Chinese Studies

Lecture: Prof. Song Chen (Bucknell University): Connecting the Dots: Advancing Chinese Historical Studies through Social Network Analysis
2024-07-15 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.607, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073
In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have actively explored how social network analysis (SNA) may advance the understanding of Chinese history and literature. These explorations have underscored the pressing need for methodological reflections and the most appropriate subjects for network analysis. Drawing on my research in the areas of prosopography and local religion, this talk discusses the potentials and pitfalls in the application of SNA to historical studies. Using elite marriages in eleventh- and thirteenth-century China as an example, the first part of this talk explores how SNA breaks new ground in prosopographical research, directing attention from the “common background characteristics” of a historical population to the patterned relationships knitting together the members of that population. The second part of this talk addresses the tendency to conflate social networks as a subject of inquiry with social network analysis as a method of data modeling. This confusion often leads to flawed research designs at the onset of a project, skewing data collection and hampering subsequent analyses. It also results in missed opportunities where scholars overlook potential research projects that seem unrelated to SNA but could greatly benefit from its analytical capabilities. As an illustration, insights will be shared from my recent work that employs SNA to unveil patterns in the spatial distribution of temple cults in the Lower Yangzi during the thirteenth century.
Biography:
Song Chen received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011 and is currently an Associate Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Studies at Bucknell University, USA. His research focuses on Chinese social and cultural history between the eighth and the eighteenth century. For many years his work has focused on the migration and marriage patterns of China’s ruling elite in these centuries. Recently he is expanding the scope of his study to popular religion. He uses digital methods extensively in his teaching and scholarship. He is the inaugural project manager of the China Biographical Database project (CBDB), and has served on the project’s Steering and Executive Committees since 2011. His research combines prosopography, network analysis, and historical GIS. In 2021 and 2022, he co-edited, with Henrike Rudolph and Zhao Wei, two special journal issues that feature cutting-edge digital scholarship in Chinese studies. He has given research talks and taught digital humanities workshops at Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, National Taiwan University, Peking University, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Shanghai Normal University, National University of Singapore, among others.

Die Geschichte des Unterrichts „Chinesisch als Fremdsprache“ in Taiwan
2024-07-11 16:00 - 18:00 | KWZ 0.602
Die Geschichte des Unterrichts „Chinesisch als Fremdsprache“ in Taiwan
Referent: Dr. Chin-Hua Chu, National Taiwan University
Datum und Uhrzeit: 11. Juli 2024, 16:15-17:45 Uhr
Ort: KWZ 0.602
Sprache: Chinesisch-Englisch

Wir laden Sie herzlich zu einem spannenden Vortrag von Dr. Chin-Hua Chu von der National Taiwan University ein. Dr. Chu wird über die Geschichte und Entwicklung des Unterrichts von „Chinesisch als Fremdsprache“ in Taiwan sprechen. Dieser Vortrag bietet eine einzigartige Gelegenheit, mehr über die Methoden und Herausforderungen des Sprachunterrichts in Taiwan zu erfahren.

