2017 IEAS Events Calendar

January 1, 2017

Happy Americans, Unhappy Japanese: How Software Engineers work; how they feel about it; and how they are rewarded
Colloquium
Speaker: Professor Yoshifumi Nakata, Doshisha University
Date: January 24, 2017 | 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Location: 2521 Channing Way — Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, IRLE Director's Room
Sponsors: Institute of Research on Labor & Employment, Center for Japanese Studies

Yoshifumi Nakata holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and has a long distinguished career researching the relationship between technology and employment related factors. He founded the Institute for Technology, Enterprise and Competitiveness at Doshisha and recently stepped down as its long-term Director. His bio information can be found here.



Staging Courtesans: Liang Chenyu's (1519–1591) Washing Gauze (Huansha ji) and the Performance Culture of Late Sixteenth-Century China
Colloquium
Date: January 27, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Speaker: Peng Xu, Center for Chinese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow 2016–2017
Discussant: Ling Hon Lam, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

This paper seeks to read Liang Chenyu's dramatic masterpiece, Washing Gauze (Huansha ji), with reference to the rise of courtesans as “theater women” and the subsequent changes in the performance culture in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the play explodes the literary tradition to which it belong by staging female chorus, dance forms and their training sessions, and outdoors music performances. Despite the heroine's identity as an ancient beauty with a patriotic career, she is portrayed in the play as a courtesan lover whose sexuality and talent in stage performance constitute a hidden source of energy that drives the central plot. By focusing on courtesan lovers and their performing arts as important inspirations for Liang Chenyu's literary design, this paper revises the standard reading of the play as either a patriotic drama or a landmark in music history that served to promote Liang's favorite music genre from concert to operatic music. This paper is part of my larger project that reconsiders the role theater women played in shaping the literary landscape of the late sixteenth century.



Stabilizing Quality in Inner Mongolian Milk
Lecture
Date: January 31, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Speaker: Megan Tracy, Sociology and Anthropology James Madison University
Moderator: Franck Bille, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

In this paper, I examine how actors attempt to transfer material and symbolic value and transfer notions of “human quality” across other notions of quality, such as product quality and the presumed caliber of particular places where production occurs. This transference of quality is embedded, for example, in notions that ethnic Mongolians are pre-disposed to produce a quality dairy product. I consider the manner in which various activities — such as milking cows, producing indigenous foods, and advertising — seek to stabilize notions of quality (as attached to particular objects and practices) via claims to notions of quality that are often presumed by actors to be stable and based on measurable characteristics that go into building a quality “X” — no matter what that X might be. In this exploration, I revisit notions of human quality — a focus of anthropological attention — and bring it into dialogue with work like Callon's on how objects are qualified. These discussions are grounded in data collected within China's domestic dairy industry in Inner Mongolia both before and after the industry's epic product safety scandals.



The US, China, and Cross-Strait Relations
Lecture
Date: February 1, 2017 | 12:15 p.m.
Location: Women's Faculty Club, Lounge
Speaker: Hung-Mao Tien, President, Institute for National Policy Research, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan Moderator: T.J. Pempel, Political Science, UC Berkeley Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

Hung-Mao Tien, President, Institute for National Policy Research, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan, will speak about cross-Strait relations under the new U.S. administration.

Hung-Mao Tien is Ph.D. in Political Science, the University of Wisconsin — Madison; Chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation; President and board chairman, Institute for National Policy Research; Chief advisor to Taiwan's National Council of Industries; Board member of several cultural and charity foundations as well as business corporations in Taiwan. Formerly the R.O.C. Minister of Foreign Affairs; Representative (Ambassador) to the United Kingdom, and Presidential Advisor. He also served as advisor to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and professor of political science in the US and Taiwan (on adjunct basis) universities; Author and co-author of numerous books and articles in English.

