarin-Cantonese simultaneous interpreter for live news coverage. Her latest publication is “A Short History of Modern Arab Knowledge Production on China,” in Islam, Revival, and Reform: Redefining Tradition for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Natana J. DeLong-Bas, University of Syracuse Press, 2022, chapter 9.

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Organizers:

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Worldmaking from a global perspective: A Dialogue with China

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Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen

Lecture: Ontology of Self in Translating China's New Silk Roads
2022-10-26 16:00 - 18:00 | KWZ 0.609, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073, Germany
Ontology of Self in Translating China’s New Silk Roads
Sophia Kidd
Visiting Lecturer at the University of Goettingen
Date: October 26, 2022, 04 pm – 06 pm (GMT +2) in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna
On Campus: KWZ 0.609 (University of Goettingen, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen)

In this lecture, Sophia Kidd discusses how the ontological unit of ’self‘ cannot be taken for granted when discussing narratives, translation of, and methodology for understanding China’s New Silk Roads. She will do this by analyzing how the ontology of self remains fluid in translation of four key terms in China’s BRI narrative: ‘Five Pillars (Wu Tong 五通)’, ‘Chinese Dream (Zhongguo Meng 中国梦),’ ‘Community of Common Destiny (Mingyun Gongtongti 命运共同体) ,’ and ‘harmony in diversity (he er bu tong 和而不同) .’ First, we will look at the epistemological and ontological ‘self’ in Western thought in contradistinction to the Chinese notion of ‘self (ziwo 自我).’ By examining selected uses of the term ziwo in Chinese literature over the past two thousand years, we arrive at a constructed Chinese notion of self which resembles the epistemological more than the ontological Western ‘self,’ while failing to reach equivalency with either. This understanding will inform our lexical and contextual analysis of Wu Tong, Zhongguo Meng, Mingyun Gongtongti, and he er bu tong.

Lecturer:

Dr. Sophia Kidd is an Asia-focused scholar in the social sciences and arts disciplines. She is affiliated with the Chinese Department at Sichuan University, as well as the Research Center of Literary Geography at Southwest University, China. Her most recent contribution to a comparative study of spatial studies in literature can be seen in Spatial Studies in Literature (Palgrave 2022). Dr. Kidd has given a visiting course and lectures on Chinese contemporary art and politics as at Ruhr University Bochum, while currently delivering a course at Göttingen University on her book, Culture Paves the New Silk Roads (Palgrave, 2022). This book includes new regional research from within China’s borders, as well as throughout the New Silk Road regions. It derives primary and secondary materials from classical and contemporary Chinese arts and literature.
Sophia Kidd is also an arts professional, contributing to private and public sector arts infrastructure development in the US and China. Managing arts, culture, and education projects, she works with small teams to network creative professionals across regional and national boundaries.
Specialties:
Skilled researcher in diverse fields. Experience in arts and project management, digital branding and content development. Bi-lingual in Mandarin Chinese and English.

**This lecture announcement is beyond our currently running lecture series.**

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Sponsors 赞助

Lecture: Draft Theatre: The Assembly Line Theatre Production
2022-11-29 13:00 - 15:00 | Zoom
Draft Theatre: The Assembly Line Theatre Production

Speaker: ZHAO Chuan, author, art critic, independent theatre director
Time: Tuesday, Nov. 29th, 2022, 13: 00 PM CET
Language: Chinese
Zoom link: https://uni-goettingen.zoom.us/j/66476427828

More information: https://yingmingtheater.com/chinese-culture-seminar-series/

Global China Conversations #16 Deutscher Mittelstand im chinesischen Markt: Was sind die aktuellen Chancen und Herausforderungen?
2022-12-15 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom
Global China Conversations #16:
Deutscher Mittelstand im chinesischen Markt: Was sind die aktuellen Chancen und Herausforderungen?

Zeit: 15.12.2022, 11:00 (CET)
Online auf Zoom: Bitte folgen sie diesem Link für die Registrierung.

Thema
Dauerlockdowns, Reiserestriktionen, Abwanderndes Personal aus dem Ausland – vieles wurde für den deutschen Mittelstand in China seit Beginn der Pandemie erschwert. Dabei hatte er es nie leicht: Das rapide Tempo der Veränderungen im chinesischen Markt, den Gesetzen und der Gesellschaft konfrontierte die Unternehmen oft mit ganz neuen Fragen: Ab wie vielen Mitarbeitern zählt man in China überhaupt als mittelständisch? Wie tritt man vor Ort für die eigenen Interessen ein, ohne Kenntnis von Sprache, Kultur und den richtigen Kontakten? Die Chancen lockten dennoch viele: Die Nähe zu Zulieferern versprach vereinfachte Beschaffung von Material und Komponenten. Die Größe des Marktes und der gute Ruf deutscher Qualität taten ihr übriges. Trotz der Widrigkeiten gelang es den gut Vorbereiteten, ihre Nischen im Markt zu besetzen und sich erfolgreich in China zu etablieren. Kann das weiterhin gelingen? Erschweren die Reiserestriktionen Beziehungsaufbau und Personalschulung? Oder bieten sie nicht mitunter auch Gelegenheit zur Einsparung und Entwicklung innovativer Lösungen zur Distanzüberbrückung?
In Global China Conversation #16 möchten wir diese und weitere Fragen im Gespräch mit zwei deutschen Unternehmerinnen besprechen, die das China-Geschäft aus erster Hand kennen.
Programm
Die Veranstaltung besteht aus Impulsvorträgen der Sprecher gefolgt von einer Diskussion.
Die Global China Conversation #16 wird auf Deutsch abgehalten.

Sprechende

Julia Güsten
Julia Güsten ist geschäftsführende Gesellschafterin der Sharehouse (Nanjing) Co., Ltd. Das Sharehouse Konzept – Kosten sparen durch Teilen von Ressourcen – ist das Ergebnis von fast 30 Jahren Erfahrung, kleine und mittelständische Unternehmen bei ihrem Start in den chinesischen Markt zu unterstützen. Sie lebt bereits seit 1994 in China. Vor Sharehouse hat sie die Logistikabteilung einer deutschen Niederlassung in Südchina aufgebaut und geleitet und 17 Jahre lang in Nanjing als Repräsentantin des Landes Baden-Württemberg und Geschäftsführerin von Baden-Württemberg International (bw-i) gearbeitet.