Zhang Hanwen (Artist/Filmmaker; Berlin): Defection, Exile, and Utopia: Pan-Asianist Bodies and Legacies
2024-07-05 11:30 - 12:30 | Emmy-Noether-Saal, Tagungs-und Veranstaltungshaus Alte Mensa, Wilhelmsplatz
Zhang Hanwen (Artist/Filmmaker; Berlin)
Defection, Exile, and Utopia: Pan-Asianist Bodies and Legacies
Emmy-Noether Saal, Wilhelmsplatz
5. July (Friday), 11:30-12:30
Abstract:
The artist and filmmaker Zhang Hanwen will present his recent work, “Hostile Landscapes”, a two-channel installation film initiated in 2022, and related research. The project revolves around the true story of Jhu Hyeun-ken (朱贤健/주현건), a North Korean defector imprisoned in the Jilin Prison in Northeast China for illegal border-crossing since 2013. Jhu managed to escape from the prison on October 18th, 2021, with bare hands. After eluding local police and authorities for 40 days, Jhu was ultimately shot in the leg and apprehended near the Fengman Dam and Reservoir, a historically significant location with deep Japanese colonial ties. The presentation will explore notions related to Chinese/Asian identities, and their connections to nationalism and colonialism, within the framework of contemporary and modern East Asian history, navigating the geopolitical shifts of the past and the present.
Speaker:
Zhang Hanwen is an artist and filmmaker originally from Changchun, China, who has been wandering nomadically across Germany lately. Drawing from artistic research and field studies, his work examines specific landscapes, infrastructures, and mundane activities through images and texts, weaving them within a network of local, personal, transnational, historical, and ideological contexts. His recent research revolves around marginalized individuals’ exile, troublesome colonial heritage, and secret society activities against the backdrop of East Asian modern/contemporary history. Zhang holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and has participated in various artist-in-residencies and fellowship programs including the German Chancellor Fellowship (Bonn, 2025), the Braunschweig Projects (Braunschweig, 2023), the Oberhausen Seminar (Oberhausen, 2023), the Fosun Foundation Art Residency (Shanghai, 2021), the BRIClab Video Art Residency (New York, 2020), etc. His work has been exhibited and screened at venues such as the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, the OCAT Institute in Beijing, BY ART MATTERS in Hangzhou, the CACHE Space in Beijing, as well as at film festivals including the Beijing International Short Film Festival and BBC LongShots. In 2020, Zhang’s film “The First Line of China” was awarded the SAH Award for Film and Video.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Workshop Announcement: Asian Regionalisms in an Age of De-Globalization. Observing, Discoursing, Identifying
2024-07-05 09:00 - 17:00 | Emmy-Noether-Saal, Wilhelmsplatz, Göttingen
Workshop Announcement: Asian Regionalisms in an Age of De-Globalization. Observing, Discoursing, Identifying

Date: July 5, 2024
Time: 09:00 – 17:00
Venue: Emmy-Noether-Saal, Wilhelmsplatz, Göttingen
Organizer: Lee, Yu-Ting (National Taiwan University)

We are pleased to invite you to our upcoming workshop, “Asian Regionalisms in an Age of De-Globalization. Observing, Discoursing, Identifying,” hosted by the Department of East Asian Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. This event is open to all.

Program Schedule:
09:15-09:30

Welcome and Introduction

Lee, Yu-Ting (National Taiwan University)

09:30-11:00

Panel One: Worldmaking: Discourses and Structural Transformations

Chair: Eva Orthmann (Göttingen)
Presenters:

Rebecca Karl (New York University): Civilizational Confusions: Neo-traditionalism and Economism
Cao Yin (Peking University): The Yunnan-Burma Railway Project, 1860s-1940s
Nikolay Kamenov (Göttingen/ETH Zürich): India’s Trade Connections to the Rest of Asia: Territorialization in the Interwar Period.

11:00-11:30

Coffee Break

11:30-12:30

Keynote Presentation

Zhang Hanwen (Independent Artist, Berlin): Defection, Exile, and Utopia: Pan-Asianist Bodies and Legacies

12:30-13:30

Lunch Break

13:30-15:00

Panel Two: Between the Local and the Universal: Identity and Claims

Chair: Dominic Sachsenmaier (Göttingen)
Presenters:

Lee Yu-Ting (National Taiwan University): Taiwanese Self-Situating in Asian Regionalisms
Julian Strube (Göttingen): Religious Universalism and Nationalism in Bengal
Henrike Rudolph (Göttingen): Reclaiming the Local. Conceptions of the Bentu in Chinese International Politics

15:00-15:30

Coffee Break

15:30-17:00

Concluding Discussion

Join us for an insightful day of discussions and presentations on the evolving dynamics of Asian regionalisms in our current era of de-globalization.

Institute: Department of East Asian Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
This workshop is open to all. We look forward to your participation!

Summer Workshop (Fudan University, Shanghai, China) 23.06.-02.07.2024
2024-06-23 08:00 - 17:00
For further information please click here.

