Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

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 The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: a History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His most recent album, recorded with the band By & By, is Songs for this Old Heart. His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Global Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.

Speakers: Fred Hu, Founder and Chairman, Primavera Capital Group Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College David Daokui Li, Founding Dean of the Schwarzman Scholars program, Mansfield Freeman Professor of Economics, and Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE), Tsinghua University Yuan Ming, Dean of Yenching Academy, Peking University Moderator: William Kirby, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard University; Chairman, Harvard China Fund Introductions by: Winnie (Chi-Man) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard-China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Speaker: Edward Cunningham, Director of Ash Center China Programs and of the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.

Speakers: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Duke University Mary Augusta Brazelton, The University of Cambridge Miriam Gross, The University of Oklahoma Elanah Uretsky, Brandeis University Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Mary Augusta Brazelton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Cambridge. Miriam Gross is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. Elanah Uretsky is an Associate Professor of International and Global Studies at Brandeis University.

Speaker: Kristen Looney, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government, Georgetown University Moderator/Discussant: Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business of Administration, Harvard Business School This talk tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. Looney’s research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China’s development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the research enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change. Kristen Looney is an assistant professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance and has previously appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. She is the author of Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). She holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.

Speaker: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University Pardee School of International Relations and Political Science.

Moderator: Arthur Kleinman, Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Panelists: Xiao Shuiyuan, Professor, Central South University, Xianya School of Public Health. Yifeng Xu, President, Shanghai Mental Health Center; Head & Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; Director, WHO/Shanghai Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Mental Health. Vikram Patel, The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Co-Founder and Member of Managing Committee, Sangath. Cindy Liu, Director, Developmental Risk and Cultural Resilience Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School. Host and Commentator: Winnie Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director, Harvard China Health Partnership; Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Sponsored by the Harvard China Health Partnership and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Cosponsored by the Mittal South Asia Insitute.

Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School. Moderator: Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University; Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton; Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama. Introduction by: Winnie Chi-Man Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population; Faculty Director, Harvard China Health Partnership, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; Interim Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, Harvard Kennedy School.

Speaker: Covell Meyskens, Assistant Professor of Chinese History, Naval Postgraduate School In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of15 million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. Drawing on a rich collection of archival documents, memoirs, and oral interviews, Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change. Covell Meyskens is Assistant Professor of Chinese history in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He works on capitalist and anti-capitalist development in modern China, especially as it relates to building big infrastructure projects. His first book, Mao’s Third Front: Militarization of Cold War China, published by Cambridge University Press, examines how the Chinese Communist Party industrialized inland regions in order to protect socialist China from American and Soviet threats. His second book project, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Hydraulic Engine for China, analyzes state-led efforts to transform China’s Three Gorges region into a hydraulic engine to power national development in the twentieth century. Currently, he is in the process of developing a third project on changing conceptions of national security in modern China. Dr. Meyskens also curates a website of images of everyday life in Maoist China. Meyskens is the author of articles and book chapters on Chinese railroads, the Three Gorges Dam, Sino-North Korean relations, Maoist visual culture, globalization, radio in Mao’s China, and racial violence in the Pacific War.

Speakers: Judith Shapiro, Director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service, American University Yifei Li, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai,Global Network Assistant Professor, New York University; Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. In the 2020-2021 academic year, he is also Residential Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. His research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, and the China Times Cultural Foundation, among other extramural sources. He is coauthor (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. His recent work appears in Current Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, and other scholarly outlets. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bachelor’s from Fudan University. Judith Shapiro is Director of the Masters in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development for the School of International Service at American University and Chair of the Global Environmental Politics program. She was one of the first Americans to live in China after U.S.-China relations were normalized in 1979, and taught English at the Hunan Teachers’ College in Changsha, China. She has also taught at Villanova, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and the Southwest Agricultural University in Chongqing, China. She was a visiting professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. Professor Shapiro’s research and teaching focus on global environmental politics and policy, the environmental politics of Asia, and Chinese politics under Mao. She is the author, co-author or editor of nine books, including (with Yifei Li) China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity 2020), China’s Environmental Challenges (Polity 2016), Mao’s War against Nature (Cambridge University Press 2001), Son of the Revolution (with Liang Heng, Knopf 1983), After the Nightmare (with Liang Heng, Knopf 1987), Cold Winds, Warm Winds: Intellectual Life in China Today (with Liang Heng, Wesleyan University Press 1987), Debates on the Future of Communism (co-edited with Vladimir Tismaneanu, Palgrave 1991), and, together with her mother Joan Hatch Lennox, Lifechanges: How Women Can Make Courageous Choices (Random House, 1991). Dr. Shapiro earned her Ph.D. from American University’s School of International Service. She holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and another M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her B.A. from Princeton University is in Anthropology and East Asian Studies.