Claudia Gläser
Claudia Gläser ist geschäftsführende Gesellschafterin des Schwarzwälder Familienunternehmens Gläser GmbH in Horb drei weitere internationale Tochtergesellschaften in den USA, Mexiko und China. Sie ist außerdem Trägerin der Wirtschaftsmedaille des Landes Baden-Württembergs und Präsidentin der Industrie- und Handelskammer Nordschwarzwald. Ende April 2020 hat sie der ständige Ausschuss des Landtags in den SWR-Rundfunkrat berufen. Außerdem ist sie Aufsichtsratsmitglied bei Germany Trade and Invest (GTAI) und vielfältig ehrenamtlich aktiv, darunter beim Karriere- und Mentoring-Portal „Spitzenfrauen“ Baden-Württemberg, in der Jury des jährlichen bundesweiten Wettbewerbs „Jugend gründet“, und im Verband deutscher Unternehmerinnen (vdu).

Moderation

Dietmar Beatge
Dietmar Baetge ist Professor für Internationales Handelsrecht und Wirtschaftsprivatrecht an der Technischen Hochschule Wildau. Er war u.a. Referent am Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht in Hamburg und Partner einer deutsch-griechischen Anwaltskanzlei. Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Wettbewerbs- und internationaler Handelspolitik.

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China.Table Professional Briefing ist das Leitmedium für Entscheider in Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Werktäglich News und Analysen über politische und technologische Entwicklungen in China und die Beziehungen zu Europa.
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Lecture: The paradox of Wealthy Merchants and Weak Capital Accumulation in Late Imperial China
2023-01-24 18:15 - 19:45 | KWZ 0.607
Francois Gipoloux, CNRS Paris: The paradox of Wealthy Merchants and Weak Capital Accumulation in Late Imperial China
Time: 24. Jan. 2023, 18:15 – 19:45
Place: KWZ 0.607

Global China Conversations #17 Ideologie vor Wirtschaft: Vor welchen Herausforderungen stehen europäische Unternehmen in China?
2023-01-26 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Global China Conversations #17:
Ideologie vor Wirtschaft: Vor welchen Herausforderungen stehen europäische Unternehmen in China?

Zeit: 26.01.2023, 12:00 – 13:00 (CET)
Online auf Zoom: Bitte folgen sie diesem Link für die Registrierung.

Thema
Mit Xi Jinpings Aufstieg an die Staatsspitze Chinas rückte die Ideologie der Kommunistischen Partei wieder ins Zentrum von Staat und Gesellschaft. Während die Reformära von pragmatischen Prinzipien, Dezentralisierung und Öffnung geleitet war, sind es nun Zentralisierung sowie politische und wirtschaftliche Isolation, die den Kurs bestimmen. Beobachter sprechen von einer neo-maoistischen Wende in der chinesischen Politik; Xi Jinping und die Partei stehen im Zentrum der nationalen Verjüngung und des Chinesischen Traum. Diese von Ideologie bestimme Wirtschaftspolitik sorgt nicht erst seit der während der Pandemie verfolgten Null-Covid-Strategie für Verunsicherung. Unternehmen sehen sich zusehends gezwungen, ihre China-Aktivitäten zu reduzieren und zu isolieren.
Vor diesem Hintergrund diskutieren wir zum Jahresbeginn folgende Fragen: Sind die Lockerungen der Null-Covid-Politik ein erster Schritt aus der Isolation? Was ist die neue Parteiideologie? Wie verändert sich die Kommunistische Partei und welche Rolle spielt Loyalität unter den Parteikadern? Wird China für deutsche und europäische Unternehmen wieder ein zuverlässiger und berechenbarer Handelspartner werden?
Programm
Die Veranstaltung besteht aus Impulsvorträgen der Sprecherinnen und Sprecher gefolgt von einer Diskussion.
Die Global China Conversation #17 wird auf Deutsch abgehalten.
Sprecherinnen und Sprecher

Jörg Wuttke
Jörg Wuttke ist Chefrepräsentant eines großen deutschen Dax-Konzerns in China. Er ist zudem Präsident der Europäischen Handelskammer in China – ein Amt, das er bereits von 2007 bis 2010 sowie von 2014 bis 2017 besetzt hatte. Wuttke ist Mitglied des Beratergremiums des Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin und lebt seit mehr als drei Jahrzehnten in Peking.

Carolin Kautz
Dr. Kautz studierte Sinologie und Politikwissenschaft in Göttingen und an der Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Nach Praxiserfahrungen bei der Hessischen Stiftung für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK) und dem German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) begann sie ein Forschungsprojekt zu Parteidisziplin und Korruption in China an der Universität Göttingen, das sie mit einer Dissertation zur sozialen Identität der Partei und der Bedeutung der Ideologie für die Kommunistische Partei Chinas abschloss. Im Rahmen ihrer Dissertation absolvierte sie einen Forschungsaufenthalt an der University of Sydney. Ihre Forschungsinteressen umfassen die Kommunistische Partei Chinas, Ideologiedebatten und die Legitimität politischer Herrschaft sowie deren Anfechtung. Außerdem interessiert sie sich für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik und die innenpolitischen Einflussfaktoren hierauf.

Moderation

Amelie Richter
Amelie Richter ist Journalistin und Sinologin. Bei China.Table befasst sie sich vor allem mit den Beziehungen zwischen der Europäischen Union und der Volksrepublik. Vor China.Table war Richter für die Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Australien, Mexiko und Straßburg im Einsatz. Sie lebt aktuell in Paris.

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Medienpartner

China.Table Professional Briefing ist das Leitmedium für Entscheider in Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Werktäglich News und Analysen über politische und technologische Entwicklungen in China und die Beziehungen zu Europa.
Jetzt unverbindlich für 30 Tage testen: deutsche Version kostenlos testen – englische Version kostenlos testen

Labour and Migration in Guangzhou: Reading Group with Prof. Nellie Chu, Duke Kunshan University
2023-04-13 13:00 - 15:00 | KWZ 0.701
Dear students, dear colleagues, we warmly invite you to join our upcoming reading group with Prof. Nellie Chu on April 13, 2023: Labour and Migration in Guangzhou.
Date: April 13, 2023
Time: 1pm – 3pm
Place: CeMEAS Meeting Room, KWZ 0.701
The reading group is an exclusive opportunity to delve into migration and labour research in South China.
Reading and discussing research together will give you new ideas, perspectives and information and will greatly enrich your knowledge!
We will focus on two papers:
Castillo, Roberto. 2016. “‘Homing’ Guangzhou: Emplacement, belonging and precarity among Africans in China.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 19(3): 287–306.
Chu, Nellie. 2019. “Jiagongchang Household Workshops as Marginal Hubs of Women’s Subcontracted Labour in Guangzhou.” Modern Asian Studies 53, 3: 800-821.
We invite up to ten advanced BA students, MA and PhD students to participate and we kindly ask you to read the two papers in advance and prepare questions for discussion!
Please register by email to Ms. Lu Cai (assist@cemeas.uni-goettingen.de).
Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. She has published in positions: east Asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and Journal of Modern Craft. Her work can also be found in Made in China Journal, Youth Circulations, and University of Nottingham China Policy Institute blog.