Lecture: "China, mein Vater und ich: Über den Aufstieg einer Supermacht und die Verbindung zur Familie Lee aus Wolfsburg", Gewinner des deutschen Wirtschaftsbuchpreises 2023
2024-06-13 11:15 - 12:15 | Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude
Referent: Felix Lee, Journalist & Autor
Titel: “China, mein Vater und ich: Über den Aufstieg einer Supermacht und die Verbindung zur Familie Lee aus Wolfsburg”,
Gewinner des deutschen Wirtschaftsbuchpreises 2023
Datum und Uhrzeit: 13. Juni 2024, 11:15-12:15 Uhr
Ort: ZHG (Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude)
Veranstalter: Alumni der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät
Für Ihre Teilnahme registrieren Sie sich bitte hier: https://www.alumni-goettingen.de/termine/responsible-innovation-summit-2024/
Weitere Informationen finden Sie unter: Responsible Innovation Summit 2024 https://www.alumni-goettingen.de/termine/responsible-innovation-summit-2024/
Mehr über Felix Lee erfahren Sie hier: Felix Lee – Aufbau Verlag https://www.aufbau-verlage.de/autor-in/felix-lee

Lecture Prof. David Ownby (Université of Montréal): "A China We Can Talk To?"
2024-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.602, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073
Introduction by Dr. Harlan Chambers (Fellow, Worldmaking Project) and Comments by Prof. Lee Yu-Ting (National Taiwan University)
Talk summary:
For the past decade or so, in his Reading the China Dream project, David Ownby has been reading and translating the work of Chinese intellectuals who publish in China and in Chinese, not dissidents, but not Party propagandists either. These intellectuals inhabit a world parallel to and at the mercy of the world of Xi Jinping and the Party-State where – like intellectuals elsewhere in the world – they write and publish to try to influence public opinion and perhaps the state on the issues they are allowed to discuss. This world is circumscribed and has shrunk under Xi Jinping, but over the course of 40 years of reform and opening, Chinese intellectual life in China underwent a transformation like that of China’s economy and society; globalization changed the way Chinese intellectuals think and write with the result that, to a surprising degree, Chinese and Western intellectuals now share a common vocabulary and common references. This suggests that a dialogue might be possible with many of China’s thought-leaders, if not with Chinese authorities.
Bio:
David Ownby recently retired from the History Department of the Université of Montréal and is currently a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. His most recent work focuses on intellectual life in contemporary China and he is the founder of the Reading the China Dream website.

Lecture: Prof. Dr. Lim Jie-Hyun: "Victimhood Nationalism: Global History and Memory"
2024-04-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.610, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073, Deutschland
Abstract:
My work “victimhood nationalism” aims to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the global memory space. I try to make a critical inquiry of the global memory formation with a focus on victimhood memories. The historical space in this study is not an individual nation but an intersection of the memory loci of entangled history. Assuming the national history of “victimhood nationalism” implies a tautology resulting from and contributing to the nationalist phenomenology that constructs memories upon the present idea of the nation, I am tracing the global trajectory of victimhood nationalism through the interactions among Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan and Korea. As a memory activist as well as a historian, I aim to sacrifice the victimhood nationalism globally for the mnemonic solidarity. The book consists of 11 chapters: 1. Mnemohistory, 2. Genealogy, 3. Sublimation, 4. Globalization, 5. Nationalization, 6. De-historicization, 7. Over-historicization, 8. Juxtaposition, 9. Denial, 10. Forgiveness, 11. Solidarity.
Bio:
Jie-Hyun Lim holds CIPSH chair of Global Easts and is founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published widely on nationalism and Marxism in comparison, Polish history, transnational history and global memory. He is principal investigator of the research projects of Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan and “Global Easts” at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism-Global History and Memory (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024-forthcoming), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach, 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021, co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft).

Invitation – Global China Conversations #28: Prospects of the Chinese economy: short malady or fundamental slow-down?
2024-01-25 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
For more information please click here.

CANCELLED: Robert Kramm (Munich): Staging Radical Utopian Communities in the Early 20th Century
2023-12-18 16:15 - 17:45 | Verfügungsgebäude (VG) 3.101
VG 3.101
18. Dec. (Monday), 16:15-17:45
Abstract:
At the turn of the twentieth century, radical utopian communities were built all around the world. They served as retreats, but they simultaneously constituted hubs for activists, reformers, and revolutionaries to meet, share, and develop new ideas and practices of community and human existence. The project Radical Utopian Communities deliberately builds on different and seemingly unrelated case studies of communal experiments, encompassing the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchist commune in imperial Japan, and the Rastafarian Pinnacle Commune on Jamaica. In this talk, the main focus is on these communities’ intellectual work, and their staging as a struggle of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker:
Robert Kramm holds a doctoral degree in history from ETH Zurich and is currently Freigeist-Fellow and principal investigator of the research group “Radical Utopian Communities” in the School of History at LMU Munich. He received an Asia-Pacific History Fellowship at the GHI West at UC Berkeley, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg at the University of Konstanz. His first book, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy during the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952, was published 2017 with University of California Press. His peer-reviewed articles appeared in the Journal of World History, Journal of Women’s History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Global History.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Online Präsentation & Diskussion, 14.12.2023: Was wäre, wenn…? Abkoppelung von China und die Kosten für Deutschland
2023-12-14 11:00 - 12:00

