Free expression is a human right and cornerstone of a democratic society.

The U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to free expression, but not all those who reside within the country’s borders have equal protection. Some migrants to the U.S. are leaving situations where their rights were threatened, and they embrace the principle of free expression. Those same migrants may find their rights circumscribed when they arrive in the United States.

What can be done to counter threats to free expression for immigrants? How can we protect civil liberties and the law while also protecting human rights and building a diverse, inclusive, and safe society? When is it appropriate to deny visa applications because of a person’s political views?

Our panel of experts will explore these questions in a discussion moderated by Stephen Yale-Loehr (Cornell Law School). This event is hosted by Global Cornell and its Migrations initiative. Learn more about how Global Cornell supports global freedom of expression and Scholars Under Threat.

Panelists

Cecillia Wang, Deputy Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Austin Kocher, Research Assistant Professor, Syracuse UniversityBeth Lyon, Associate Dean for Experiential Education, Clinical Professor of Law, and Clinical Program Director, Cornell Law School Gautam Hans, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Michelle Cho, University of Toronto.

Retro trends in popular media are a common feature of contemporary cultures across the globe. Nowhere is the nostalgia for 20th century vibes more prominent than South Korea. This talk will discuss “new retro”(aka “newtro/뉴트로)” aesthetics in South Korea, focusing on the television drama Reply 1988 and the recent revival of City Pop on digital platforms like YouTube and Spotify. My presentation probes newtro’s multiple genealogies, to situate nostalgia-tinged portrayals of late ‘80s and ‘90s youth culture as Korean media’s self-reflexive portrayal of the impact of commercial popular media on the social transformations of the post-authoritarian period. Connecting newtro to the transmedia domains of City Pop and related genres of music and media production driven by digital distribution and platform engagement, I’ll argue that the aesthetics and sensoria of new retro illuminate the social impacts and ideological effects of contemporary parasocial engagement, to suggest that the trendiness of retro aesthetics today serves as a visible trace of global media entanglements of human and algorithmic agency.

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her published work explores contemporary South Korean genre cinemas, Korean television, K-Pop's politicization on digital platforms, and histories of race and racialization in K-Pop and its fandoms. She is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea with Jesook Song (University of Michigan, April 2024, Perspectives on Contemporary Korea series) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke UP, August 2024) and author of the forthcoming monograph Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema (Duke UP, 2025). Her public-facing writing appears in such venues as The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she's a frequent commentator on Asian media in outlets ranging from NPR to the CBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post. She once hosted a public conversation between hallyu stars and BFFs Lee Jung Jae and Jung Woo Sung at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Introduced by Andrea Bachner, Comparative Literature, Cornell University. This event is part of the East Asia+ Initiative.

The lecture is followed by a reception.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Diana Kim, (Assistant Professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service), who will discuss Japanese colonial legacies in Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

For over a century, Southeast Asia was ruled by multiple European powers. Then, between 1940 and 1945 during World War Two, there was a temporary changing of the colonial guard as the Japanese empire occupied the region. The ideological bases and discourses for arrogating political authority changed, with a self-avowed Asian empire professing to liberate fellow Asians from the old yoke of Western imperialism and build a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was also a time of heightened emotions, both great material losses and gains, as well as extraordinary physical, sexual, and symbolic violence. And in retrospect, it is an era that people remember in different ways, from a time of war, material deprivation and acute hardship, and the indignities of a “double occupation,” to a turning point towards independence and the birth of new nations.

This talk explores the significance of the Japanese occupation (1940-1945) for understanding the legacies of European colonial institutions across Southeast Asia today. It examines how agents of wartime empires stationed across Southeast Asia implemented varieties of formal arrangements for governing territories under Japanese military control that variably destroyed, kept, or altered extant institutions, while sometimes introducing new ones altogether. The Japanese occupation as such, I argue, generated different pathways for transmitting pre-war European colonial institutions into independent Southeast Asia. By exploring these varieties of wartime institution-building processes, this talk grapples more generally with what constitutes a meaningful rupture to historical continuity when studying the long-term effects of colonial institutions upon contemporary outcomes.

About the Speaker

Diana S. Kim is Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She is the award-winning author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press 2020), and is currently writing a new book on global untouchability. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant, and crosses disciplinary boundaries between political science and history, with area focus on Southeast and East Asia.

