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How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions

Please join us for a lecture:

How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions

Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies; Lead Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, University of Oxford.

Moderated by: Elizabeth Wishnick, Professor, Political Science and Law, Montclair State University

From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its “Made in China 2025” strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to its significant economic reach into Africa and Latin America, China is rapidly expanding its influence around the globe. Many fear that China’s economic clout, tech innovations, and military power will allow it to remake the world in its own authoritarian image. But despite all these strengths, a future with China in charge is far from certain. Rich and poor, big and small, countries around the world are recognizing that engaging China produces new strategic vulnerabilities to their independence and competitiveness. Researching the book took Dr. Patey to East Africa, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia over the past five years and he will discuss how countries in these parts of the world are responding to China’s rise and assertiveness.

This event is cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the APEC Study Center at Columbia University.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

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Pacific Crossings: Wango Weng and his Film Collection at Columbia

Please join us for a panel discussion:

Organized by Ying Qian (Assistant Professor of Chinese Cinema and Media, Columbia EALAC) and Jim Cheng (Director, the C.V. Starr Library)

Introduced by Eugenia Lean (Director, WEAI and Professor of Chinese History, Columbia EALAC)

Panelists:

Charlotte Brooks (Professor of History, CUNY Baruch College)

Jane Gaines (Professor of Film, Columbia University)

Caroline Hsu-Balcer (Filmmaker, designer and art programmer)

Ssu Weng (Physician, daughter of Wango Weng)

Yanqiu Zheng (Assistant Professor of History, Misericordia University)

As research in East Asian studies moves away from the national paradigm to pay more attention to transnational connections and diasporic communities, this roundtable is the first of a series of events that trace transpacific film and media connections as prisms to examine larger historical processes of war, migration, racialized capitalism, cultural diplomacy and community organizing.

Wango Weng (1918-2020) was a Chinese American filmmaker, art historian and collector. He came to the US in 1938 to study engineering at Purdue, and later on, entered University of Wisconsin, Madison to study painting. In 1948, he brought his family’s massive art collection to the US., where he then settled for life. He began making films in the 1940s, mostly producing for the U.S. educational film market and covering topics related to Chinese art and history. He was also active in the Chinese American community, and served as the president of the Chinese Institute from 1982 to 1987. Mr. Weng passed away at 102 on December 9th, 2020, after donating his family art collection to museums in the US (the MFA) and in China (the Shanghai Museum and others), and his film collection to the C.V. Starr Library at Columbia.

This roundtable brings together historians and film scholars on both China and America, and Mr. Weng’s family and friend, to discuss Mr. Weng’s filmmaking in the US, his connections to China’s film industry, and his engagements with the China Institute, the Chinese American community and American society at large.

Audience are encouraged to watch prior to the round table a short film shot by Wango Weng in 1948, on his last trip to his hometown Changshu before settling in the US, entitled A Town On the Yangtze (full 10-min film streamed here https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2020/05/26/weng/).

Sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the C.V Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.

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Borderland Asia in Historical Perspective: Hong Kong

Please join us for a panel discussion:

Borderland Asia in Historical Perspective: Hong Kong

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California Irvine

Angelina Chin, Pomona College

Denise Ho, Yale University

Peter Hamilton, Trinity College Dublin

Moderated by: Paul Kreitman, Columbia University

This panel discussion explores the border between the People’s Republic of China and British Hong Kong (1949-1997). Denise Ho analyses the history of oyster aquaculture in Deep Bay between Shenzhen and the New Territories, while Angelina Chin surveys the history of border-crossing between Hong Kong and the P.R.C. between the 1950s and 1970s. Peter Hamilton uses the case study of the Shenzhen-Guangdong Expressway as a case study to explore the history of Hong Kong investment in mainland infrastructure in the 1980s. Jeffrey Wasserstom, author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) will serve as discussant.

Organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Register here.

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