Speaker: Bin Xu, Associate Professor, Sociology, Emory University

Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory

In the 1960s and 1970s, about 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to the rural areas and the frontiers. In his forthcoming book Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory (Cambridge), Bin Xu tells the story of how this “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) generation, including China’s top leaders, have come to terms with their difficult past in various forms of memory in the past 40 years, including personal life stories, literature, exhibits, museums, and commemorative activities. At the core of this lasting memory boom, however, is their struggle to deal with the tensions between two entangled aspects of memory: their desire to remember their youth and confirm their worthiness on the one hand, and their difficulty in evaluating the controversial send-down program and other political upheavals in the Mao years on the other.

Their memory is used by the state to construct an official narrative, which weaves the leaders’ “adversity-to-success” personal experiences into an upbeat story of “China dream” but avoids addressing the controversial event. The memory boom also marginalizes those zhiqing who are still suffering from the harmful impacts of the program and veils voices of self-reflection on their moral responsibility during the political upheavals in their formative years. This generation of “Chairman Mao’s children” are still caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association. His second book, tentatively titled Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press). His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals.

Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Development Sociology

Ithaca Premiere

1979 > Taiwan/Hong Kong > Directed by King Hu
With Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Chun Shih
Buddhist spirituality suffuses this restored wuxia (martial arts) masterpiece from King Hu. Rival gangs compete to steal a priceless scroll from a monastery in "a remarkably photographed caper heist... [with an] emphasis on the intriguing battles of wits and minds." (Far East Film Festival) Subtitled. More at filmmovement.com/raining-in-the-mountain
2 hrs

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first playdate. Requests received before that time will not be processed.

Shuang Shen is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese, Penn State University

This paper situates Cantonese literature in the context of several key programmatic changes of language in the twentieth-century Sinosphere, including language reforms, language movements, or language policies. It aims to show how Cantonese literature critically engages with “accessibility” as a cultural and political issue through navigating through certain fetishized divisions between the classical and the modern, script and sound, the national and the regional, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese dialect. The paper examines a number of cases drawn from a variety of literary treatises and texts, including Lu Xun’s essays on Hong Kong (1927), Lin Shouling’s serial fiction Diary of a Muddleheaded Man (1950’s), and the documents related to the Chinese Language Movement of early 1970’s.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, 'rough work.' This rough work session is hosted by EAP core faculty member, Andrea Bachner.

Speaker: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder

Abstract: Although infrastructure is conventionally thought of in reference to human-designed systems such as railroads, pipelines, tunnels, and ports, landscapes, and nature itself are also increasingly being understood as infrastructure through terms such as “natural infrastructure” and “green infrastructure,” which tend to focus on the concept of ecosystem services. Taking an infrastructural lens onto natural infrastructure projects in the context of Xi Jinping’s call for ecological civilization, this paper argues that new calculative tools obscure the profoundly political nature of ecological red lines and ecological functional zones, which effectively enframe China’s national territory as an object of optimization. The paper then explores a specific aspect of the project of ecological civilization: campaigns to dismantle and destroy infrastructure deemed to be in violation of environmental regulations. I theorize this as a form of “destructive production” of natural infrastructure and provide two case studies of the dismantling of scenic areas not long after their reconstruction following the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan.

Bio: Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, and co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, and Rural Politics in Contemporary China.

Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Developmental Sociology

Co-sponsored by Cornell Department of Global Development

and The Polson Institute for Global Development

Rescheduled from April, Dr. Daisy Wang will present this year's annual Stoikov Lecture, "Who is Lai Fong? New Perspectives on 19th-Century Photography in China" as a free webinar.

Daisy Wang is deputy director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, which will open its doors in 2022. She was previously the Robert N. Shapiro Curator of Chinese and East Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Chinese art specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (formerly Freer and Sackler). She cocurated the groundbreaking exhibition Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, a collaboration between the Peabody Essex, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Washington, DC, and Beijing’s Palace Museum.

Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography at the Johnson; Stacey Lambrow, curator of the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection; and Yuhua Ding, PhD 2020, former curatorial assistant for Asian art at the Johnson, will share selected research findings from their recent exhibition, Lai Fong (ca. 1839–1890): Photographer of China.

This lecture is supported by the Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund at the Johnson, which was funded by a generous gift from Judith Stoikov, Class of 1963.

Free registration is required to attend this virtual event via Zoom.

The food industry has a long history of driving and shaping low wage labor migration regimes, and around the world agriculture is often a site for large undocumented workforces, exploitative visa arrangements, and a disproportionate share of human trafficking as compared with other industries. Agricultural labor migration schemes have long permitted overcrowded housing and dangerous working conditions, allowing employer retaliation to trigger deportation of workers who speak up about dangerous conditions. Workers and allies in Asia have turned to labor organizing, trade policy, and the United Nations to address these concerns.

Presenter: Beth Lyon, Clinical Professor and Founder, Farmworker’s Legal Assistance Clinic at Cornell Law School

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oHFvyPPjQFWzCAfW6CwEpw

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"

Bios:
Austin M. Aldag (M.R.P. '18) is currently a Ph.D. student within the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. His research agenda focuses broadly on local governance, the delivery of public services, federalism, and inter-governmental relations, all within the United States. Aldag has published in various academic journals, including, but not limited to, The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory; Public Administration Review; Public Management Review; and Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

Yuanshuo Xu (M.R.P. '13, Ph.D. '19) is an assistant professor at Zhejiang University, China, where he studies economic development, state decentralization, and specializes in spatial analysis of the U.S. and China. His work has been published in academic publications like The Journal of Economic Policy Reform, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society. He served as a post-doctoral associate within City and Regional Planning, where he obtained both his M.R.P. and Ph.D. He has a B.S. from the China University of Mining and Technology.

Mark Davidson is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. His current research investigates trends in municipal governance, and he has an international reputation for his research on gentrification and critical urban theory. He holds a B.A. (Hons) and Ph.D. in Geography from King's College London.

Abstract:
Local government fiscal stress can be understood through various lenses. A popular, but misconceived lens in the US and western Europe is austerity urbanism, when the data shows pragmatic municipal responses. A popular lens in China is the growth machine, when asymmetric state rescaling is more accurate. Aldag and Xu will present a set of papers, conducted as part of Professor Warner's Local Government Restructuring Lab. These papers use broad national data and sophisticated modeling techniques to look at the diversity of responses across the U.S. and China and the role of higher levels of government in a multi-scalar governance system. Understanding divergent paths are important as planners attempt to put local government responses to fiscal stress in context. Implications for the coming COVID-19 recession will be discussed.

If you would like to attend this lecture, please email the department (crpinfo@cornell.edu) to receive Zoom information.