Speaker:

Chih-Jou Jay Chen, Director of Institute of Sociology, Research Fellow, Academia SinicaPanelists:

Victor Nee, Frank and Rosha Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and SocietyPeter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International StudiesNaoki Sakai, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies

Description: This study compares perceptions in China and Taiwan regarding military unification and threat. Drawing on recent national survey data in China and long-term representative surveys in Taiwan, the findings reveal a widening gap. Many in China favor the use of force and often assume strong support for unification in Taiwan, though views differ across social groups and fall into distinct orientations ranging from moderates to militant hardliners. In Taiwan, confidence in China’s development has steadily declined, more people view China as a threat, and unification support remains marginal. Preference for maintaining the status quo is dominant, while support for independence has grown. Despite consistent willingness to resist aggression, confidence in Taiwan’s defense capacity has weakened, alongside stronger expectations of U.S. support. These mutually reinforcing perceptions sustain polarization across the Strait and raise concerns for regional stability and global security.

This is a hybrid event. To join the livestream, please register here: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7cdUCO70TaG76o8j-56JAA

Purnima Menon, an expert on food and nutrition policy, will deliver a lecture at Cornell University on Tuesday, September 30, at 12:20 p.m. ET in Mann Library 102. The lecture is entitled “Nudging People (and Policy) Towards Better Diets and Nutrition: Insights from South Asia.” The event is part of the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) distinguished lecture series.

The lecture will be held in a hybrid format. Virtual participants can register to attend via Zoom. Boxed lunches will be served.

Menon is the senior director for food and nutrition policy at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She is also the acting director for transformative strategies.

Talk by Rohit Lamba (Economics, Cornell University)

India's pursuit of great power status faces a fundamental paradox: the economic nationalism that shapes its development strategy simultaneously undermines the global integration necessary for achieving its international ambitions. This article examines how India's current blanket commitment to strategic autonomy and self-reliance, while producing notable achievements, such as in digital infrastructure and financial inclusion, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2014-2024), ultimately constrains its ability to project power and influence globally. Drawing on developmental state theory, nationalism and civilizational-state typologies, and comparative analysis with East Asian success stories, I argue that India's economic nationalism operates through four transmission mechanisms—worldview constraints, state capacity limitations, decision-making pathologies, and foreign perception costs—that create a self-reinforcing feedback loop limiting its global reach. Highlighting India's distinctive political economy model as a premature and pluralist democracy specializing in high-skilled services, I argue that the country's development trajectory may be better served by strategies that leverage its democratic strengths and pursue an incremental but consistent reforms by consensus strategy while heeding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of "hide your strength, bide your time" on the international stage. The analysis suggests that while India's fundamentals ensure respectable growth rates of 5-6%, achieving the 8-9% growth needed to fulfill its global ambitions before demographic dividends dissipate will require transcending the current overtly nationalist framework in the economic realm.

Rohit Lamba is an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. He has previously held academic positions at the Pennsylvania State University, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University Abu Dhabi. He did his PhD in economics at Princeton University. He was also an economist at the Office of the Chief economic Adviser to the Government of India. His research spans economic theory and economic development. He is the co-author of the best-selling book Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future.

Talk by Margaret Graves (History of Art and Architecture, Brown University)

Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, a time when craft skills in the Middle East were being redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project’s fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters ceramics faking and forgery in the Middle East as a form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism that was capable of creating stunning new objects of encounter. These fictionalized objects married manual and cerebral ingenuity to generate new objects of delight for elite collectors, in an environment where the structures of antiquities collection derive ultimately from both colonial-era resource extraction and the structures of international banking.

Margaret Graves is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a particular research focus on the plastic arts (ceramics, metalwork, and stone carving) and the acts and contexts of making in the medieval and modern eras. Her first monograph, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), looked at medieval artworks that make formal and conceptual allusions to architecture, placing these acts of material allusion into medieval Islamic intellectual history. Arts of Allusion won the 2019 book prize of the International Center of Medieval Studies and the 2021 Karen Gould prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her new book, Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, February 2026), explores the craft skills of ceramics faking and forgery for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiquities market. Other ongoing research topics include contemporary art that explores the legacies of colonial-era craft reform and heritage management in the Middle East; locating a global “golden age” of faking for the international antiquities market; and collaborations with conservators on the material lives of doctored objects.