Image:
The southern end of Baohan Straight Street (facing south), the heart of the African area, Dengfeng Subdistrict, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
Anna Rodesiak: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Anna_Frodesiak
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou, China
2023-04-13 16:00 - 18:00 | KWZ 0.602
Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou, China
Prof. Nellie Chu, Duke Kunshan University
Date: April 13, 2023
Time: 4pm – 6pm
Place: KWZ 0.602
This presentation traces the emergence of migrant “bosshood” across China, West Africa, and South Korea fast fashion commodity chains in Guangzhou. It is part of a larger book project that analyzes the global fast fashion industry as a historical movement in transnational capitalism that is tied to China’s post-socialist transformations of land, labor, and personhood. At the heart of these transformations is the emergence of the small-scale migrant “boss,” a figure of labor and livelihood that hovers between boundless riches and merciless ruin in southern China’s “workshop of the world.” While West Africans forge ties with Chinese manufacturers, South Korean bosses collaborate with members of the Chinese-Korean ethnic group to capitalize on the rise of K-pop trends and fashion around the globe. The rise of these migrant bosses engenders forms of governmentality that materialize through practices of criminalization, racialization, and policing. The disparagement of African and Chinese migrants by local officials and urban residents as “criminals” and “counterfeiters,” for instance, demonstrates the unequal access that aspiring entrepreneurs have to the state-sponsored welfare services and legal protections that are necessary for capital accumulation. In place of security and protection, nationalism, racism, and the policing of migrants have fueled a secondary economy of predation, rent seeking, and extraction.

Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. She has published in positions: east asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and Journal of Modern Craft. Her work can also be found in Made in China Journal, Youth Circulations, and University of Nottingham China Policy Institute blog.

Image:
Megan Eaves: Creepy Chinese mannequins

Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Global China Conversations #20 Hidden Debts and Defaults: A Chinese Debt Trap for Africa?
2023-04-20 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom
April 20, 2023, 11:00-12:00
> Please use our online form to submit your registration

Topic
There has been an increasing concern over “debt trap diplomacy” in recent years, which refers to the sustainability of African debt owed to China. Although it is unlikely that this is a deliberate strategy by the Chinese government, it is important to take into account the scale of the debt and the associated issues. Recent studies have uncovered high levels of “hidden” debt and defaults, with Chinese lenders’ restructuring providing little relief. At the same time, there has been criticism from both African and Chinese stakeholders regarding the lending and restructuring practices of multinational lenders. The impact of COVID-19 on African countries’ liquidity has compounded the overall debt situation, which could lead to a potential financial crisis on the continent. Will we see African countries defaulting in large numbers? Which role can Chinese lenders and multinational institutions play?
Program
The event consists of different impulse lectures followed by a discussion.
The Global China Conversation #20 will be held in English.

Literature

The impulse lectures refer to the following publications:
Horn, Reinhart, Trebesch (2021) China’s Overseas Lending
Horn, Reinhart, Trebesch (2022) Hidden Defaults

Speakers

© IfW Kiel / Gregor Fischer

Christoph Trebesch
Christoph Trebesch is Head of the Research Centre International Finance and Macroeconomics and Director of the Research Initiative Geopolitics and Economics at the Kiel Institute, as well as a Professor of Macroeconomics at Kiel University. His research links international financial markets, macroeconomics, economic history, and political economy, with a growing focus on China’s rise in the global financial system. After completing his doctorate at FU Berlin, he first went to LMU Munich as an assistant professor and then moved to Kiel. He has advised the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the US Treasury Department and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry of Finance. His work is regularly cited by leading international media, such as the New York Times, the Economist, or the Financial Times.

Hannah Ryder
Hannah Ryder is the CEO of Development Reimagined (DR). A former diplomat and economist with 20 years of experience, named one of 100 most influential Africans in 2021, she is also Senior Associate for the Africa Program of the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), sits on the Board of the Environmental Defence Fund, and is a member of UAE’s International Advisory Council on the New Economy. Prior to her role at DR, Ms Ryder led the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s work with China to help it scale up and improve its cooperation with other developing countries, including in Africa. She has also played various advisory roles for the UN and OECD and co-authored the seminal Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change in 2006.

Moderation

© Felix Lee

Felix Lee
Felix Lee is editor of China.Table and business editor of taz – die Tageszeitung, where he is responsible for trade and the global economy. Between 2012 and 2019, he was China correspondent for taz, Zeit Online, Die Presse, Luxemburger Wort and the Funke Group.

Contact
Silas Dreier: silas.dreier@ifw-kiel.de

Organizer
Kiel Institute for the World Economy

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Vortrag: Dr. phil. Volker Klöpsch: „Jadeschleifer, Verseschmied: Das Handwerk der Dichtung im Lichte der chinesischen Literaturkritik“.
2023-05-03 18:00 - 20:00 | KWZ 0.602
Dichtung ist ein universales Phänomen. Doch entsteht sie überall unter ähnlichen Voraussetzungen? Ein genauerer Blick zeigt, dass Dichten vielfach als ein gewöhnliches Handwerk verstanden wird. Darauf verweisen Begriffe wie Verseschmied oder Jadeschleifer, Vers oder Text. Der Vortrag untersucht an einer Reihe von Beispielen, wie im Alten China ein Gedicht entstand, welche Funktion sein Verfasser in Gesellschaft und Politik einnahm und wie seine Verse bewertet wurden. Aus der Betonung handwerklichen Könnens ergibt sich auch die Frage nach der Erlernbarkeit des Dichtens.
Zeigen wird sich, dass die chinesische Poetik des Altertums Gemeinsamkeiten mit Vorstellungen des europäischen Mittelalters aufweist, aber möglicherweise Leser enttäuscht, die an Goethe und Hölderlin geschult sind.
Volker Klöpsch (geb. 1948) studierte Germanistik, Anglistik, Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft und Sinologie auf verschiedenen Kontinenten. Er lehrte in Taipeh, Bochum und Köln, legte zahlreiche Übersetzungen von Lyrik und Prosa aus verschiedenen Epochen der chinesischen Literatur vor, gab mit Eva Müller das Lexikon der chinesischen Literatur (München 2004) heraus und ist Begründer und langjähriger Mitherausgeber der Hefte für ostasiatische Literatur.