Speaker: Thunghong Lin, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. Introduced by Eli Friedman (ILR).

In an era where democratic nations globally face the risk of regression, the question arises: How can a small democratic country survive the political and economic pressures imposed by authoritarian great powers? The concept of "democratic resilience" has recently emerged in political science circles. Lin's new book, "Stormy Seas: Taiwan's Democracy under the Shadow of China in the 21st Century," uses Taiwan as a case study to analyze China's authoritarian influence. This influence is sometimes referred to as "Sharp power," an international relations strategy that impacts Taiwan's election outcomes. In this lecture, Lin explores China's strategies of authoritarian expansion toward Taiwan, including United Front tactics, economic interests, propaganda, and the influence of military intimidation. These strategies interact with three major political cleavages in Taiwan: ethnic and national identity, economic disparities, and generational differences. The dynamics of Taiwan's elections are shaped by the interplay between these strategies and political cleavages.

Lin is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, and the former director of the Center for Contemporary China at Tsinghua University (Taiwan). His research interests include social stratification, political sociology, and sociology of disasters. He received the Golden Tripod Award (National Book Award in Taiwan 2012), the Wu Ta-You Memorial Award (National Young Scholar Award in Taiwan 2015), and the Fulbright Scholarship for 2023-24. He is the Stanford-Taiwan Social Science fellow for 2023-24.

Youngju Ryu, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

University of Michigan

“President by Night” is the infamous nickname Park Chung Hee once gave to Pang Il-yŏng, the head of Chosun ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily newspaper. The nickname reveals the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the press and political regimes in authoritarian South Korea, which continued well past the transition to procedural democracy in 1987. Transforming itself from a watchdog to a lapdog to an attack dog, mainstream news media has continued to serve as a powerful stakeholder in the maintenance of conservative political regimes and agendas in twenty-first-century South Korea. Against this backdrop, the rise of new media as news media in the “post-broadcast” age, which took off with the internet, exploded with the podcast, and achieved dominance with YouTube, has been led by an irreverent and iconoclastic maverick named Kim Ou-joon. Tracing Kim's career over three decades from the founding of an internet newspaper to the launch of the wildly popular political podcast Nakkomsu, and to the recent establishment of a YouTube news channel that reached a million subscribers in the first three days of its livecast, this talk will map Kim’s sustained search for what he has termed an “alternate messaging system” onto­ the political and media terrains of his times to interrogate the relationship between media and democracy in twenty-first century South Korea.

Introduced and moderated by: Ivanna Yi, (Korean Studies)

Discussant: Shiqi Lin, a current Klarman Postdoc in Asian Studies

This is the inaugural lecture in the East Asia Program's Korean Studies speaker series fostered by faculty members, Ivanna Yi (Asian Studies) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies.) Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature.

Bio: Youngju Ryu is a specialist in modern Korean literature with research interests in politics and aesthetics of protest, cultures of authoritarianism, and mediatized publics in modern Korea. Introduced by professors Ivanna Yi (Asian Studies) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies).

Ji Li, of US-China Business and Law at UC Irvine, will discuss his book titled Negotiating Legality: Chinese Companies in the U.S. Legal System (soon to be published in May 2024 by Cambridge University Press). Introduced by Yun-chien Chang, the Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law.

Refreshments provided with RSVP .

Book description: Despite escalating geopolitical rivalry, the US and China continue to be economically intertwined. Numerous Chinese companies have made substantial investments in the US and are reluctant to exit this strategically important market. While the global expansion of Chinese companies has ignited intense policy and academic debates, their interactions with complex host-state legal systems have largely escaped systematic examination. To fill this knowledge gap, Negotiating Legality introduces a dual institutional framework and applies it to analyzing extensive interviews and multi-year survey data, thereby shedding light on how Chinese companies develop in-house legal capacities, engage with US legal professionals, and navigate litigation in US courts. As the first comprehensive investigation of these crucial topics, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in China's rise, its global impacts-especially on the legal systems of developed nations like the US-and the intricate dynamics of US-China relations.

Y.S. Lee, author of Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia (Anthem Press, 2023) and Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School speaks about his book which examines the causes of long-standing and complex tensions in the region and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace there. Introduced by Yun-chien Chang, Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law.