Global China Conversations #27: Zukunft der Technologiestandards: Deutschland und China im Wettbewerb?
2023-12-07 11:00 - 12:00

Fan Xin (Cambridge): Emotions as Politics: Rethinking Chinese Nationalism
2023-12-04 17:15 - 18:45 | Theologicum (Theol) 0.135
4. Dec. (Monday), 17:15 – 18:45
Theologicum (Theol) 0.135
Abstract:
The rise of history of emotions has been a recent development in historiography. In the field of Chinese studies, scholars such as Eugenia Lean, Haiyan Lee, Chen Li, and Zuo Ya have been writing about how emotions, feelings, and sentiments contributed to the formation and transformation of Chinese identities. In this presentation, I attempt to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity to rethink the theoretical implication when we historicize emotions beyond the Eurocentric paradigm of the rationality regime. By critically examining the existing scholarship on Chinese nationalism through the lens of history of emotions, I argue that emotions are a significant aspect to affect decision-making process in nationalist politics, and Chinese nationalism is not just political, cultural, ethnic, but also emotional.
Speaker:
Dr Xin Fan is Teaching Associate of Modern Chinese History and Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of World History and National identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021) and the second editor of Receptions of Greek and Roman in East Asia (Brill, 2018). As a historian of modern China with strong interest in global history, he is currently working on two book projects, “Global History in China” and “The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotional Politics, 1900–1949.” In addition, he has written on global conceptual history, the history of international relations, and the rise of historical geography in China. He also the book review editor of China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies. He has studied and worked in China, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Global China Conversations #26: The Chinese Anti-espionage Law: What Risks for Companies and the Scientific Community?
2023-11-30 11:00 - 12:00

Chen Hao (Shanghai Jiaotong Univ.): A Tentative Interpretation of the Rise of Global History in China
2023-11-20 16:15 - 17:45 | Verfügungsgebäude, VG 3.101, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen, 37073, Deutschland
Abstract:
Whether in a democratic or authoritarian society, it is not uncommon to explain academic currents by taking political and economic factors into consideration. However, the impetus in the intellectual realm itself shall never be disregarded. The recent development of Global History in China can be explained adequately by Chinese intellectuals’ persistent endeavor to stage global publics, rather than its pursuit of political and economic power worldwide.

Speaker:
Chen Hao is an associate professor of history at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his Ph. D at Free University of Berlin (2016) and is the 2023 recipient of the Göttingen Academy’s humanities award. His academic interests include Global History and history of Inner Asia, especially the Turkic-speaking peoples. He has published his first monography A History of the Second Türk Empire (ca. 682-745 AD), Brill, 2021. His forthcoming book deals with the historical semantics of “Turk”. The current project he is working on is about a 17th century Central Asian historian Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Opening Events – MA East Asian Studies/Modern Sinology (Meeting 2)
2023-11-03 18:00 - 20:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.606, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073
Click here to get more information.

Prof. Lung Ying-Tai (Writer): How the Wild Changed Me. A Philosophical Journey: Readings and Discussions with Lung Ying-Tai
2023-10-26 19:15 - 20:45 | Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude, ZHG 002, Platz der Göttingen Sieben 5, Göttingen, 37073
Abstract:
Snail sex, demanding deities, a cold case – everyday life in Taiwan holds the most unbelievable stories in store. Lung Ying-Tai compiled them in her novel “Under Kavulungan.” In conversation with Dominic Sachsenmaier and Monika Li, Taiwan’s most famous author explores the complex answers to this question. Philosophical young adult novel, nature writing, nativist literature, an escapist zeitgeist portrait, thriller or love story – “Under Kavulungan” offers many ways of reading. On which themes did Lung Ying-Tai’s focus during the writing? Why did she choose southern Taiwan as the stage of her novel?
Bios:
Prof. Lung Ying-Tai (author) is one of Taiwan’s most renowned essayist and cultural critics, whose writing significantly contributed to Taiwan’s democratization. She taught at the University of Hong Kong and Heidelberg University and served as Taiwan’s first minister of culture from 2012 till 2014. With more than 30 published works, she is among the most well-known authors in the Chinese speaking world.
Monika Li (moderator and translator) grew up bilingual – German and Hungarian – and studied German studies, philosophy and Chinese studies in Heidelberg. She received a scholarship of the National Taiwan University in 2009 and lives with her family between Taipei and Berlin, where she translates Taiwanese literature into German.

