Harvard Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies

Speaker: Sheena Greitens, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School, as well as a faculty fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, authoritarian politics, and foreign policy. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Speaker: M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Moderator: Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes, (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other publications have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Studies Review, The China Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Current Histo

Speaker: E. Elena Songster, Professor of History, History Department, Saint Mary’s College of California The giant panda stumbled into ambassador work. Profoundly successful, its diplomatic roles multiplied and evolved, but its persistent existence as an animal repeatedly reframed its role as a diplomat and beyond. Songster discusses findings from her book, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon (Oxford UP), examining the history of the emergence of the giant panda as a national icon and the impact it has had on foreign policy and the natural environment. Elena Songster’s research focuses on the environmental history of modern China. She is currently researching medicinals found in nature through an historical lens. Other research projects include the history of snow leopard conservation and forestry history. Elena Songster teaches classes on Chinese History, Japanese History, Asian History, and World History. She has also taught in the Collegiate Seminar Program, and JanT

Speaker: Anne-Marie Brady, Professor, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Professor Brady is a specialist of Chinese politics (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty scholarly papers. She has written op eds for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Financial Times. Her research has a strong policy focus. In 2017, Professor Brady put her conference paper “Magic Weapons: CCP Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping” online, as the topic was of public interest. The paper has been downloaded more 160, 000 times and has helped spark a debate in New Zealand, as well as internationally, that resulted in a Parliamentary Inquiry into Foreign Interference in New Zealand. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-

Speaker: Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Department of Political Science; Director, Stanford China Program, Stanford University China’s rapidly growing local government debt (LGD) is now branded a “grey rhino,” a known threat that has received little attention. Why did Beijing let LGD get so out of hand? What are the sources of LGD? There is evidence to suggest that no matter how honest and law-abiding local cadres might be, localities are likely to have local government debt. Prof. Oi will argue that LGD stems from a grand bargain between the center and the localities that were made to secure support for the 1994 fiscals reforms. This series of policy decisions institutionalized backdoor financing, creating a “win-win” solution that recentralized tax revenues to Beijing while countering the downsides of fiscal recentralization for the localities. The cost, however, was that China’s economic growth model was increasingly undergirded by mounting LGD, with little transparency and con

Speaker: Kerry Ratigan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Amherst College China is widely known for its strong central government, but the center needs the provinces to implement policies using their knowledge of local conditions. However, provincial priorities sometimes conflict with those of the center. Drawing on research conducted for her forthcoming book, Let Some Get Healthy First: How Local Politics Shaped Social Policy in China, Ratigan shows how local politics have impacted social policy implementation in China. While some provinces tend to closely follow central directives, others resist central policy, sometimes subverting the goals of the central government. Although decentralization in contemporary China peaked in the early 2000s, the impact of local government is still salient despite recent efforts to reign in local actors. Dr. Kerry Ratigan is an assistant professor of Political Science at Amherst College where she currently teaches courses on Chinese politics and social movements. H

Speakers: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, New Silk Road Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs Björn Jerdén, Director, Knowledge Centre on China , Swedish Institute of International Affairs Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Foreign Policy and Diplomacy, Danish Institute for International Studies Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University Nordic and Baltic countries have struggled to develop well-calibrated approaches to cooperation with China and its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Economic incentives or disincentives, human rights, the EU dynamics, security arrangements, and global governance consideration have pulled the agendas of Northern European states in different directions. This panel will discuss the current

Some states have always maintained a sense that they have a mission in the world well beyond the maintenance of domestic order, the United States, France and Britain among them. Japan, China and the Koreas also inherited a strong sense of purpose in the modern era, from Meiji modernization to Mao’s “Three Worlds” and the Belt and Road Initiative, ideas drawing on the longer past – yet the definition of that purpose has been in constant flux. What defines East Asia’s sense of purpose today, can we speak of it in regional terms, and how does it relate to its long history of aspiration to be an intellectual and moral exemplar? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year

Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Jie Li, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University LECTURE 2 OF 3: AN ERA OF EMOTION? One factor that defines Chinese engagement with the world today is its highly emotional character, in terms of self-presentation that can move from saccharine to shrill at remarkable speed. But emotion is not new – the use of the registers from exhilaration to depression defines the way that China, Japan and the Koreas have chosen to present themselves over the past century, whether through (often highly gendered) lenses of Asianism, revolution, martiality, discourses of “national humiliation,” or of global citizenship. How much of this draws on emotional registers defined by modernity, and how much from a repertoire shaped by a culture with much longer roots? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at t