RSVP is required as space is limited. Please note, lunch is available to the first 15 who RSVP.

Uris Hall 204.

Includes a light lunch.

This event is co-sponsored by the Reppy Insitute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

More about the book: Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia examines the causes of these complex tensions in Northeast Asia and their underlying political, historic, military, and economic developments. It further discusses their political-economic implications for the world and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace in the region. This book offers a unique approach to these important issues by examining the perspectives of each constituent country in Northeast Asia: China, South and North Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, and their respective roles in the region. Major global powers, such as the United States and Russia, have also closely engaged in the political and economic affairs of the region through a network of alliances, diplomacy, trade, and investment. The book discusses the influence of these external powers, their political and economic objectives in the region, their strategies, and the dynamics that their engagement has brought to the region. Both South Korea and North Korea have sought reunification of the Korean peninsula, which will have a substantial impact on the region. The book examines its justification, feasibility and effects for the region. The book also discusses the role of Mongolia in the context of the power dynamics in Northeast Asia. A relatively small country, in terms of its population, Mongolia has rarely been examined in this context; Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia makes a fresh assessment on its potential role.

Animating Forces by Andrew Schonebaum.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). We are pleased to welcome Andrew Schonebaum, East Asian Studies, Maryland University to lead this month's text-reading.

Liaozhai zhiyi, like other anomalous account collections, is a curious text.  It not only records curiosities of the natural world – enormous bugs, tiny animals, and suchlike, it is curious about particular topics, investigating (in brief, but repeatedly), things that seem inexplicable – that dragons could die, or that foxes could evade the punishment of thunder. Liaozhai examines the stuff of life - the animating force, souls, human forms, and zombies (jiangshi 僵屍 /  殭屍). It asks, what is the difference between a body that is alive and one that is dead?  What transformation takes place in the moment of death?  Life itself – what animates a body is the ultimate object of inquiry into the unseen, and one that still fascinates.  We are of course, always gathering first-hand information about our bodies, and yet, as a natural object what makes it go, is elusive. We will read “Woman from Changzhi” 長治女子 about a Daoist who steals the life anima of a woman to bring alive a wooden doll. We will also consider other records that detail the legal and moral menace of "plucking life" (caisheng 採生).  

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.

The Emergence of the Yuan non-Han Ancestry in Late Qing North China by Tomoyasu Iiyama, Waseda University.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 , a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文), is thrilled to welcome Tomoyasu Iiyama, of Waseda University, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Yenching Institute to present the first text-reading of the spring semester!

This text-reading attempts to shed light on the largely unknown trajectories of the resurgence and evolution of Yuan non-Han ancestries in North China from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. By exploring three relatively well-documented cases of the resurgence of the Yuan non-Han ancestry, this text-reading offers two tentative conclusions. First, the commemoration of the non-Han ancestries seems to have been roused by the two-century-long Gazetteers of the Great Qing Empire compilation project, throughout which the state reiterated extensive surveys of local worthies, widow chastity, and martyred loyal subjects, including those from the previous dynasties. Second, apart from the intention of the Qing court, gazetteer compilation projects functioned as a classification project of some kind, if not ethnicity. The ancestries classified by the Qing came to compete with modern minzu identities classified by the Ethnic Classification Project during the mid-twentieth century.

More information: 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.Advanced registration is required.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) is excited to welcome Meg Rithmire, Business Administration, Harvard Business School to speak on, "The Dangerous Politics of State-Business Relations in Contemporary China."

Why have relations between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese private-sector business elites gone from “co-optation” and “cronyism” to crackdowns and emigration? Drawing on her book (Precarious Ties, Oxford University Press 2023) and related work on the turn to security in China’s political economy, Meg Rithmire traces the current crackdown to the long presence of distrust between political and business elites in China and the CCP’s partial liberalization of the financial sector over the last 20 years.

Introduced by EAP director, Jeremy Wallace (Government).

CCCI brings together scholars, researchers, and students with sustained research interests in contemporary China. In response to widely expressed needs related to contemporary China across campus, CCCI invites leaders in the field to give talks on an array of interdisciplinary issues about the current Chinese economy, politics, and society.