Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Over the past three decades, China has become a major trade partner and investor for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. The region is also an important component of the BRI New Eurasian Land Bridge, providing alternative access to Western Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shaking up China’s plans and prospects in this part of Eurasia. With the closing of borders between Russia and the EU, China’s long-term interests are arguably at risk. The war is also resulting in geopolitical shifts and hardening divisions between the West on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. This panel discusses China’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the impact that today’s dramatic developments will have on China’s presence in Eastern Europe and its BRI plans.

Panelists:

Jinghan Zeng

Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University and Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova

Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, Asia Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs

Jeremy Garlick

Director of the J. Masaryk Centre of International Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations and China Studies at Prague University of Economics and Business

Arseny Sivitsky

Co-Founder and Director of Minsk-based Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy 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

This event is sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Speaker: Stephen Kaplan, Associate Professor of Political Science and Economic Affairs, George Washington University

Discussant: Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

This book explores how China’s state-led capitalism affects national level governance. China, as the world’s largest saver, has more than doubled its overseas banking presence since the 2008 global financial crisis. Compared to the West’s private-sector capital, China’s overseas financing is a distinct form of patient capital that marshals the country’s vast domestic financial resources to create commercial opportunities internationally. Its long-term horizon, high risk tolerance, and lack of policy conditionality have allowed developing economies to sidestep the fiscal austerity tendencies of Western markets and multilaterals. Employing a multi-method research strategy that includes statistical tests and extensive field research from across China and Latin America, this book finds that China’s patient capital endows national governments more room to maneuver in formulating their domestic economic policies. This book also evaluates the potential costs of Chinese financing, raising the question of how Chinese lenders will deal with developing nations’ ongoing struggles with debt and dependency.

Globalizing Patient Capital is targeted toward a broad audience within political science, economics, Latin American politics, and Asian studies but is especially relevant for scholars of the political economy of finance, globalization and development, the politics of economic policymaking, and US-China relations. By disaggregating the structure of international finance, this book also offers new insights about globalization and development, demonstrating that the type of international capital (state vs. market) can influence the extent of national-level policy discretion.

This event is part of the China Economy Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Meg Rithmire.

Speaker: Cheng Li, Director, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution

Moderator/Discussant: Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the opens in a new windowHarvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University

Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change, the Chinese middle class, and technological development in China.

Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, he came to the United States, where he received a master’s in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. From 1993 to 1995, he worked in China as a fellow sponsored by the Institute of Current World Affairs in the U.S., observing grassroots changes in his native country. Based on this experience, he published a nationally acclaimed book, “Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform” (1997).

Li is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including “China’s Leaders: The New Generation” (2001), “Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange 1978-2003” (2005), “China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy” (2008), “China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation” (2010), “The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress” (in Chinese, 2012), “The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign” (2012), “China’s Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives” (2014), “Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership” (2016), “The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China” (2017), and “Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement” (Spring 2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title “Xi Jinping’s Protégés: Rising Elite Groups in the Chinese Leadership”. He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.

This event is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. This event is introduced and moderated by Professor Elizabeth J. Perry.

Speakers:

Ashley Esarey, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta

Joanna Lewis, Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA),Georgetown University

Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University

Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology and School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington

Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College

Ashley Esarey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and was An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His research concerns political communication in China, elite politics, renewable energy policy, and Taiwanese politics. He was co-author (with Lu Hsiu-lien) of My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman’s Journey from Prison to Power. His co-edited books include Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization and Greening East Asia: The Rise of the Eco-Developmental State, both published by the University of Washington Press in 2020.

Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her research examines political and technical determinants of energy and climate policy, particularly in China. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.

Mary Alice Haddad is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. A Fulbright and Harvard Academy scholar, she is the author of Effective Advocacy: Lessons from East Asia’s Environmentalists (MIT press, forthcoming 2021), Building Democracy in Japan (Cambridge, 2012) and Politics and Volunteering in Japan (Cambridge, 2007), and she co-edits the new Elements in Politics and Society in East Asia series from Cambridge University Press. Her current work concerns environmental politics in East Asia, as well as how urban diplomacy is connecting and transforming policy around the world.

Stevan Harrell retired in 2017 from the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. A special issue of Human Ecology on Social-Ecological System Resilience in China, co-edited with Denise M. Glover and Jack Patrick Hayes, will appear in February. He is writing an ecological history of modern China, provisionally entitled either Intensification and its Discontents or The Great Un-Buffering. He also edits the University of Washington Press series, Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.

This event is part of the Environment in Asia public lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, organized by Professor Ling Zhang.