Speaker: Jeffrey Bader, Senior Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution Jeffrey Bader is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. From 2009 until 2011, Bader was special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs at the National Security Council. In that capacity, he was the principal advisor to President Obama on Asia. Bader served from 2005 to 2009 as the director of the China Initiative and, subsequently, as the first director of the opens in a new windowJohn L. Thornton China Center. During his three decade career with the U.S. government, Bader was principally involved in U.S.-China relations at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In 2001, as assistant U.S. trade representative, he led the United States delegation in completing negotiations on the accession of China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization. Bader served as a Foreign Service officer in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Namibia, Zambia, Congo, and the United States Mission to the United Nations. During the 1990s, he was deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia; director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council; and director of the State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs. He served as U.S. ambassador to Namibia from 1999 to 2001. Bader is the author of opens in a new window“Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy,” published in 2012 by Brookings Institution Press. He is president and sole proprietor of Jeffrey Bader LLC, which provides assistance to companies with interests in Asia. Bader received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s and doctorate in European history from Columbia University. He speaks Chinese and French. Please note, Jeffrey A. Bader is not associated with the Joe Biden for President Campaign.

Speakers: David Fedman, Assistant Professor of History,University of California, Irvine Ian M. Miller, Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College David Fedman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020). His other publications include “The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Article Prize. Ian M. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at St. John’s University in New York. He is the author of Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020). His current research is on the role of lineage organizations in regulating village environments, provisionally titled Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in South China. This lecture is part of the Environment in Asia Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Fei-Hsien Wang, Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington Examining a wide range of cultural products and genres from the late nineteenth century to the present, this talk traces the evolution of the vernacular myths and popular fantasies about Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). As China’s cultural economy and political climate transforms overtime, new stories and myths about Qianlong emerge to satisfy the changing desires of the audience as well as the political authorities. These popular cultural products have gradually shaped a common historical memory that takes the place of Qing “history” in most (Han) Chinese audience’s minds, despite generations of specialists’ effort to debunk it. The voracious fascination with this most accomplished Manchu emperor, however, has been an uneasy one. At the core of the vernacular fantasies of Qianlong lies the unsolved tension between the modern Han/Chinese nationalism and the legacy of a non-Han “prosperous age” (shengshi). The unofficial endorsement by the PRC leaders of using High Qing to talk about a great China further prolongs the career of the vernacular Qianlong. Fei-Hsien Wang is a historian of modern China, with a particular interest in how information, ideas, and practices were produced, transmitted, and consumed across different societies in East Asia. Fei-Hsien Wang’s research has revolved around the relations between knowledge, commerce, and political authority after 1800. Co-sponsored by the Joint Center for History and Economics. This lecture is part of the Modern China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School. This lecture is part of the Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

Speaker: Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore Wang Gungwu is University Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2007, and Emeritus Professor of Australian National University since 1988. He is Foreign Honorary Member of the History Division of the American Academy of Arts and Science and former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He received his BA and MA from University of Malaya (UM) in Singapore, and PhD at SOAS, London. His early teaching career was in the UM History Department at Singapore and then at Kuala Lumpur, and held the History Chair at UM in KL (1963-1968). He was then appointed to the Chair of Far Eastern History at The Australian National University (1968-1986). From 1986 to 1995, he was Vice-Chancellor (President) of The University of Hong Kong. In Singapore, he was Director of the East Asian Institute till 2007. His books include The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea. New Edition (1998); The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (2000); Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: war, trade, science and governance (2003); Divided China: Preparing for reunification, 883-947 (2007); Renewal: The Chinese State and the New Global History (2013); and Another China Cycle: Committing to Reform (2014).