East Asia Program Lecture Series Presents "Studying China in the Absence of Access: Relearning a Lost Art"

Speaker: Andrew Mertha, Director of the SAIS China Research Center, George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Description: As our access to Chinese data sources becomes increasingly constrained, many China scholars outside China have been scrambling to find new and innovative ways to mitigate these trends. One promising avenue is dusting off the tools Sinologists utilized from the 1960s through the 1970s, when it was impossible to contemplate the access that many of us have been able to take for granted, but which allowed these scholars to get so many things about China right. What are these skills—the analytical tools and the strategies to deploy them—and how might we be able to adapt them to the current research climate (and the foreseeable future)? This is the subject of the SAIS China Research Center’s first publication, featuring four eminent Pekingologists – Joe Fewsmith, Tom Fingar, Alice Miller, and Fred Tiewes. I present our findings here.

Refreshments will be provided.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

East Asia Program presents "Lilting."

About the film: Junn, played by the beloved late Cheng Pei-Pei, is an elderly Cambodian Chinese widow still grappling with the death of her son, Kai. Her life is further complicated by Richard (Ben Whishaw), Kai’s boyfriend, seeking to build a more intimate connection despite their language barriers. With the help of a translator, the two uneasily embark on a journey of mutual understanding, transforming the prickly relationship into tethered solace. Through its non-linear narrative, Lilting delivers a tremendously insightful study of loss and coping, of fractured memories and graceful acceptance. Hong Khaou’s Lilting reminds us that grief can be a delicate bridge, a thin lifeline that transcends language and cultural barriers.

Free Admission! Part of our “Love, Loss, and Longing” series. Courtesy of Strand Releasing. In English and Mandarin (with subtitles).

About the screening series:

Join us for a two-part screening series offering tender glimpses into queerness centered on East and Southeast Asian contexts. Seen through the eyes of diasporic directors—Cambodian British Hong Khaou and Vietnamese American Leon Le—Lilting and Song Lang weave delicate, lyrical narratives to contemplate unexpected connections. Both debut feature films speak not only to the happenstance of those who enter our lives but also to the ephemerality of these relationships.

This series celebrates queer Asian filmmakers who employ cinematic language to traverse difficult spaces, reminding us of the playful gestures that films can offer to resituate our understanding of presence and absence, of memory and healing, and of intimacy and unspoken emotions.
Featuring:
Lilting (2014, dir. Hong Khaou)
Wednesday, March 5, at 6pm
Song Lang (2018, dir. Leon Le)
Wednesday, March 12, at 6pm

Sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and co-presented by QGrads, Cornell’s LGBTQIA2S+ Graduate Student Association.
"Love, Loss, and Longing" is curated by Vince Ha, a Fulbright visiting researcher for the Southeast Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Talk by Peter Lavelle (Associate Professor, Department of History University of Connecticut)

In the 1850s, when the Taiping Rebellion threw the finances of the Qing Empire into disarray, officials scrambled to prevent their empire from crumbling. In Xinjiang, they enacted a raft of measures to urgently make up for the loss of financial support from Beijing. These measures ranged from the liquidation of state-owned livestock herds to the widespread impressment of Turkestani Muslims in agriculture and mining. Conventional histories of the Taiping-era financial crisis have often linked it to the long-term institutional development of the modern Chinese fiscal state in the context of world history. By contrast, this paper takes a short-term and regionally-focused view of history in the mid-nineteenth century, showing that the financial crisis led to distinct patterns in the exploitation of people and resources in Qing Central Asia.

Peter Lavelle is a specialist in Chinese history during the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on topics related to the environment, agriculture, science and technology, and colonialism. He is currently working on a book about Chinese agricultural science and development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research has been supported by funding from a variety of sources, including the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Program. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut, he was a member of the History faculty at Temple University.

Speaker: Eric S. Lee, Cornell University

Accidental Status: Reassessing Protection Privilege in Northern Song (960-1127)

Lee writes:

Much of what we have been told about governance during middle and late imperial China revolves around the narrative of a meritocracy created and maintained by the civil service examination system. Against an earlier emphasis on the emergence of social fluidity in the tenth and eleventh centuries, this project contributes to the current scholarship by revealing alternative systems underpinning the social reproduction of the ruling elite and explores their far-reaching consequences for the state-society relationship. In particular, this project analyzes the role of the protection privilege system, or yinbu 蔭補, in northern China during the Northern Song (960-1127). As a primary channel of bureaucratic recruitment, the protection privilege granted hereditary access to political status and social privilege to family members of qualified officials. By a rough estimate, its recipients constituted at least one-third of the entire Song official roster. However, for such a statistically significant method of social reproduction, protection privilege has yet received attention proportionate to its social implications in English, Chinese, and Japanese scholarship.

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.A light dinner will be served.