Moderator:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Informationsveranstaltung für alle Erstsemester in den BA-Studiengängen des OAS
2023-10-20 10:00 - 12:00 | KWZ 2.601/ KWZ 2.739
Das Ostasiatische Seminar lädt alle Erstsemester für den 20. Oktober 2023 von 10:00-12:00 Uhr zu einer Informationsveranstaltung über unsere Bachelorstudiengänge in das Kulturwissenschaftliche Zentrum KWZ 2.601/ 2.739 ein.
Da wir an diesem Tag bereits die Gruppeneinteilung für den Sprachunterricht vornehmen werden, wird die Teilnahme dringend empfohlen.
Hier gelangen Sie zum Orientierungsphasen-Programm des Ostasiatischen Seminars.
Hier gelangen Sie zur Kursübersicht des OAS für das WiSe 2023/24.
Link zum Erklärvideo für die Stundenplan-Erstellung in EXA.

Opening Events – Ma East Asian Studies/Modern Sinology (Meeting 1)
2023-10-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Online (Zoom)

Global China Conversations #24 Global Gateway und die Belt and Road: Eine Nachhaltige Alternative?
2023-09-21 11:00 - 12:00

CeMEAS: ENLIGHT WORKSHOP: "More than a Distant Relative: China and its Neighbours in an Increasingly Turbulent World"
2023-09-11 09:00 - 19:30

Lecture: Prof. Li Xuetao (Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU)): „Examples of research methods in the history of German Sinology / 德国汉学史研究方法举隅.“
2023-07-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.608
The lecture will be in Chinese.
Prof. Li is an expert among other topics on the history of Western China Studies and will address recent central questions of the development of China Studies in the West applying a global history perspective.
Abstract:
德国汉学从一开始就不局限于某一领域，今天对它的历史梳理，也必然是在历史学、语文学、人类学、自然科学等其他学科的理论和方法的参与下进行，这同时也体现了德国汉学史研究的活力和多样性。李雪涛教授以德国汉学史为例，指出近年来汉学史研究的范式，已经从之前的“内部论”（internalist）或“谱系式”（genealogical）的历史思考方式，转变为了将汉学研究的现象、事件与进程置于“全球脉络”中予以分析，从而形成了一种真正的跨文化全球史研究。

Lecture: Ying Zhou (Xiamen University): Education and democracy in modern China
2023-07-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.602, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, Göttingen, 37073
Abstract:
Institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin of developing democratic education in modern China. At stake is to understand how democratic education filled a critical role in bridging the gap between democratic ideals and political realities. This lecture will focus on teachings of citizenship and democracy in Chinese primary and secondary schools between 1923-1936 for the purpose of strengthening embryonic democratic politics by creating qualified citizens, and seek to shed some light on the complex intertwinement of educational and political reforms in modern China.
Short biography:
Ying Zhou is an assistant professor at the Institute of Education, Xiamen University, China. She obtained her PhD at the University of Groningen (NL), trained in both Educational Studies and Sinology. Her PhD dissertation is entitled Education and Politics in China: Civic Education in Times of Reform, 1901-1937, and her current research project is concerned with pragmatism and progressive education in China and Japan.

