weai

Tagged With: , ,

Talking About Inner Asia in China Today: The Reception of the New Qing History

Time: June 22, 2021, 10 AM – 11:30 AM EDT
Speaker: Mark C. Elliott (Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History & Vice Provost for International Affairs, Harvard University)

Moderator: Joanna Waley-Cohen (Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University & Provost, NYU Shanghai)

Abstract: The importance of taking Inner Asian historical subjectivity into account is widely recognized as a hallmark of the “New Qing History,” which, over the past twenty years, has led to the destabilization of a number of established Sinocentric narratives and tropes and has gained the scholarship associated with this approach considerable attention in greater China, not all of it favorable. Even as the increasing politicization of history in China over the last decade has called forth an unusually robust critical response, New Qing History appears to enjoy ever broader recognition as an important methodological turn, as evidenced in a marked growth in attention to Inner Asia on the part of many historians writing in Chinese. This talk examines the reception and response to the New Qing History since 2010 as well as its influence on the field in China in recent years.

Register for the Zoom link: https://reurl.cc/5rrjKM

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

by

Tagged With: , ,

Illegible Cities: Translating Early Modern China

June 16, 3:00–4:30 PM EDT, 2021

Speaker: Carla Nappi, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History, University of Pittsburgh

Moderator: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Columbia University

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. This talk will introduce Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities, a new book that tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Using a hybrid form that blends fiction and history, each chapter finds a particular translator conjured from the past to tell the story of a text (in Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more) that helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. The book explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian’s craft, and the talk will address questions of language and translation in China’s past, the use of fiction as a historian’s tool, and the ways that translation creates language.

Register for the Zoom link: https://reurl.cc/9Z2o5X

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World: Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Event Contact Information: Ling-Wei Kung lk2627@columbia.edu

by

Tagged With: ,

Imperial Space, National Space: The New Qing Empire in the Twentieth-century World

Speaker: Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, Yale University

Moderator: Nicola Di Cosmo, Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian History, Institute for Advanced Study

Register here.

The Qing dynasty endured for over two hundred years because, like other empires, in much of its territory it employed forms of indirect rule, and beyond its borders, it cultivated buffer states and quasi-protectorates (known as “tributaries”).

By the end of the 19th century, these techniques no longer held off other encroaching empires. In response, the Qing, just like the others, introduced policies of centralization, greater state penetration, and intervention in buffer states. After 1905, especially, the administrative structures, fiscal composition, and geopolitical vision of the empire had altered radically.

The main force driving new state building efforts was resource development, especially minerals. As foreigners cast greedy eyes on the underground forests of the interior, Qing officials reclaimed mining rights and remapped the empire. If on the ideal level Chinese territorial nationalism embraced the vision of a unified Han race, on the mundane level it rested on subterrestrial resources. The larger project of state penetration and territorial aggrandizement has continued during the ROC and PRC.

In this talk, with reference to case studies from Inner Asia and Korea, I will discuss how an ecological-resource perspective has informed our understanding of the late Qing.

This event is a part of the lecture series “China, Inner Asia, and the World:Mongol and Qing Empires in Comparative Perspectives” sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

by