Prof. Selcuk Esenbel (Bogazici Univ. Istanbul): Legal Transformation, Contemporary Civilization, and Sovereignty: Global Perspectives on the Quest for Modernity in Japan, China, and Turkey
2023-05-09 16:15 - 17:45 | VG 0.110
9. May (Tuesday), 16:15 – 17:45
VG 0.110
Abstract:
The paper discusses some key experiences of Japan, Turkey, and China during the nineteenth century, but primarily focuses on a comparative discussion of Japan and Turkey for the twentieth century and possibly the early years of the new millennium. It will offer reflections particularly on the conjuncture that was related to the adoption of European codes and constitutionalism, coupled with the larger aim of catching up with contemporary civilization and regaining sovereignty. Despite the fact that the perception of the West throughout this long history kept shifting between a friend or foe, the West has remained to be the “Un-forgettable Other.”
Speaker:
Dr. Selçuk Esenbel is Professor em. of History at Boğaziçi University, and the Director of the Asian Studies Center at the same institution. After studying at International Christian University Tokyo and George Washington University, she obtained her Ph.D. in Japanese history from the Columbia University. Since 1982, she has been teaching Japanese and Asian history at Boğaziçi University, where she is also in charge of the Asian Studies Center, Asian studies graduate program and Asian language courses. Esenbel has published many articles in various professional journals as well as a number of books on history of Asia with particular focus on Japanese history. Her research interests cover Japan and the world of Islam, Japanese pan-Asianism, modernization in Japan and Ottoman Turkey, peasant uprisings in Meiji Japan, and Japanese-Ottoman/Turkish relations. Esenbel is the recipient of various awards, like the Order of the Rising Sun, Japan Foundation Special Prize for Japanese Studies, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs special award for the promotion of Japanese-Turkish academic relations, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation George Forster research award.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Dr. Hu Nan, Fudan University: Towards an Anticolonial Asian Cinema: the 1957 Asian Film Week and China’s Imagination of Asia
2023-05-11 18:15 - 19:45 | VG 2.103
11. May, 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
This talk traces the forgotten history of the Asian Film Week held by and in China in 1957. It engages with two recent discussions of cultural politics in the Cold War era. First, there is a growing interest in Sino-Asian cultural relations in the 1950s and 1960s, but scholars have not focused attention on film festivals, which was a very important element of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Second, studies on film festivals among Asian countries in this period highlight events sponsored by either the U. S. or the Soviet Union, leaving the efforts and experiments of cinematic practices beyond the superpowers understudied. Drawing on a variety of sources including contemporary newspapers, magazines, festival brochures, local film gazetteers, government documents, and the films shown at the 1957 Asian Film Week, this talk demonstrates that film festival was a crucial part of China’s inter-Asian cultural diplomacy in the Bandung age and that the postcolonial Asian countries played an active role in defining “Asian cinema” and “Asianness” alternative to the superpowers’ imagination. Not only did the Film Week build an inter-Asian cinematic network beyond the Cold War divide to improve China’s diplomatic relations with many Asian countries, but it also sought to unite Asian filmmakers with anticolonial aesthetics and agenda, which challenged the cinema-as-entertainment model previously entrenched in other inter-Asian cinematic networks. This talk will also discuss the enduring influence of the Asian Film Week as an important event in the history of world cinema, including its connections with the Afro-Asian Film Festival (1958-1964) and the Third Cinema movement.
Bio:
Nan Hu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai. She earned her Ph. D. in Chinese and Comparative Literature in 2021 at Washington University in St. Louis, where she completed a dissertation entitled “In Other Voices: Dubbing Foreign Films in Maoist China (1949-1976).” Her current research projects explore the idea of inter-Asian solidarity among Chinese intellectuals around the 1960s, and the ways zoos have reconfigured the human-animal relationship vis-à-vis the Chinese projects of nation-building, modernity, and revolution. Her studies have been funded by the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, Ministry of Education (Taiwan), and China Postdoctoral International Exchange Program, among others.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Hybrid Maps: Reformatting the Chinese Imperial Realm According to 19th-Century Western Cartography
2023-06-01 18:15 - 19:45 | VG 2.103
1. June, 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
The definition of “The Great Qing Everlasting Unified” was frequently used in titles of general maps of the imperial realm in the beginning of the 19th century. It formally distinguishes one of the most widely known and impressive group of Chinese maps, the so-called Blue Maps and their multi-coloured congeners. This series of large format wall maps is representative of the late imperial phase of the development of traditional Chinese cartography. Göttingen State and University Library possesses a unique surviving copy of a hand-coloured map of this kind. The map is signed by Li Mingche (1751-1832), a Taoist master and a recognised Chinese astronomer and cartographer, who was propagating Western science in China. The proposed presentation analyzes how Li Mingche tried to reformat traditional Chinese representation of the realm of the Qing empire according to the standards of modern Western cartography and evaluate the outcome of this attempt from the point of view of Chinese and the Western cartographic traditions.

Speaker:
Dr. Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann studies historical Chinese conceptions of terrestrial space and their continuous influence on Chinese cartography. Since 2000 she is a Chargé de Recherche at the CNRS (France), and in 2017-2023 was recurrently a Visiting Scholar of the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Germany). Her latest publications cover a large scope of text-map relationships, including translation of text into maps.

Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Changing Perceptions of World Order in Chinese Historiography: Three Phases of Development/C
2023-06-08 18:15 - 19:45 | VG 2.103
8. June (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
“Changing Perceptions of World Order in Chinese Historiography: Three Phases of Development”: This talk takes a longue-durée perspective to examine and analyze the modern Chinese conception of the world from the middle of the 19th century to the present. This perception has changed significantly over the course of this period, which is reflected in the ups and downs of world/global history as a subfield of history. Foreign histories are commonly referred to as “world history” in the Chinese historical community; the term’s invention in the 19th century was a sign of a shifting worldview. The term “world history” has been increasingly been replaced by the term “global history” starting from the late 1990s, which suggests yet another significant shift in how the Chinese leadership and historians view the world.