Lecture: Dr. Sally Chengji Xing (MPI Berlin) & Lucas Brang (Cologne): Transnational Knowledge Transfers Between China, Europe, and the United States: Actors, Institutions, and Dynamics, 1924-1935
2023-07-13 18:15 - 19:45 | Verfügungsgebäude (VG) 2.103, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen, 37073
13. July (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Overview:
The two talks of this joint session interrogate processes of knowledge transfer between China, the United States, and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on two distinct organizations– the China Foundation (based in Shanghai and New York) and the League of Nations (based in Geneva) – both talks shed new light on the transnational entanglements of the Republican period in China, and demonstrate how foreign efforts to influence China often met with domestic resistance.
Bios:
Sally Chengji Xing is a visiting fellow of the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin (Lise Meitner Research Group, “China in the Global System of Science,” MPIWG) and the Joint Center for Advanced Studies “Worldmaking from Global Perspectives: a Dialogue with China;” she is also an incoming associate professor of US history at Nankai University. She is interested in writing US history from transnational and global perspectives. Her book manuscript in progress, “Pacific Crossings”: The China Foundation and a Negotiated Translation of American Science to China, 1913-1949″, examines how and to what extent did the American intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century influence the development of Chinese science. Her multi-archival research in China and the United States has been funded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Rockefeller Archive Center, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and numerous other graduate research fellowships at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her long-term research explores Sino-American intellectual history in transnational approaches, from early 20th century all the way to the late 1960s.
Lucas Brang is a PhD candidate at the University of Cologne, where he is currently completing his dissertation on the rise of the discipline of international law in early twentieth century China. From 2019 to 2022, he was a recipient of a Marie Curie global research fellowship of the European Union, as part of which he was affiliated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lucas’ research interests include China’s constitutional development and visions of international order in historical and comparative perspective. In his work, he employs approaches from different disciplinary traditions such as legal theory, conceptual history, and the sociology of knowledge. His research has appeared in journals like Global Constitutionalism, Modern China, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Yuhang Li (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Engineering Religious Bliss at the Qing Court: Jile shijie in the Beihai Park
2023-07-12 14:00 - 16:00 | Verfügungsgebäude (VG) 2.103, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen, 37073
Abstract:
In 1770, with the purpose of presenting an unusual gift to his mother Empress Dowager Chongqing (1692-1777) for her eightieth birthday, Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) ordered the imperial architectural department to construct a Buddhist compound named jile shijie or World of Utmost Pleasure on the northern shore of imperial Beihai Park next to the Forbidden City. Inside of the main hall, instead of conventional Buddhist icons staged on the lotus pedestals, an innovative three-dimensional clay mountain site scenery adorned with various deities from the Pure Land occupies the interior space. Jile shijie, a synonym for the Western Paradise and Pure Land, has been consistently visualized and contemplated since early medieval China. But the jile shijie built for Empress Dowager Chongqing is a standalone case which creates the experience of religious joy through a site scenery. The Pure Land is usually experienced as a future connected to death, which one literally cannot experience as present. However, Qianlong’s filial gift allows his mother to feel the required affect in this world, by juxtaposing transcendence and immanence. The absolute future of the Pure Land, a future that one experiences only after one has no more future on earth, becomes present at least in part, in a man-made small-scale western paradise. In this paper, I will discuss the surviving architecture, sculptural mountain preserved in old photographs, imperial documents on the design process, and Qianlong’s own writings on the given subject. Through unpacking the layers of this site, I will demonstrate how a liminal temporality of religious joy is materialized.

Lecture: Viren Murthy "Hegelian Master Narratives and Periodizing Japanese and Chinese Modernity"
2023-07-11 16:00 - 18:00 | Oeconomicum OEC 0.168
Abstract:
Scholars of Asian studies have something of a love-hate relationship with Hegel; they love to cite him as the epitome of Eurocentrism, modernization theory and the legitimation of colonialism. Despite their prevalence, such criticisms overlook both the complexities of Hegel’s philosophy and the different ways in which Asian intellectuals attempted to turn Hegel on his head or rescue the rational kernel of his thought in a non-Western context. I contend that for much of the twentieth century, especially in Japan, but also in China, scholars engaged Hegel by incorporating and transforming his ideas. Such incorporations enabled us to see that Hegel was not merely a theorist of modernization but one of its most incisive critics. Indeed, it was precisely because of Hegel’s critique of capitalist modernity that conservatives such as Inoue Tetsujirō found him interesting. In this presentation, I will examine three attempts to rethink Hegel, respectively by the pan-Asianist, Okakura Tenshin, the Kyoto school philosopher of world-history, Koyama Iwao and the Japanese sinologist, Mizoguchi Yūzō. I argue that each of these thinkers narrates the history of Asia, while implicitly or explicitly responding to Hegel’s idea of the Orient as not having subjectivity. Against this static vision of Asia, these figures reconfigure the historical trajectories of Japan, China and the world to reconfigure both universality and subjectivity beyond Eurocentrism. Towards the end of my talk, I suggest that the contemporary “new leftist” intellectual Wang Hui, continues elements of the various thinkers mentioned above. The contemporary rise of China makes such responses to Hegelian master narratives especially relevant for our contradictory present.