Speaker: Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work focuses on urban development, governance, architecture, and the built environment in global perspective.She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is currently working on two new projects. The first project examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban governance in six countries, including China, the United States, Canada, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. The second project compares culture-led revitalization in post-industrial cities, with Detroit, Harbin, and Turin as case studies. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (2021-2023). She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Evan Medeiros, Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and the Cling Family Senior Fellow in US-China Relations, Georgetown University

Evan S. Medeiros is a professor and Penner family chair in Asia studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has published several books and articles on East Asia, U.S.-China relations, and China’s foreign and national security policies. He regularly provides advice and commentary to global corporations and international media in his current role as Senior Advisor with The Asia Group.

Dr. Medeiros’ background is a unique blend of regional expertise and government experience. He served for six years on the staff of the National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and then as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia. In the latter role, Dr. Medeiros was President Barack Obama’s top advisor on the Asia-Pacific and was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific across areas of diplomacy, defense policy, economic policy, and intelligence. Prior to joining the White House, Medeiros worked for seven years as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. From 2007 to 2008, he also served as policy advisor to Secretary Hank Paulson Jr., working on the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Dr. Medeiros holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.Phil in international relations from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in China studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a B.A. in analytic philosophy from Bates College.

Dr. Medeiros is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a member of the International Advisory Board of Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Bernadette Meehan, and they have a daughter, Amelia.

This lecture is the 2021 Annual Neuhauser Lecture, presented at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats. Xiangmao soap was featured in the first ever trademark litigation trial in China held in 1889. In that trial, it became evident that the emerging global trademark regime was premised on an Orientalist understanding of the Chinese character as ideograph. A second case in 1919 that also featured the alleged counterfeiting of the Xiangmao brand then reveals how the homophonic nature of Chinese and the issue of dialect were often the basis of wordplay and punning in Chinese trademarks, and that international trademark law was unable to accommodate these practices. The key legal premise that an offending trademark rested on its function to deceive the public prevented the system from recognizing (and thus, successfully prosecuting) marks that while likely to have been emulative, turned precisely on a knowing audience, willing to purchase the “counterfeit” because of the witty pun or wordplay at work. Both bring to the fore how the emerging trademark regime was premised on romance languages and failed to appreciate the complexity of both the Chinese language and the nature of the Chinese consumer market. Hardly marks that purposefully deceived in acts of “passing off,” so-called “spurious” marks aided (and arguably abetted) knowledgeable and appreciative consumers in their wily acts of consumption and were part of a larger market of rogue knock-offs in China that eluded the emerging trademark regime in the early twentieth-century and that continue to elude the global IP today.

Eugenia Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, affect studies and gender, as well as law and urban society. She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia. She is the author of Public Passions: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (UC Press, 2007) which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association.

Professor Lean’s second book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in theMaking of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the manufacturing, commercial and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early twentieth century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing and was marked by heterogeneous, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work.

This event is part of the Modern China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.

China is constantly in the global media limelight due to its growing presence and influence throughout the world. Journalists reporting on this rising superpower play a crucial role in explaining the complexities of its domestic developments and international activities to local publics. This is a formidable task, made even more difficult by the increasingly constrained environment in China forcing most critical journalists leave the country and work from outside its borders. This panel brings together reporters from different parts of the world to discuss how they see their role in shaping and challenging narratives on China and how they approach challenges that they face in conducting their work.

Speakers:

Ananth Krishnan

China Correspondent, The Hindu Newspaper

Hui (Lulu) Ning

Senior International News Journalist, Initium Media

Alexander Gabuev

Senior Fellow and Chair, Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program, Carnegie Moscow Center

Moderator:

Lucy Hornby

Visiting Scholar, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

Organizers:

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

This event was co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Joan Judge, Professor, Department of History, York University

What can we learn from intellectual detritus? Focusing on cheap print, vernacular daily-use knowledge, and common readers in the Long Republic (1895-1955), this talk argues that the books an age discards as slipshod and unscientific, and the readers it disparages as superstitious and ignorant, comprise the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change is actualized. Premised on the notion that what we currently know about China’s iconic 20th-century revolutions does not explain enough, it shifts our attention from innovation to ingenuity, from “knowledge what” to “knowledge how,” from the momentous to the mundane—without losing sight of the momentous. The talk first introduces a project on “China’s Mundane Revolution” that is based on some 500, largely unstudied, daily-use texts, together with material gathered from the interstices of various archives. It then zeros in on one of the “how to” topics in the study: “how to treat a cholera infection.” Examining the ways individual common readers might have approached “the most spectacular ‘new’ disease of the nineteenth century,” the example highlights the dynamic processes of scientizing vernacular and vernacularizing scientific forms of knowledge. It also raises questions about the ways these processes align—or misalign—with the various iterations of mass politics in this critical period.

Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada.She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project, China’s Mundane Revolution: Cheap Print, Vernacular Knowledge, and Common Reading in the Long Republic, 1894–1955.

This presentation is part of the Modern China Lecture Series, hosted by Professor Arunabh Ghosh.

Speaker: Scott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford University

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.

His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.

This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China lecture series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.