Speaker: Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford Discussant: Odd Arne Westad, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University LECTURE 1 OF 3: HOW NEW IS THE NEW ERA? China’s leaders speak today of a “new era” – but East Asia has seen a range of “new eras” in the modern age, defined by Japan, China, and outsiders who encountered both. What defines that novelty and how familiar are the elements that form part of it? The mid-twentieth century saw war, social change and changing global encounters defined as moments when both China and Japan entered a “new” or “special” era in a global context. What continuities and contrasts are there between the past and the present, and what defines that “newness”? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival,

Speaker: Andrew B. Liu, Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract idea

Speaker: Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan Portrayals of China’s political economy tend to be divided, with one side depicting it as a Confucian-style meritocracy, and the other arguing that the regime is a kleptocracy. In fact, neither view is correct: in the Chinese officialdom, competence and corruption can go hand in hand. Drawing on her new book, China’s Gilded Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Ang underscores that paradoxes define China’s political economy. Chinese growth is speedy yet risky and imbalanced. Corrupt officials worship the pursuit of prosperity. China’s regime is authoritarian yet its regions are decentralized and highly competitive. Understanding China requires that we grasp these seeming paradoxes, which will persist well into the next decade. Yuen Yuen Ang is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributio

Speaker: Andrea Ghiselli, Assistant Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University Moderator: Robert Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate The securitization of non-traditional security issues is a scarcely discussed and, yet, extremely powerful force that shapes the evolution of Chinese foreign and security policy. The lecture will show how this tortuous process deeply shaped China’s approach to the protection of the life and assets of Chinese nationals overseas, an aspect of Chinese foreign policy that is already and will become increasingly important over time. This became evident as, especially after the evacuation of 36,000 Chinese nationals from Libya in 2011, Chinese institutions evolved and issued new regulations that are also aimed at supporting the possible use of the military overseas. Dr. Andrea Ghiselli is an assistant professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He is also t

Experiencing another downturn in its relations with the West, Iran has been more actively “looking to the East” to pursue stronger political and economic cooperation with China. Tehran remains an enthusiastic supporter of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), despite the withdrawal of Chinese companies from a number of projects due to U.S. sanctions. Iran still hopes to benefit from investments, technologies and new connectivity routes promoted under the BRI umbrella. This roundtable will discuss the prospects of Iran becoming a node of the BRI, and the promises and challenges of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy. Speakers: Eyck Freymann, Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford University Nader Habibi, Professor of Practice, Brandeis University Dina Esfandiary, Senior Advisor, International Crisis Group Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harv

Speaker: Deborah Brautigam, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Director of the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: David Yang, Assistant Professor Economics, Harvard University The conventional wisdom suggests a misalignment between autocracy and technological innovation. In this project, we examine whether there exists a political and economic alignment between the monitoring aims of autocracies and the innovative aims of AI firms. We gather comprehensive data on firms and government procurement contracts in China’s facial recognition AI industry. We find two results. First, autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government demands for public security AI, and increased AI investment suppresses subsequent unrest. Second, AI sector benefits from the autocrats: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results indicate a stable equilibrium between the autocrats and the AI sector. Using a directed technical change model, we show that autocrats’ demand for AI not only could enhance its stability, but may also sustain growth and bias i

Philip Thai is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China, with research interests in legal history, economic history, business history, and history of capitalism. He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 (Columbia University Press and a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, published in 2018). The book examines the impact of smuggling and illicit trade in China from the late Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic. The Harvard on China Podcast is hosted by James Gethyn Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Speaker: Eddy U, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis No system of rule has objectified the intellectual as much as communist rule of the twentieth century. Communist regimes codified, identified, and governed part of the general population as intellectuals based on Marxist thought. This talk builds on my recently published book and illustrates how the “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) in China evolved from an obscure classification of people during the 1920s to embodied subjects locatable everywhere after the 1949 revolution. This transformation of the intellectual changed Chinese society, intensifying mass surveillance, political education, and other governing practices. My analytical approach moves the study of the intellectual in modern China into new terrains. I end with an interpretation of the current situation in Hong Kong. Eddy U is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. His book, Creatin

Speaker: David M. Lampton, Hyman Professor Emeritus Johns Hopkins—SAIS; Senior Fellow, SAIS Foreign Policy Institute David M. Lampton is Senior Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins—SAIS. Immediately prior to his current post he was Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2019-2020. For more than two decades prior to that he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Lampton is former Chairman of The Asia Foundation, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS. Among many written works, academic and popular is his most recent book (with Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik), Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an

Speaker: James A. Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University Event Slides: CCP Policies towards Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Indigenous People James A. Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He also teaches as invited professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy. Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ”Silk Roads” series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include Th