Film Screening: People are the Sky: A Journey to North Korea
Documentary Film
Speaker: Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Filmmaker
Moderator: John Lie, UC Berkeley
Date: February 2, 2017 | 4:00–6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies

Director Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is the first Korean American filmmaker to be given official permission by the North Korean government to film inside its borders. In People are the Sky, Kim-Gibson's eighth and most personal film, the filmmaker makes a pilgrimage to her place of birth in North Korea for the first time in nearly 70 years to explore if it is still home.

Kim-Gibson seamlessly weaves her own personal story as a native born North Korean with the fractious history of the North/South division and pinpoints the roots of North Korean's hatred of the United States, giving Americans a much better understanding of the conflict. A mix of interviews, epic images, and graceful musings, People are the Sky offers some of the best political and social history of the relations between North and South Korea, and also a contemplative exploration of the meaning of home. The result is unprecedented, at times startling, for hers is an up close look of the hurts and desires, beauty and contradiction, pride and aspirations of the long held demonized nation.

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is a writer and producer, known for Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (2000), Olivia's Story (2000), and America Becoming (1991).



Music and Song from Mongolia
Performing Arts — Music
Date: February 2, 2017 | 7:30 p.m.
Location: Cal State University, East Bay, Recital Hall (MB1055), Music Building
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Music Department, Cal State University East Bay, Department of Music

An exploration of the diversity of Mongolian music, from traditional folk to folk-inspired hip-hop, mixing ethnographic video and audio recordings, narration, and live musical performance.

Performers and speakers include:
 •  Charlotte D'Evelyn, Loyola Marymount University
 •  Urtaa Gantulga, Musician
 •  Tamir Hargana, Northern Illinois University
 •  Peter Marsh, California State University, East Bay
 •  Dimitri Staszewski, mongolmusicarchive.com
 •  Jennifer Post, University of Arizona
 •  Sunmin Yoon, University of Delaware



Environmental Narratives in Mongolian Sound Worlds
Symposium
Data: February 3, 2017 | 1:00–6:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Cal State University East Bay, Department of Music

Urbanization, globalization, and climate change have had a powerful effect on the ways Mongolians and Inner Mongolians relate to their environment, and this is transforming many of their cultural forms. This conference seeks to increase awareness of the relationships been musical expression and the ecological, economic and political issues impacting residents in different ethnic groups in both rural and urban Mongolia.

A Keynote Address by Erdene Luvsannorov will be followed by performances of Mongolian music and singing.

This symposium and workshop follow a concert, "Music and Song from Mongolia," to be held at Cal State University East Bay, 7:30 PM in Room MB1055.

Speakers and Performers:
 •  Andrew Colwell, Wesleyan University
 •  Charlotte D'Evelyn, Marymount Loyola University
 •  Erdene Luvsannorov, Inner Mongolian University of Art, Huhhot, China
 •  Peter Marsh, Cal State East Bay
 •  Jennifer Post, University of Arizona
 •  Tamir Hargana, Mongolian Musician
 •  Urtaa Gantulga, Mongolian Musician
 •  Dimitri Staszewski, mongolmusicarchive.com
 •  Sunmin Yoon, University of Delaware



Annual Chinese New Year Banquet: Center For Chinese Studies
Special Event
Date: February 3, 2017 | 6:00–9:00 p.m.
Location: China Village, 1335 Solano Avenue, Albany, CA 94706
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies


Year of the Rooster

祝大家春節快樂: 公雞神採奕奕, 母雞勤勞美麗! Please join the Center for Chinese Studies for our annual celebration of Chinese Lunar New Year. Let us welcome the Year of the Rooster with good food, prizes, and interesting conversations with old and new friends.

Event Contact: ccs-vs@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑6322



Mongolian Throat-Singing (Khöömii) Workshop
Workshop
Date: February 4, 2017 | 9:00 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Location: 1995 University Avenue — IEAS Fifth Floor Conference Room
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Department of Music, Cal State University East Bay

An opportunity to learn the Inner Asian vocal technique of throat-singing, through which one can produce multiple vocal lines simultaneously, from expert practitioners in an intimate learning environment. This workshop is offered in conjunction with the February 3 symposium "Environmental Narratives in Mongolian Sound Worlds."



