China

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A World Safe for Autocracy: The Domestic Politics of China’s Foreign Policy

Please join us for a lecture with:

Jessica Chen Weiss – Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University

How does China’s domestic governance shape its foreign policy? What role do nationalism and ideology play in Beijing’s regional and global ambitions? The Chinese leadership has been at once a revisionist, defender, reformer, and free-rider in the international system—insisting rigidly on issues that are central to its domestic survival, while showing flexibility on issues that are more peripheral. To illuminate this variation and prospects for conflict and cooperation, Weiss will discuss her new book project, which theorizes and illustrates the domestic-international linkages in Beijing’s approach to issues ranging from sovereignty and homeland disputes to climate change and COVID-19.

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

Organized by China and the World Program and co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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Charting a Tibetan Cartography

Please join us for a lecture with:

Kenneth Bauer, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College

Moderated by:

Eveline Washul, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Drawing upon fieldwork in western Nepal, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the eastern Tibetan Plateau as well as historical and contemporary maps, I will argue that there is a recognizable but as yet underappreciated body of knowledge and traditions that comprise a Tibetan cartography. In addition to describing a coherent set of representational and embodied practices that were foundational to Tibetan efforts to map their worlds, I will argue that mapping practices were, in fact, integral to governance in pre-1950s Tibet. Though the Tibetan state may justly be called “minimal” (Jansen 2019) prior to assimilation by the People’s Republic of China, the delineation and claiming of territory through mapping occurred at multiple levels and was, as Scott (1995) instructs, one way that the state ‘saw’ its territory. Even as we recognize aspects of cartographic practices that are shared between contemporary scientific and Tibetan approaches, the case of Tibet can also catalyze an expanded notion of geography beyond the material bounds and geopolitical purposes to which scientific cartographers aspire, but also limit themselves.

This event will be streamed live on WEAI’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/WeatherheadEastAsianInstitute/live. Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.

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Corporate Conquests: Business, The State, and The Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China with author Pat Giersch

Please join us for a lecture with:

Pat Giersch, Professor of History, Wellesley College

Moderated by: Elizabeth Reynolds, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, History Department, Washington University in St. Louis

Tenacious patterns of inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China’s modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca the 1870s-1956, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses throughout the Southwest and into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and eastern China. Bringing wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles to their hometowns, the merchant-owners also gained greater access to commodities at the expense of the Southwest’s many indigenous communities. Meanwhile, new concepts of development shaped the creation of state-run corporations, which further concentrated resources in the hands of outsiders. The book reveals how important new ideas and structures of power, now central to the Communist Party’s repertoire of rule and oppression, were forged, not along China’s east coast, but along the nation’s internal borderlands. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about China’s unique state capitalism and its contribution to inequality.

This event will be streamed live on WEAI’s YouTube Channel.

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University.

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