Speaker:
Q. Edward Wang, a specialist in Chinese history and global historiography, received his education partly in China and partly in the US. He is now Eminent Professor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey. He is also editor of Chinese Studies in History, a journal that promotes academic exchanges between historical communities in greater China and the rest of the world. Wang’s main publications include Historiography: Critical Readings (2021 in 4 volumes); A Global History of Modern Historiography (2008 and 2017); Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History (2015), and Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (2001). Some of the above titles have appeared in Chinese, Korean, German, Greek, Japanese, and Russian.

Vom Dichter zum Zeugen: Der Schriftsteller und Dissident Liao Yiwu
2023-06-21 18:00 - 19:30 | KWZ 0.602
21. Juni 2023, 18 h c.t.
KWZ 0.602
Der Nachwuchslyriker Liao Yiwu kam nach dem 4. Juni 1989 wegen zweier Gedichte für vier Jahre ins Gefängnis, wo er sich vom Dichter zum (Zeit) Zeugen wandelte. Danach beruflich in Schwierigkeiten, begann er, in hunderten von Interviews den Außenseitern der VR-chinesischen Gesellschaft, unter ihnen die vergessenen Opfer früherer Kampagnen sowie der Öffnungspolitik, eine Stimme zu geben und ein Bild der Gesellschaft von unten zu zeichnen. Gleichzeitig hielt er in autobiographischen Werken seine Erfahrungen in und nach der Haft und bei seinen mehrfachen Fluchtversuchen fest. Zuletzt legte er mit Wuhan einen Dokumentarroman über die Corona-Pandemie in China vor. Bei all dem hat Liao Yiwu doch nie aufgehört, ein Dichter zu sein. So stellt dieser Vortrag auch die Frage nach der Beziehung von Dichtertum und Zeugenschaft.

Prof. Dr. Hans Peter Hoffmann ist einer der profiliertesten literarischen Übersetzer aus dem Chinesischen in Deutschland. Er leitet zurzeit den Arbeitsbereich Chinesisch am Fachbereich Translations-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft der Universität Mainz in Germersheim. Dort lehrt und forscht er zur chinesischen Literatur und Kultur und unterrichtet literarisches Übersetzen. Hier wie in seiner weiter geführten übersetzerischen Tätigkeit beschäftigt er sich mit Texten verschiedener Genres, Autor:innen unterschiedlichster Hintergründe und mitunter weit auseinander liegenden Thematiken.

The Wandering Earth and China's Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism
2023-06-29 18:15 - 19:45 | VG 2.103
29. June (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
As an epoch-making event in the history of the Chinese sci-fi film industry, The Wandering Earth boasts the extraordinary acting skills of cinema superstars and fabulous special effects. Instead of providing a description of the technical issues surrounding the film’s production, this paper looks at the film as a cultural expression and dramatization of China’s reconceptualization of the notion of cosmopolitanism. After scrutinizing tianxia, which is generally taken to refer to classical Chinese cosmopolitanism, this paper goes on to describe its experiential dimension, its techno-socio-economic foundation, and its cosmopolitan solidarity as shown in the film. Finally, after analyzing the ethical dimension of the cosmopolitan community, which is embodied in the idea of “home” in the film, the paper concludes by proposing a cosmopolitanism of ethicality.

Speaker:
Weihua He is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Central China Normal University. He is also the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Language and Literature Research and the Secretary General of the International Ethnic Literature Commission of (China) Association for Comparative Studies of Languages and Cultures. His research interests include comparative literature, literary theory, and the modern transformation of China. He has published extensively in journals such as European Review, Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Neohelicon and Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature.

Disclaimer:
The lecture was canceled last week due to extreme weather conditions. However, we are pleased to inform you that the lecture will be carried out this week.

Confucius as a Cosmopolitan: Thought and Practice
2023-07-07 14:00 - 16:00 | KWZ 0.601
07. July, 14:00-16:00
KWZ 0.601

Abstract:
Based on the Analects and other texts related to Confucius in classical period and taken “cosmopolitanism,” a concept with long history in the Western tradition as a counterpart for comparison, this talk aims to probe the thought and practice of Confucius as a cosmopolitan and point out the feature and significance of the Confucian “rooted cosmopolitanism” revealed in the thought and practice of Confucius. The rooted cosmopolitanism embodied by Confucius not only has the basic characteristics of all versions of cosmopolitanism, namely, going beyond the territory and ethnicity, but also keeps a dynamic balance between the one and the many, which is usually ignored by the radical cosmopolitanism. Last, a brief comparison between Confucian rooted cosmopolitanism and the rooted cosmopolitanism advocated by Appiah would be made.
Speaker:
PENG Guoxiang 彭國翔 is Qiu Shi Distinguished Professor of Chinese philosophy, intellectual history and religions and the director of Ma Yifu International Center for the Studies in Humanities at Zhejiang University. He was professor at Peking University and Tsinghua University and research fellow at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is the 2016 Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North (Library of Congress, USA) and 2009 Awardee of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (Humboldt Foundation and the Ministry of Education and Research, Germany).
His publications include The Unfolding of the Innate Good Knowing: Wang Ji and the Yangming Learning in Mid-Late Ming (2003, 2005, 2015), Confucian Tradition: Between Religion and Humanism (2007, 2017), Confucian Tradition and Chinese Philosophy: Retrospect and Prospect in a New Century (2009), Confucian Tradition from Classical Period to Its Contemporary Transformation: Speculation and Interpretation(2012), Revision and New Discovery: Historical Study of Pre-Modern Confucianism from Northern Song till Early Qing Dynasty (2013, 2015), Reconstruction of This Culture of Ours: Confucianism and Contemporary World (2013, 2017), This-worldly Concern of the Wise: The Political and Social Thought of Mou Zongsan(1909-1995) (2016) and numerous articles.