From Mass Science to Participatory Action Research: Maoist Legacies in Contemporary Chinese Knowledge Production
Colloquium
Date: February 6, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Speaker: Sigrid Schmalzer, History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Discussant: Andrew F. Jones, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

One of the signature elements of Mao-era science was the insistence on mobilizing the masses. Today, propaganda accounts of such activities ring hollow — or at best perhaps chime quaint. Yet some Chinese social scientists are eagerly adopting the theory and language of "participatory action research," an academic field that emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s global radicalism in which Maoist political philosophy and epistemology played crucial roles. This lecture will cross national boundaries and the “1978 divide” to trace the influence of Maoism — and the place of China more broadly — in leftist academic movements around the world, with a specific focus on agricultural science and rural development.



A Conversation with Writer Kyung-uk Kim
Colloquium
Kyung-uk Kim, Writer
Discussant: Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia
Moderator: Laura Nelson, Chair, Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley
Date: February 16, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies, Literature Translation Institute of Korea

Kyung-uk Kim was born in Gwangju, South Jeolla Province, South Korea in 1971. His career as a writer began when he published a novella titled Outsider in 1993 while a university student and won the Best New Writer Award from the quarterly Writer's World. The story follows a first-person narrator passing several stops on the Seoul subway while recalling memories concerning a high school student he had once taught. While depicting the expressions of anonymous crowds in the urban subterranean world, the narrator continuously mulls over movie scenes and pop music bands.

He then published his first novel Acropolis (1995), which depicts university campus life in the early 1990s when interest in ideology abruptly waned. Kim often follows what is called the 1990s generation in South Korea and the culture that dominated that time, and in particular, the music and visual culture of that era. His first short story collection There's No Coffee at the Bagdad Cafe (1996) takes its title from the Percy Adlon movie Bagdad Café. The title story of the collection is about an assistant film director who, while scouting for potential shooting locations, meets a woman. Additionally, the novel Morrison Hotel (1995) takes its title from the 1970s album of the rock group The Doors, and the short story collections Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (2003) and Leslie Cheung is Dead? (2005) take their titles from the band leader Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who largely symbolized the 1990s, and the Hong Kong-based movie star Leslie Cheung. Notably, The Doors vocalist Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Leslie Cheung were all icons who committed suicide.

More recently, the world of Kim's fiction has been moving away from the sphere of contemporary culture. He has also published The Golden Apple (2002), a novel based on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and Kingdom of a Thousand Years (2007) about the Dutch man Weltevree, who was shipwrecked on the shores of Chosun in 1627.

He completed his undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature and a master's degree in Korean Language and Literature from Seoul National University. In 2013, he participated in the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. Kim currently teaches creative writing at the Korean National University of Arts in the School of Drama.

Works (in Korean)

Novels
Acropolis (Akeuropolliseu 1995)
Morrison Hotel (Moriseun hotel 1997)
The Golden Apple (Hwanggeum sagwa 2002)
Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Cheonnyeon-ui wangguk 2007)
Like a Fairy Tale (Donghwacheoreom 2010)
What is Baseball (Yaguran mueot-inga 2013)

Short story collections
There is No Coffee at the Bagdad Café (Bageudadeu kape-eneun keopi-ga eoptda 1996)
Going to Meet Betty (Beti-reul mannareo gada 1999)
Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (Nuga keoteu kobein-eul jukyeoss-neunga 2003)
Is Leslie Chung Really Dead? (Janggukyeong-i jukeossdago? 2005)
Risky Reading (Wiheomhan dokseo 2008)
God has no Grandchildren (Sin-egeneun sonja-ga eoptda 2011)

Awards
Writer's World Best New Writer's Award (1993)
Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award (2008)
Dong-in Literary Award (2009)
Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize (2004)



