Webcasts

The Center for Chinese Studies invites speakers to make presentations to Berkeley’s students, faculty, and the public throughout each year. For a complete list of upcoming and past events, go to the CCS Events page.

Some of the more notable speakers were videotaped and their talks are available here. We hope to add to these online resources in coming years.

Rural Roots of Reforms near Shanghai, c. 1971-1989 (Compared to Medial Entrepreneurship in Taiwan, Thailand, and Luzon): The Kwang Siam Lim Memorial Lecture
Lynn T. White, III, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
October 3, 2012, 4-6 p.m.
"Green revolution" exploded near Shanghai during the late 1960s. By the early 1970s — long before 1978 — field mechanization justified local leaders to run rural factories; evidence of substantive "reforms" then is extensive for some rich parts of China. By the mid-1980s, these factories took most rural inputs; so socialist planning practically ended. Lynn will compare these changes near Shanghai with others in Taiwan and Thailand, and with usual non-growth in Luzon, showing that these cases were all politically and locally led (more than growth in Northeast Asia has been).

Click here for the downloadable notes on which the paper is based.

 

Solids and Surfaces in Chinese Drama: The Kwang Siam Lim Memorial Lecture
Tina Lu, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University
Discussant: Robert Ashmore, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
October 28, 2011, 4-6 p.m.
Is an object really just an idea or is it something beyond an idea? Tina Lu will examine the "marvel tales" (chuanqi) of Chinese drama. Over eighty percent of chuanqi are named after an object passed from one set of hands to another, yet contemporary writings do not address these signature items. In an age marked by anxieties about the nature of money and the liquidity of wealth and status, this question strikes at the heart of the matter.  

China in Ten Words
Yu Hua, speaking about his new book, China in Ten Words
October 26, 2011, 4-6 p.m.
Yu Hua is one of China's best-known novelists. Author of Brothers, To Live, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, he will talk about his most recent work. In Chinese with English interpretation.  

Revalorizing Gendered Self-Worth in China's New Age of Private Property: Elvera Kwang Siam Lim Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies
Li Zhang, Anthropology, UC Davis
Discussant: You-tien Hsing, Geography, UC Berkeley
November 11, 2008
This lecture explores how the privatization of home ownership and a rising material culture of consumerism reconfigure the intimate realm of self-worth, love, and marriage in urban China. Through several ethnographic cases, Li Zhang’s research shows how owning a private house has gradually become the decisive factor in considering marriage and a focal point of contention in dissolving that relationship. In this context, they suggest that self-worth has become more and more individualized and materialized through the idiom of property possession. After thirty years of economic reform, the socially embedded nature of the self that was once at the heart of a moral economy is being eclipsed by an individual-centered, materialistic determinism nurtured by a market economy. This social reconfiguration however is a gendered process. While the meanings of masculinities have shifted toward ones ability to make money, possess desirable material goods, or gain political power, the construction of self-worth among women tends to focus on the body and physical appearance, which serve as the material foundation for constructing femininities.