Hegelian Master Narratives and Periodizing Japanese and Chinese Modernity
2023-07-11 16:00 - 18:00 | OEC 0.168
11. July, 16:00 – 18:00
OEC. 0.168
Abstract:
Scholars of Asian studies have something of a love-hate relationship with Hegel; they love to cite him as the epitome of Eurocentrism, modernization theory and the legitimation of colonialism. Despite their prevalence, such criticisms overlook both the complexities of Hegel’s philosophy and the different ways in which Asian intellectuals attempted to turn Hegel on his head or rescue the rational kernel of his thought in a non-Western context. Viren Murthy contends that for much of the twentieth century, especially in Japan, but also in China, scholars engaged Hegel by incorporating and transforming his ideas. Such incorporations enabled us to see that Hegel was not merely a theorist of modernization but one of its most incisive critics. Indeed, it was precisely because of Hegel’s critique of capitalist modernity that conservatives such as Inoue Tetsujirō found him interesting. In this presentation, Viren Murthy will examine three attempts to rethink Hegel, respectively by the pan-Asianist, Okakura Tenshin, the Kyoto school philosopher of world-history, Koyama Iwao and the Japanese sinologist, Mizoguchi Yūzō. Viren Murthy argues that each of these thinkers narrates the history of Asia, while implicitly or explicitly responding to Hegel’s idea of the Orient as not having subjectivity. Against this static vision of Asia, these figures reconfigure the historical trajectories of Japan, China and the world to reconfigure both universality and subjectivity beyond Eurocentrism. Towards the end of his talk, Viren Murthy suggests that the contemporary “new leftist” intellectual Wang Hui, continues elements of the various thinkers mentioned above. The contemporary rise of China makes such responses to Hegelian master narratives especially relevant for our contradictory present.
Speaker:
Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese, Japanese and Indian intellectual history. He is interested in critics of modernity in Asia, specifically, China, Japan and India. He places the history of nationalism and transnationalism in the larger trajectory of global capitalism and examines how pan-Asianists, Third Worldists, Marxists and postcolonialists theorize resistance to imperialism and capitalism and posit a world beyond the present. Central to his work is the politics of the nation-form. Pan-Asianists and Third Worldists believed that the nation-form would be able to combine anti-imperialism with a politics of socialism. He inquires into the conditions for the possibility of such theories in the early postwar period and the ask whether their categories and politics continue to be germane to our neo-liberal present. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and The Politics of Time in China and Japan, Routledge, 2022). He is co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014), co-editor with Joyce Liu of East Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor with Max Ward and Fabian Schäfer of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Journal of Labor and Society. His book, entitled: Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution, is scheduled to appear in October, 2023 with University of Chicago Press.

Transnational Knowledge Transfers Between China, Europe, and the United States: Actors, Institutions, and Dynamics, 1924-1935
2023-07-13 18:15 - 19:45 | VG 2.103
13. July (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103

Overview
The two talks of this joint session interrogate processes of knowledge transfer between China, the United States, and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on two distinct organizations– the China Foundation (based in Shanghai and New York) and the League of Nations (based in Geneva) – both talks shed new light on the transnational entanglements of the Republican period in China, and demonstrate how foreign efforts to influence China often met with domestic resistance.

Abstract First Talk (Sally Chengji Xing): The China Foundation’s Sponsorship for Pure Science Research since 1924
In the first half of the twentieth century, leading American intellectuals frequently communicated with a cohort of prominent Chinese intellectuals previously trained in the US. Such face-to-face interchanges across the Pacific ultimately influenced Chinese choices in shaping modern scientific education and research, and the impact was generated primarily through a unique organization established based on Sino-American intellectual collaborations, the China Foundation. The China Foundation administered the second American remission of the Boxer Indemnity Funds to China and served as a sponsor of Chinese pure science research. Xing’s talk studies the contested debates, conversations and dialogues that occurred in Beijing surrounding the establishment of the China Foundation in 1924. It revisits the robust debate within the China Foundation back in 1924, by Paul Monroe and Roger Sherman Greene, about whether to sponsor “pure” or “applied” science for the sake of China’s modernization. In so doing, it demonstrates how and why Paul Monroe’s ideas, though being very influential at the time, were consequently challenged by Greene and other Chinese scientists.
Abstract Second talk (Lucas Brang): From Geneva with Expertise: The League of Nations’ program of cooperation with Republican China (1925-1935)
Despite being largely forgotten today, the League of Nations’ China Program was likely the largest and most ambitious program of international cooperation and “development assistance” prior to the second half of the twentieth century. From its formal inception in 1931 to its dismantling several years later, the cooperation between Geneva and Nanjing brought large numbers of European experts to China, where they advised on such diverse fields as public health, educational reform, infrastructure-building, administrative restructuring, and global finance. Based on memoirs of involved actors as well as diplomatic documents from several Foreign Offices and the League of Nations Archive in Geneva, Lucas Brang’s talk will reexamine the China Program as an early instance of “global governance” through professional expertise. Revisiting this episode of transnational cooperation demonstrates that, despite the increasingly hostile environment, the early 1930s constituted a highpoint of China’s international legal, economic, and administrative integration. At the same time, internal documents reveal that, rather than being a genuinely universal organization, the League of Nations was widely perceived as an agent of “European civilization” in competition with new hegemons like the United States and Soviet Russia. Finally, the talk shows how this global rivalry over China undermined Geneva’s claim to “neutral” expertise, which ultimately precipitated the collapse of the program along with the interwar peace order at large.

Speakers:

Sally Chengji Xing is a visiting fellow of the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin (Lise Meitner Research Group, “China in the Global System of Science,” MPIWG) and the Joint Center for Advanced Studies “Worldmaking from Global Perspectives: a Dialogue with China;” she is also an incoming associate professor of US history at Nankai University. She is interested in writing US history from transnational and global perspectives. Her book manuscript in progress, “Pacific Crossings”: The China Foundation and a Negotiated Translation of American Science to China, 1913-1949″, examines how and to what extent did the American intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century influence the development of Chinese science. Her multi-archival research in China and the United States has been funded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Rockefeller Archive Center, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and numerous other graduate research fellowships at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her long-term research explores Sino-American intellectual history in transnational approaches, from the early 20th century all the way to the late 1960s.

Lucas Brang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cologne, where he is currently completing his dissertation on the rise of the discipline of international law in early 20th-century China. From 2019 to 2022, he was a recipient of a Marie Curie global research fellowship of the European Union, as part of which he was affiliated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lucas’ research interests include China’s constitutional development and visions of international order from historical and comparative perspectives. In his work, he employs approaches from different disciplinary traditions such as legal theory, conceptual history, and the sociology of knowledge. His research has appeared in journals like Global Constitutionalism, Modern China, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Education and democracy in modern China
2023-07-14 16:00 - 18:00 | KWZ 0.602
Abstract:
Institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin of developing democratic education in modern China. At stake is to understand how democratic education filled a critical role in bridging the gap between democratic ideals and political realities. This lecture will focus on teachings of citizenship and democracy in Chinese primary and secondary schools between 1923-1936 for the purpose of strengthening embryonic democratic politics by creating qualified citizens, and seek to shed some light on the complex intertwinement of educational and political reforms in modern China.
Speaker:
Ying Zhou is an assistant professor at the Institute of Education, Xiamen University, China. She obtained her PhD at the University of Groningen (NL), trained in both Educational Studies and Sinology. Her PhD dissertation is entitled Education and Politics in China: Civic Education in Times of Reform, 1901-1937, and her current research project is concerned with pragmatism and progressive education in China and Japan.