Bodhisattva Precepts in East Asian Perspective and Beyond
Conference
Dates: Friday, February 17, 2017 (4:00–6:30 pm): 180 Doe Memorial Library
Saturday (9:30 am–6:00 pm) — Sunday (9:00 am – 12:00 pm): Alumni House, Toll Room
Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies

Program

Panel 1 (Friday, February 17, 4–6:30pm): China I
Chair: Peiying Lin (UC Berkeley)

T. H. Barrett (SOAS, University of London) — How did Chinese Lay People Perceive the Bodhisattva Precepts?

Liying Kuo (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient) — Visions and the Reception of Bodhisattva Precepts in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries

Charles Muller (Tokyo University) — The Silla Monk Daehyeon and his Commentary on the Sutra of Brahmā's Net

Panel 2 (Saturday, February 18, 9:30am–noon): China II
Chair: Raoul Birnbaum (UC Santa Cruz)

Sangyop Lee (Stanford University) — The Youposai wujie weiyi jing Bodhisattva Pratimokṣa: Its Nature and Historical Significance

Ann Heirman (University of Gent) — Body Movement and Sport Activities in Bodhisattva Precepts: A Normative Perspective from India to China

Ester Bianchi (Università degli Studi di Perugia) — Bodhisattva Precepts in Modern China. An Overview and Evaluation

Panel 3 (Saturday, February 18, 2–3:45pm) China and Japan
Chair: Robert Sharf (UC Berkeley)

Peiying Lin (UC Berkeley/ Fu Jen Catholic University) — Bodhidharma Lineages and Bodhisattva Precepts in the Ninth Century

Paul Groner (University of Virginia) — Annen's 安然 Comprehensive Commentary on the Universal Bodhisattva Ordination (Futsū jubosatsukai kōshaku 普通授菩薩戒広釈): Its Background and Later Influence

Panel 4 (Saturday, February 18, 4:15–7pm) Japan
Chair: Mark Blum (UC Berkeley)

Dermott Joseph Walsh (UCLA) — Eisai and the Bodhisattva Precepts

Richard Jaffe (Duke University) — Kawaguchi Ekai's View of the Precepts for Buddhism in the Twentieth-Century

William Bodiford (UCLA) — Anraku Ritsu in Tokugawa Japan: The Reconfiguration of the Bodhisattva Precepts within Japanese Tendai Buddhism

Panel 5 (Sunday, February 19, 9am–noon) India and Tibet
Chair: Jake Dalton (UC Berkeley)

Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Independent scholar) — “Compassionate Killing” Revisited

Alex von Rospatt (UC Berkeley) — The Adikarma literature. The vows and daily practices of lay bodhisattvas in late Indian Buddhism

Hiromi Habata (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) — Did the Bodhisattva-vinaya Exist? The Situation of the Bodhisattva Precepts in India before the Systematization


Right of Passage: A Documentary by Janice D. Tanaka
Documentary Film
Discussant: Janice Tanaka, Director
Date: February 21, 2017 | 7:00 p.m.
Location: Hearst Field Annex, A1 PFA
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies

Nowadays, when bipartisanship on Capitol Hill is a rarity, filmmaker Janice Tanaka tells the story of a bygone era of human connection inside the Beltway — an unprecedented “American” moment in the US Congress that the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University called an achievement “against all odds.” The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, almost forty-five years in the making, acknowledged the fundamental injustice of the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II in American Concentration Camps and paid each surviving internee $20,000 along with a government apology. Not many outside the Japanese American community know this story. Right of Passage recounts the journey of a small disenfranchised people who for thirty years buried their shame and indignation but then found the courage and strength to seek justice, which then snowballed into a lesson of the power of American democracy.

The documentary draws upon newly declassified documents, never-before-seen archival films and interviews with players speaking for the first time. Featured are Presidents Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; Senators Daniel Inouye, Spark Matsunaga and Alan Simpson; Congressmen Barney Frank, Norm Mineta and Bob Matsui; Ken Duberstein, former Chief of Staff to Ronald Reagan; and the men and women from the community who played a significant role in this Herculean effort.

