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The Suga Administration: Prospects for the Future

Please join us for a live webinar with:

Gerald L. Curtis, Burgess Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Columbia University

Moderated by: David E. Weinstein, Director, CJEB; Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy, Columbia University

With Prime Minister Abe’s sudden resignation in September, his powerful chief cabinet secretary, Suga Yoshihide, obtained the support of the party’s most powerful faction leaders to become Japan’s new prime minister. Suga was elected to serve out the remainder of Abe’s tenure as LDP president. Come next September he will have to win a party presidential contest if he is to remain as prime minister. After almost two months in office his future is uncertain. He has pushed for some popular reforms but he has not been able to articulate an overarching vision or strategy. He has faced widespread criticism for his decision relating to the appointment of new members of the prestigious Science Council. His popularity has been going down. One thing we know is that the skill set that makes for a powerful chief cabinet secretary is not the same as is required of a successful prime minister. Will Suga remain prime minister after next September or will power pass into the hands of a new generation of political leaders? Is there likely to be a continuation of stable government as there was under Abe or is Japan perhaps heading into another phase of rapidly changing occupants of the prime minister’s residence? These are some of the questions Professor Curtis will be addressing in this webinar.

The event is co-sponsored by the Center on Japanese Economy and Business at the Columbia Business School
and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Registration required. Please register here.

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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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Eat the Buddha: Reportage on the Tibetan Plateau

Please join us for a lecture with:

Barbara Demick, former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library

Moderated by: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick talks about her recent book, Eat the Buddha, and discusses the challenges of reporting on the Tibetan Plateau. In her latest book, she tells the story of the Tibetan town of Ngaba, one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation.

Barbara Demick is the former Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times and currently a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for The Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
This event will be conducted via Zoom. Registration required. Please register here.

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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