China

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Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Eugenia Lean

Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940
By: Eugenia Lean

Speakers:

Eugenia Lean, Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University

Deborah Coen, Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University

Jing Tsu, John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University

Wei Shang, Du Family Professor of Chinese Culture at Columbia University

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Wednesday, December 2, 2020
4:00 PM-5:00 PM

The event will be conducted online via Zoom. Please visit http://heymancenter.org/events/celebrating-recent-work-by-eugenia-lean/ for more information including how to register for the online event.

This event is co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.

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Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers

Please join us for a lecture with:

Jennifer Pan, Assistant Professor of Communication, Stanford University

Moderated by: Yao Lu, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

What are the costs of the Chinese regime’s fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or “stability”? This book project shows how China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. Novel datasets and a variety of methodologies show how this distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. The project traces the transformation of China’s approach to enforcing order at the turn of the 21st century and identifies the phenomenon of seepage whereby one policy—in this case, quelling dissent—alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government.

Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines the strategies authoritarian regimes employ to perpetuate their rule, including censorship, redistribution, and responsiveness, using large-scale data from traditional and digital media as well as experiments on media platforms. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Science, and other peer-reviewed publications.

Pan received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government. She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 2004, and until 2009, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company based in New York and Beijing. She has also worked for the Chinese Center for Disease Control, the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, and the Clinton Global Initiative.

The event will be conducted via Zoom. Please register here.

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How Does Beijing View U.S.-China “Decoupling”?

Please join us for a lecture with:

Julian Gerwertz – CWP Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University

This talk analyzes trends in Chinese views of U.S.-China interdependence from Xi Jinping’s rise to the COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S.-China relations have sharply deteriorated, the prospect of “decoupling” is looming larger for leaders in both Beijing and Washington. But it remains unclear how that process will play out, and how far it will go. How do China’s leaders and other Chinese elites think about these prospects? How will U.S.-China decoupling affect China’s domestic evolution and its global role?

This event will be conducted online via Zoom. Please register here.

Event organized by China and The World Program and co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

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