Running time: 98 minutes.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion with director Janice Tanaka, John Tateishi, and others.

Visit the Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/CivilLibertiesAct1988/

Filmmaker's Statement

Every human rights campaign starts with a goal to right a fundamental wrong. It was clear that racial prejudice was the sole reason the U.S. Government imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wire in desolate locations around the country. In their quest for justice, Japanese Americans needed not only the three cornerstones of our government — the US Congress, Supreme Court and President — to admit a grievous 40-year old mistake, but to overcome internal community divisions ... and they did, when President Reagan signed The Civil Liberties Act in 1988 that awarded each former surviving internee an apology and $20,000. When the Nitto Tire USA approached me with the idea of creating a documentary film on this subject, my immediate thought was, “This is a complicated story to tell.” My producing partner, Nancy Araki, a former inmate herself, and I started by identifying all the groups involved, then we created ground rules for this journey.

First, the battle for redress was divisive; so we knew every participant firmly believed in his/her version of how it was won. We adopted Akira Kurosawa's “Rashomon” approach — asking each person to tell the story from his/her perspective — which took us from San Francisco to Seattle, Salt Lake City, Washington DC, New Jersey and Worland and Cody, Wyoming.

Second, we decided we would include only those statements in the film that could be substantiated with a paper trail or came from a source with firsthand knowledge, like Ken Duberstein, Reagan's White House Chief of Staff, Senator Alan Simpson and Rep. Norman Mineta. We examined recently declassified documents from the vast collection of papers in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California; the Mike Masaoka Collection, University of Utah; news items from 1939–1988; never-before-seen films from the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford Presidential Libraries; DENSHO archive of interviews of redress players no longer with us; and scores of personal collections.

Third, we framed the film's structure within the 8-year window of President Reagan's presidency because he was the not only a common thread to span the entire 40-year journey but had unique, unexplored intersections to it, plus I wanted the name recognition to attract an audience beyond the Japanese American community.

Fourth, for a narrator we wanted an icon who was not just immediately recognizable but knew about the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Brooke Shields, a Princeton graduate, was not only aware of the story but felt passionately that it needed to be told.

Fifth, we wanted to use this film to correct the lexicon — that Japanese Americans were not “evacuated,” they were forcibly removed; these were not “relocation camps” but concentrations camps.

My own emotional connection to the story comes from the fact that my mother and grandparents were incarcerated. When, as a film student at USC, I was encouraged to make documentary films about the people and world around me, my parents refused to talk about their camp experience. We lived in South Central Los Angeles, predominantly African American, and I discovered it was one of few areas that Japanese Americans were allowed to resettle after the war. Growing up, my parents warned me never to make waves — a mantra our entire community around me lived by. Many of my generation resorted to gangs, drugs and suicide. My previous film, When You're Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of Internment, tells this story.

In 1981, there was a buzz about Japanese American redress when President Carter signed a bill to appoint a commission to study this “embarrassing chapter.” I volunteered to film the public hearings in Los Angeles — a shocking and moving experience. It was the first time I heard former internees speak of their experience and many just broke down in tears. In 1988 when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act I really did not have any idea of what it took to get that bill passed.

In making this film I wanted to present a neutral but comprehensive and honest picture of the when and where the movement began, the forgotten players and factions and fractures within a community labeled the “model minority.” I also wanted to capture a time in politics when positions were not as intractable as they are today, a time when there was bipartisanship. While winning redress was an achievement for Japanese Americans, it could not have happened without Democrats and Republicans coming together — this created a unique and unprecedented “American moment” at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, one we are likely never to see again in view of today's political climate.

JANICE D. TANAKA (Director/Producer)

Right of Passage marks Janice D. Tanaka's debut as a feature documentary director. A producer, educator and television executive with 30 years of experience in producing film, cable, corporate media and educational videos for non-profit organizations in the Asian American community, Tanaka provides an unique inside perspective. Her mother was incarcerated at the Amache Concentration Camp and a recipient of the $20,000 monetary reparation and apology from the Civil Liberties Act.

