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.

The Bomb is a critically acclaimed documentary film that puts viewers at the center of the story of nuclear weapons. It explores their immense power, their perverse allure, and the profound death wish at their very heart. Combining archival footage, animation, music, and text, The Bomb offers a visceral and unsettling experience, taking audiences inside the complex cultural and technological realm of nuclear weapons.

Free admission. This special screening of The Bomb (one hour) will be followed by a panel discussion. The film and panel event is sponsored by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Panel

Rebecca Slayton (moderator), Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict StudiesAnindita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Comparative LiteratureDavid Cortright, Reppy Affiliated Scholar, Professor Emeritus of the Practice, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre DameAgnieszka Nimark, Reppy Visiting Scholar, Associate Senior Researcher in Global Geopolitics and Security at CIDOB – Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, Spain***

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A discussion with Pita Limjaroenrat, hosted by the Center on Global Democracy.

About the Speaker
Pita Limjaroenrat (b. 1980) formerly led the Move Forward Party (MFP) in Thailand’s May 2023 general elections, where his social democratic platform won the most votes and seats in the Parliament. Despite this mandate, his attempts to form a government were blocked by institutional mechanisms, and the Constitutional Court dissolved the MFP on August 7. Pita’s policy focus centers on addressing grassroots issues, welfare improvements, and human rights, while advocating for the demilitarization of politics and economic demonopolization. Currently, he is Visiting Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a joint MPA-MBA from Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan and has been named on the TIME 100 Next List. Today, Pita continues to champion transparent and equitable governance on a global scale.

About the Event

Join Pita Limjaroenrat, former leader of Thailand’s dissolved Move Forward Party, for a discussion on contemporary Thai politics and society. In this fireside chat, Pita will address audience questions on topics such as Thailand’s political and economic landscape, inequality, and democratic movements, as well as the country’s evolving relationships with ASEAN and major global powers. The discussion will also touch on broader regional challenges and the state of democracy on a global scale.

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.

Hosted by librarians Emily Zinger (Cornell University Library) and Brent Bianchi (Yale University), this webinar will provide an overview of Yale’s Maurice Durand papers, as well as current work with the Digitizing Việt Nam project. Our first speaker, Trâm Phương Nguyễn, Ph.D. (Columbia University) will focus on the Hán-Nôm collection that she and her colleagues are working on and the digital humanities tools in development specifically for this collection and Hán-Nôm studies. She will also discuss how this collection has been formed and its accessibility to the public. Our second speaker, Thành Hà Thị Tuệ (Vietnam National University) will describe their work with the Maurice Durand papers, focusing particularly on 3 Hán Nôm texts: The Tale of Kiều; the dictionary 大南國音字彙; and Tú Xương thi tập 陳濟昌詩集.