Examples of research methods in the history of German Sinology / 德国汉学史研究方法举隅
2023-07-17 16:00 - 18:00 | KWZ 0.608
17. 07, 16:00 – 18:00
KWZ 0.608

Abstract:
德国汉学从一开始就不局限于某一领域，今天对它的历史梳理，也必然是在历史学、语文学、人类学、自然科学等其他学科的理论和方法的参与下进行，这同时也体现了德国汉学史研究的活力和多样性。李雪涛教授以德国汉学史为例，指出近年来汉学史研究的范式，已经从之前的”内部论”（internalist）或”谱系式”（genealogical）的历史思考方式，转变为了将汉学研究的现象、事件与进程置于”全球脉络”中予以分析，从而形成了一种真正的跨文化全球史研究。

Speaker:
Prof. Li is an expert among other topics on the history of Western China Studies and will address recent central questions of the development of China Studies in the West applying a global history perspective.

The lecture will be held in Chinese.

Global China Conversations #23 Russia’s Ties with China: Helping or Hindering the Yuan in Becoming an International Currency?
2023-07-20 11:00 - 12:00
Registration required

Topic
The “friendship without limits” between China and Russia, which the heads of state of the two countries still affirmed on the occasion of the Winter Olympics in China at the beginning of February 2022, has not lost its significance in the past year since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, even if China has held back from its otherwise pro-Russia position. However, this “friendship” received a new boost with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Russia in March 2023: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, announced that in the future, all oil and gas transactions between Russia and China would be denominated in the Chinese yuan. Will this development help or hinder the Chinese yuan’s path to becoming an international currency? What are the economic and financial challenges behind this yuan peg in oil and gas transactions between the two countries, especially for China? What is the geopolitical significance of this deepened partnership for China, Russia, and also for the West?
Program
The event consists of different impulse lectures followed by a discussion.
The Global China Conversation #23 will be held in English.

Speaker

© Kiel Institute / Studio 23

Rolf Langhammer
Prof. Dr. Rolf J. Langhammer was Vice-President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy from October 1997 until August 2012 and Professor at the Kiel Institute. He retired from the Vice-Presidency on August 31, 2012, but continues to work at the Institute. From April 2003 to September 2004, he served as Acting President. From July 1995 to November 2005, he headed the Research Department “Development Economics and Global Integration” at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Prof. Langhammer has served as a consultant to a number of international institutions (EU, World Bank, OECD, UNIDO, ADB), as well as to the German ministries of economic affairs and economic cooperation.

Alicia García Herrero
Alicia García Herrero is the Chief Economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis CIB. She is also a Director with the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI). Alicia serves as a Senior Fellow at the Brussels-based European think-tank BRUEGEL and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the East Asian Institute (EAI) of the National University Singapore (NUS). Alicia is also Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Finally, Alicia is a Member of the Council of Advisors on Economic Affairs to the Spanish Government and an advisor to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s research arm (HKIMR), among other advisory and teaching positions.
Alicia is very active in international media (such as BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, and CNN) as well as social media (LinkedIn and Twitter). As a recognition of her thought leadership, Alicia was included in the TOP Voices in Economy and Finance by LinkedIn in 2017 and #6 Top Social Media Leader by Refinitiv in 2020.

Moderation

Kandy Wong
Kandy Wong is a correspondent for the Political Economy desk of the South China Morning Post, having earlier worked as a reporter on the Business desk. She focuses on China’s trade relationships with the United States, the European Union, and Australia, as well as the Belt & Road Initiative and currency issues. She graduated from New York University with a master’s degree in journalism in 2013. An award-winning journalist, she has worked in Hong Kong, China, and New York for the Hong Kong Economic Journal and the Financial Times, E&E News, Forbes, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Nikkei Asia, and Coconuts Media.

Contact
Silas Dreier
silas.dreier@ifw-kiel.de

Organizer
Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Registration

> Please use our online form to submit your registration

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Lecture: How to unlock the "Great Potential" of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in Africa?
2023-09-05 06:00 - 19:00 | Oec 0.167
How to unlock the “Great Potential” of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in Africa?
Prof. Dr. Holger Görg (Kiel Institute)
September 5, 2023, 6pm

Oeconomicum 0.167
Organizers: The chair of Development Economics, CeMEAS

Global China Conversations #25 Diversifizierung: Kann Indien eine Alternative zu China sein?
2023-10-26 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom
Thema
Eine alternde Bevölkerung, strukturell schwächeres Wachstum in China und der generelle De-Risking-Tonus lenken alle Augen auf Indien: Während Chinas arbeitsfähige Bevölkerung schrumpft, wird die Indiens wachsen. Investoren sehen in der relativen wirtschaftlichen Autonomie des Landes die Möglichkeit, sich gegen die Auswirkungen einer drohenden, globalen Rezession der international vernetzten Wirtschaft besser zu sichern. Für deutsche Unternehmen kann das Land einen Markt bieten, wo China zunehmend selbst produziert. Selbst erklärtes Ziel der indischen Regierung ist es, bis 2047 das Stadium eines entwickelten Landes zu erreichen. Reformen wie eine einheitliche Mehrwertsteuer und ein einheitlicher Binnenmarkt sind Schritte in die richtige Richtung. Trotzdem bleiben strukturelle Probleme wie Armut, geringe Industrialisierung, protektionistische Maßnahmen, und Korruption bestehen. Das Land unter Narendra Modi sieht außerdem einen Wandel hin zu Hindu-Nationalismus, der in Teilen des Landes zu ethnischen Unruhen führt. Als „größte Demokratie Asiens“ wird Indien als Partner des Westens umworben, während es sich gleichzeitig in den BRICS an die Seite von China und Russland stellt. Bietet gerade dieser Versuch, zwischen den Blocks zu stehen, attraktives Diversifizierungspotential? Oder werden die internen Probleme weiter dazu führen, dass Indien der „ewige Zukunftsmarkt“ bleibt?
In GCC#25 diskutieren wir Indiens wirtschaftliche Zukunft und sein Potential als Diversifikationsziel für deutsche Unternehmen.

Programm
Die Veranstaltung besteht aus Impulsvorträgen der Sprecher gefolgt von einer Diskussion.
Die Global China Conversation #25 wird auf Deutsch abgehalten.