From 2006 to 2011, Tanaka served as Manager, Diversity Development, at Fox where she worked on initiatives to employ writers, actors and directors of color. She specialized in outreach programs to make the studio system more accessible to minority youth. Prior to Fox, Tanaka executive produced over 100 episodes of multiple television shows that presented positive images of Asian Americans for International Channel and AZN Television. Shows included Cooleyville, an animated sitcom featuring a Chinese American family, XBYTES, a hip tech show and Popcorn Zen, a film shorts show.

As an educator for more than a decade teaching video production at Indiana University, Purdue University and the University of Florida, Tanaka instilled in her students the power of communicating and creating their own stories. Prior to teaching, Tanaka was an award winning marketing and public relations video producer at major corporations such as Transamerica, City National Bank and Hughes Aircraft Company. In addition, Tanaka has written and produced several acclaimed documentaries including When You're Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of Internment, the very first documentary to connect suicides in the Japanese American community in the 70's to their incarceration experience.

Her current work includes biographies on Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, a Japanese American civil rights advocate whose critical discovery made redress possible, and Reverend Emery Andrews, a Baptist minister who dedicated his life to helping Japanese Americans during the war. She is also working on a documentary about Japanese Americans in the Midwest immediately after World War II. Tanaka continues to be involved with broadcast TV as a script evaluator for ABC's New Talent Development program. She also produces videos for clients such as the Japanese American National Museum, Keiro Senior Healthcare, Advancing Justice-LA, the USC Alumni Association and others.

JOHN TATEISHI (Former JACL National Redress Director, Author)

John Tateishi gained national prominence in 1978 when he launched a campaign to seek redress for Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II as the National Redress Director of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). His work on the legislative and public affairs strategies of this campaign ultimately culminated in the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted a formal apology from the President and the Congress, as well as reparations, to the survivors of this incarceration.

He is the author of And Justice for All, one of the first compilations of oral history interviews about the wartime experiences of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II. He also has been a contributing author to Last Witnesses, a collection of personal essays by children about their incarceration experiences during this time.



Recital of Chinese Opera
Performing Arts — Music
Speaker: Peng Xu, CCS Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016–2017
Date: February 22, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

 彈詞 "The Ballad" — A Performance from Chinese opera

This famous excerpt from the poet Hong Sheng's (1645–1704) southern drama Palace of Lasting Life (1688) consists of ten solos sung by the character Li Guinian, a former leading musician from the Pear Garden Academy at the glorious Tang (685–762) court, now a performer reduced to singing popular ballads in the marketplace after the An Lushan Rebellion.

In “The Ballad,” the 38th scene of Hong Sheng's play, Li Guinian narrates the tragic love story of Emperor of the Tang and his most favored consort, Lady Yang Yuhuan (719–756). Among the audience this day is a young admirer of Lady Yang's composition “Rainbow Skirts.”

In the 11th scene of the play, Lady Yang learns the piece of music during a dream visit to the moon. She transcribes it from memory when she awakens and teaches it to Li and the musicians of the Pear Garden.

Li Guinian's last solo in “The Ballad” portrays the two refugees' bittersweet reunion and foresees that “Rainbow Skirts” is to be passed down to future generations. This ending may be self-referential: Li Guinian's solos turned out to have enjoyed great popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are still deemed as a central piece in the repertory of Chinese opera today.

Cast and Crew:
 •  Peng Xu: Singer
 •  Daniel C.F. Chan: Flute
 •  Tai-Yen Pao: Drum
 •  Lindy Li Mark: Host

Peng Xu (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2014) is an assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature and culture at Swarthmore College. She is working on her book manuscript as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in traditional bibliography and M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Peking University. In addition to her scholarly focus on premodern Chinese drama and theater, Dr. Xu was trained by a master of Peking opera in the vocal style known as the “Old Tan, New Tan” popular in the early twentieth century. At the same time, she studied with great amateur artists of kunqu opera in the Beijing Kunqu Learned Society. Her own singing style manifests significant connections between the two heritages of vocal music. Since 2010, she has taught undergraduate classes in Chinese opera and performing arts and has traveled to deliver lecture-demonstrations and interactive workshops at American colleges and universities.



