Pu Wang, Professor of Chinese, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature, at Brandeis University, traces the outburst of the writing of long poems by mainland Chinese poets since the turn of the century. These longer experimental texts, together with the debates revolving around them, have formed a key yet controversial intervention into contemporary cultural-political changes in China and beyond.

Pu Wang is an Associate Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (2018). He is also an acclaimed poet writing in Chinese, having published two books of verse. He translated Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life into Chinese.

Introduced by Kevin Dong, PhD Asian Studies graduate student; co-hosted by the EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee

Please note: this event will not be recorded and is solely in-person unless special access is required due to accessibility needs.

Timothy Cheek, History, University of British Columbia kicks off this semester's CCCI lecture series with the theme of "China, the Central State and All Under Heaven."

How is China governed? It is a question on our minds today as the rule of Xi Jinping in China challenges American hopes and stokes our fears. Is it Communist? Capitalist? Confucian? Making sense of Chinese statecraft, or of how any state is governed, requires not only political analysis but also some sense of the context, inherited problems, sense of self, that is, of its history.

This is a fundamental historiographical challenge: how and in what ways can knowledge of past practice inform our understanding of later or current practice? How can specific knowledge of history inform, deepen, challenge, and open up new questions about what we think we know of our present rather than simply reinforcing our current assumptions and prejudices?

This lecture explores that challenge to the practice of history through the example of one sort of governance—state-sponsored, village-based local public education in civic virtues. This state attempt to create ideal subjects began with the Confucians of the early 11th century, continued in rural education programs in Republican China in the 1930s, re-emerged in Communist ideological remolding campaigns under Mao, and appeared once again in political study sessions in Xi Jinping’s China today.

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

Whose Tianxia? Imagining the Great Qing in Post-Imperial China

Fei-Hsien Wang, History, Indiana University Bloomington

Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) lecture series

How should the geographical and ethnic boundary of “China” be defined after the fall of the Qing Empire? Did China become just a nation among nations, or should it retain the vision of being the overseer of “all under Heaven”? How should the modern (Han) Chinese states and society come to terms with the Manchu imperial glory? Wang explores cases ranging from the popular history in the early Republic period, martial art novels and cinema from the Cold War Hong Kong, and twenty-first-century internet novels and TV drama, to demonstrate how (Han) Chinese authors, audiences, and the state confront, negotiate, and reconcile with the tension between their uncomfortable longing for greatness, the modern Han-centered Chinese nationalism, and the imperial legacy of a Manchu/non-Han “prosperous age.”

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

Our semester's first Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium text-reading will be led by Megan Bryson, Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee.

The Dali kingdom (937–1253), centered in what is now southwest China’s Yunnan province, left behind several ritual texts that have not been found elsewhere. This short section on “Inviting the White Vajra Being” thus resonated far beyond the spatial and temporal confines of the Dali kingdom.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). 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.

The Supreme Court of Japan (SCJ) has been described as the most conservative and passive constitutional court in the world. The small number of times the Japanese Supreme Court has struck down statutes as unconstitutional is an argument for such a statement. However, the SCJ has provided important decisions to control legislative and executive power in fields related to the democratic political process, such as the right to vote and freedom of expression.

Masahiko Kinoshita, Graduate School of Law, University of Kobe, Japan gives this talk.

In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power for a long time. Nevertheless, the fact that Japan has been able to maintain democracy without falling into authoritarianism is largely dependent on the SCJ's accumulation of precedents. This talk will discuss the active aspects of the SCJ in the democratic political process, which have not received much attention so far.

Faculty host and moderator: Yun-chien Chang, the Cornell Law School Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law

Discussant: Mitchell Lasser, Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law

This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia program and the Cornell Law School Clarke East Asia Law Program.

Karl Gerth, History, UC San Diego

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism.

Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949-1976) down to the present.

Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire – wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges – Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people’s lives.