Sprecher

Moritz Schularick

Moritz Schularick ist seit Juni 2023 Präsident des Kiel Instituts für Weltwirtschaft und Professor für Volkswirtschaftslehre an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. In seiner Forschung beschäftigt er sich unter anderem mit Finanzmärkten und Vermögenspreisen, Fragen der monetären Makroökonomie und den Ursachen von Finanzkrisen und ökonomischer Ungleichheit. Vor seinem Ruf nach Kiel war Moritz Schularick Professor für Makroökonomie an der Universität Bonn, Direktor des dortigen MacroFinance Labs und Professor an Sciences Po (Paris). Darüber hinaus ist er Mitglied des Exzellenz-Clusters ECONtribute sowie ordentliches Mitglied der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Academia Europea. Im Laufe seiner akademischen Karriere forschte er unter anderem an der New York University, der University of Cambridge, der Freien Universität Berlin und in der Forschungsabteilung der Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Moritz Schularick ist Preisträger des Leibniz-Preises 2022, Deutschlands wichtigstem Forschungspreis, der von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) vergeben wird. Im Jahr 2018 erhielt er den Gossen-Preis des Vereins für Socialpolitik, die wichtigste Auszeichnung deutscher Volkswirte. Er ist Herausgeber der wichtigsten europäischen Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftspolitik, „Economic Policy“. Er berät regelmäßig Zentralbanken, Finanzministerien, Investoren und internationale Organisationen.

Stefan Halusa
Stefan Halusa trat im September 2020 in die Deutsch-Indische Handelskammer ein und ist seit dem 1. April 2021 ihr Generaldirektor. Er arbeitet von Mumbai aus. Vor seinem Eintritt in die AHK Indien war er fast 30 Jahre in der Industrie tätig, zunächst bei der Winterling Porzellan AG, bevor er 1997 zur Brose Gruppe wechselte. Während seiner Zeit bei Brose hatte er verschiedene leitende Positionen in der Zentrale (VP Strategy und EVP Sales) sowie in Asien inne, wo er als Präsdient Asien, Präsident Korea und Präsident Ostasien tätig war. Stefan Halusa ist Diplom-Kaufmann und hat seinen Abschluss an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München gemacht. Er ist 58 Jahre alt und mit Barbara verheiratet, die Apothekerin ist. Sie haben einen 26-jährigen Sohn.

Florian Wenke
Florian Wenke arbeitet seit März 2020 bei Germany Trade and Invest (GTAI) und ist derzeit als Direktor für Indien, Sri Lanka und die Malediven tätig. GTAI ist die Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Seit März 2021 ist er in Mumbai tätig. Vor seiner jetzigen Tätigkeit war er in verschiedenen Positionen und Organisationen der Außenwirtschaftsförderung tätig und hatte dabei immer ein Auge auf Indien behalten. Er beschäftigt sich seit 2012 mit diesem Land und hat rund 7 Jahren dort gelebt. Florian Wenke hat einen Masterabschluss in Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Er studierte das Fach an der Universität Heidelberg, der Universität Göttingen, der Universität Pune (Indien) und der Universität Innsbruck. Seine wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Interessen sind die Entwicklungsökonomie, die Institutionenökonomie sowie die ökonomische Ideengeschichte.

Moderation

Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk ist Wirtschaftsjournalist mit Schwerpunkt Ostasien. Er leitet die Redaktion des China.Table, des täglichen Professional-Briefings für Experten in Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, Politik und Organisationen. Mayer-Kuckuk hat unter anderem als Peking-Korrespondent für das Handelsblatt und die DuMont-Gruppe gearbeitet und hat später eine Reihe von Medien als Wirtschaftskorrespondent in der Bundespressekonferenz in Berlin vertreten.

Kontakt

Silas Dreier
silas.dreier@ifw-kiel.de

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How the Wild Changed Me. A Philosophical Journey: Readings and Discussions with Lung Ying-Tai
2023-10-26 19:15 - 20:45 | ZHG 002
26 October (Thursday), 19:15 – 20:45
ZHG 002

Abstract:
Snail sex, demanding deities, a cold case – everyday life in Taiwan holds the most unbelievable stories in store. Lung Ying-Tai compiled them in her novel “Under Kavulungan.” In conversation with Dominic Sachsenmaier and Monika Li, Taiwan’s most famous author explores the complex answers to this question. Philosophical young adult novel, nature writing, nativist literature, an escapist zeitgeist portrait, thriller or love story – “Under Kavulungan” offers many ways of reading. On which themes did Lung Ying-Tai’s focus during the writing? Why did she choose southern Taiwan as the stage of her novel?

Bios:
Prof. Lung Ying-Tai (author) is one of Taiwan’s most renowned essayist and cultural critics, whose writing significantly contributed to Taiwan’s democratization. She taught at the University of Hong Kong and Heidelberg University and served as Taiwan’s first minister of culture from 2012 till 2014. With more than 30 published works, she is among the most well-known authors in the Chinese speaking world.

Monika Li (moderator and translator) grew up bilingual – German and Hungarian – and studied German studies, philosophy and Chinese studies in Heidelberg. She received a scholarship of the National Taiwan University in 2009 and lives with her family between Taipei and Berlin, where she translates Taiwanese literature into German.

Moderator:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Language Contact in Eurasia Lectures in 2023
2023-11-16 - 2023-12-14 | Zoom
The Department of Turkology and Central Asian Studies will host a lecture series titled “Language Contact in Eurasia” during the autumn semester of 2023-2024. This series will feature eight lectures by leading scholars on prehistoric and historical contact between various languages or language families spoken in Eurasia and adjacent regions.
The programme for the lectures scheduled for 2023 is as followed. The lectures in 2024 will be announced separately at a later date.
16.11.2023, 18:00 (GMT+1)
Prof. Dr. Hannes Fellner (University of Vienna)
The Linguistic Contact on the Eastern Silk Road
30.11.2023, 18:00 (GMT+1)
Prof. Dr. Martine Robbeets / Rasmus Bjørn / Bingcong Deng / Martijn Knapen (Max Planck Institute – Jena)
Prehistoric Contact Between Transeurasian and Neighbouring Languages
14.12.2023, 18:00 (GMT+1)
Dr. phil. Andreas Hölzl (University of Potsdam)
Manchu as a Contact Language

Participation is free and open to the public. All interested are invited.
Registration is required.
Language Contact in Eurasia – University of Göttingen – Programme 2023