Lecture: PENG Guoxiang "Confucius as a Cosmopolitan: Thought and Practice"
2023-07-07 14:00 - 16:00 | Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum, KWZ 0.601
Abstract:
Based on the Analects and other texts related to Confucius in classical period and taken “cosmopolitanism,” a concept with long history in the Western tradition as a counterpart for comparison, this talk aims to probe the thought and practice of Confucius as a cosmopolitan and point out the feature and significance of the Confucian “rooted cosmopolitanism” revealed in the thought and practice of Confucius. The rooted cosmopolitanism embodied by Confucius not only has the basic characteristics of all versions of cosmopolitanism, namely, going beyond the territory and ethnicity, but also keeps a dynamic balance between the one and the many, which is usually ignored by the radical cosmopolitanism. Last, a brief comparison between Confucian rooted cosmopolitanism and the rooted cosmopolitanism advocated by Appiah would be made.

Lecture: Dr. Fan Xin (Cambridge University): Before China Studies: Private Foundations and Cold War Politics in Colonial Hong Kong
2023-07-06 18:15 - 19:45 | Verfügungsgebäude (VG) 2.103, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen, 37073
6. July (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
The founding of the University Service Centre in Hong Kong in 1963 was a significant event in the development of China studies. Thanks to the city’s adjacency to mainland China and the Carnegie Corporation’s funding support, the Centre since its very beginning has become the “go-to” place for aspiring researchers to obtain first-hand information to study contemporary China. Yet in what way did U.S. government, private foundations, and the British Colonial government collaborate on founding this important institution? This is the central question of this talk. By using American and British archives, I will investigate the complicated relationship between state and society in the production of China-related knowledge in the Cold War era.
Bio:
Dr Xin Fan is Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, and he is also a fellow at Lucy Cavendish College of the university. Prior to the move to the UK, he was a tenured associate professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. As a historian of twentieth-century China, he is the author of World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the second editor of Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia (Brill, 2018). He also serves as book review editor for China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, “The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotions of Politics, 1900s–1949.” He is collaborating with Kristin Stapleton and Els van Dongen on editing “The SAGE Handbook of Interpreting Chinese History.” In addition, he is writing about nationalism, historiography, and the history of concepts.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Lecture: Prof. He Weihua (Central China Normal University): The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism
2023-06-29 18:15 - 19:45 | Verfügungsgebäude (VG) 2.103, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 7, Göttingen, 37073
22. June (Thursday), 18:15 – 19:45
VG 2.103
Abstract:
As an epoch-making event in the history of the Chinese sci-fi film industry, The Wandering Earth boasts the extraordinary acting skills of cinema superstars and fabulous special effects. Instead of providing a description of the technical issues surrounding the film’s production, this paper looks at the film as a cultural expression and dramatization of China’s reconceptualization of the notion of cosmopolitanism. After scrutinizing tianxia, which is generally taken to refer to classical Chinese cosmopolitanism, this paper goes on to describe its experiential dimension, its techno-socio-economic foundation, and its cosmopolitan solidarity as shown in the film. Finally, after analyzing the ethical dimension of the cosmopolitan community, which is embodied in the idea of “home” in the film, the paper concludes by proposing a cosmopolitanism of ethicality.

Speaker:
Weihua He is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Central China Normal University. He is also the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Language and Literature Research and the Secretary General of the International Ethnic Literature Commission of (China) Association for Comparative Studies of Languages and Cultures. His research interests include comparative literature, literary theory, and the modern transformation of China. He has published extensively in journals such as European Review, Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Neohelicon and Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen

Global China Conversations #22 Deutsche Forschungskooperationen: Wissen Schaffen für oder mit China?
2023-06-29 11:00 - 12:00
