East Asia

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Therapeutic Politics of Care: New Ethnographies of Asia

Please join us for a panel discussion with:

Felicity Aulino, UMass Amherst
Nicholas Bartlett, Barnard College, Columbia University
Lyle Fearnley, Singapore University of Technology and Design
Ting Hui Lau, Cornell University
Emily Ng, University of Amsterdam
Saiba Varma, UC San Diego

Care has become a crucial concern of anthropological inquiry, and current global conditions have renewed its poignancy. To paraphrase Lisa Stevenson, care involves an ethics of attending, corresponding to particular ways that someone (or something) comes to matter. The drive to care, as she and others have noted, is far from innocent, and may be filled with ambivalence whether in intimate or institutional forms. Connecting fieldwork from three provinces in China, Thailand, and contested Kashmir territory, this series brings together the authors of five new books and a dissertation to explore the therapeutic politics of care across multiple logics and scales.

Featuring five scholars who books are coming out in 2020 and one who recently finished a dissertation, our event reflects on care in both its presence and absence. We aim to interrogate not only the different therapeutic forms and relationships (human and nonhuman) through which care can be performed, but also examine the historical, cultural, and social possibilities that structure its forms and possibilities.

The event will proceed through a circular reading of one another’s work. We will take up a critical focus on scale and temporality by tracing the protracted geopolitical encounters that infuse clinical settings, ritual engagements, and the very possibility of healing. Each book author will provide a reading of one of the other authors’ text, then revisit and describe their own work in light of the resonances and dissonances that arise. The result, as we envision it, would be a novel discussion mixing book review and experimental auto-introduction, reading oneself through the other, featuring both comments and on-the-spot conversation with time for audience questions.
Online. This event will be streamed live on WEAI’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/WeatherheadEastAsianInstitute/live

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

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Social Safety Net and Family Income Packages in East Asia: Comparisons between China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan

Please join us for a lecture with:

Julia Shu-Huah Wang, Assistant Professor of Social Work, The University of Hong Kong

Moderated by:

Qin Gao, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work; Director, China Center for Social Policy

Register here.

East Asian social welfare systems have been traditionally described as productivist regimes in which most social investments focus on elements of welfare that can induce economic growth. Emerging literature points to evolving and divergent features of social safety nets within East Asia. Although these inquiries are informative, extant East Asian welfare comparative research often focuses on a limited set of social policies and seldom captures the bundle of welfare programs or the contexts in which these programs operate (e.g., tax systems and service costs). This study extends the understanding of East Asian welfare systems by comparing social safety nets in China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan using a model family approach to collect income-packaging data in each country and utilizing secondary data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). We will first employ a model family approach to shed lights on the eligibility and benefit levels of safety nets in each country. This approach entails collecting detailed income package data for 2019. Specifically, income packages include labor income; cash benefits; tax benefits; and the cost of services such as health care, education and childcare in each country for each family profile. A family profile consists of a family type and income class. We will compare distributions of labor income, tax liability, cash benefits, and service costs using descriptive statistics and visualization methods. Next, we will utilize the LIS data to investigate the social safety nets’ coverage across income distribution and poverty spectrum (% of poverty line) using quantile regression models. This study’s findings can contribute to the debate on the contemporary landscape of East Asian welfare models and inform policymakers in East Asia of the strengths of social safety nets in their countries relative to others.

This event will be conducted via Zoom. Registration required.

Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the School of Social Work & China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University.

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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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