The Trump Administration's Northeast Asia Policy: History and Security
Conference
Date: February 23, 2017 | 2:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Northeast Asian History Foundation, Center for Korean Studies

This conference addresses the challenges of contemporary Northeast Asian security, focusing on the implications of the Trump administration's policies for the region. Analyzing dynamics between U.S.-China relations and America's two alliances (with Japan and South Korea), participants will discuss the extent to which the future security order in Northeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula will be different from or similar to those of the post-Cold War period.

In a 1.5 track dialogue, high-profile figures from the United States and South Korea will participate as presenters or discussants. In this public forum, the audience will hear from current and former top-level decision-makers along with prestigious scholars and experts.

SCHEDULE

2:00 — Welcoming Remarks
Kevin O'Brien (UC Berkeley)
Hosup Kim (Northeast Asian History Foundation)

2:15–3:45 — Session I: Challenges for Northeast Asian Security
Young Ho Kim (Korea National Defense University)
Lowell Dittmer (UC Berkeley)
Moderated by T.J. Pempel (UC Berkeley)

4:00–5:30 — Session II: The Future of the U.S.-ROK Alliance
Taehyo Kim (Sunkyunkwan University)
Shinhye Choi (UC Berkeley)
Moderated by Young-sun Ha (Seoul National University)

5:30 — Closing Remarks
Hosup Kim (Northeast Asian History Foundation)

Additional Participants:
Vinod Aggarwal (UC Berkeley)
In-Taek Hyun (Korea University)
Insun Kang (Chosun Ilbo)
Euiyoung Kim (Seoul National University)
Seojin Kim (Northeast Asian History Foundation)
Byongtaek Lee (Northeast Asian History Foundation)
Jung-Hoon Lee (Yonsei University)
Sang Hyun Lee (The Sejong Institute)
Taeku Lee (UC Berkeley)
Laura Nelson (UC Berkeley)
Julian Park (UC Berkeley)
Yul Sohn (Yonsei University)
Lynn T. White III (Princeton University)
Euysang Yoo (Northeast Asian History Foundation)



The Wheel of Time: Tibetan Thoughts on the Buddha's Anno Nirvanae: 2017 Khyentse Lecture
Lecture
Speaker: Professor Leonard van der Kuijp, Harvard University
Date: February 23, 2017 | 5:00–6:30 p.m.
Location: Alumni House, Toll Room
Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies

Although fairly long in coming, the Christian calendar began with the year in which Jesus was allegedly born. And Dionysius Exiguus (6thc.) was the first to introduce the notion of A[nno]D[omini], the birth year of the Christ. Famously, the British monk Bede (672‑735) went so far as to deduce in his De temporum ratione of 725, an elaboration of his earlier Liber de temporibus of 703, that 3,952 years had passed from creation to Jesus' birth. For good measure he also recalculated the date of Easter. Perhaps more notoriously, in 1650, Archbishop James Ussher (1581‑1656) calculated that the world had come into being on October 23, 4004 BCE! The great Jewish intellectual Moses Maimonides (1135‑1204) worked with the year of the creation of the world, the Aera Mundi, as his starting point. In his opinion, the world's creation fell on the first of the seventh lunar month [September 7], 3760 BCE, and he used this calculation to date his 1166‑78 treatise, the Sanctification of the New Moon.

The Buddhists were not so much concerned with the creation of the world — for them it was not — as they generally were with the year in which the Buddha entered nirvana, the year in which he passed away. As yet unpublished and titled Elimination of Errors in Computation 1442 or 1443, Gö Lotsawa Zhönupel's (1392‑1481) polemical work on chronology and computation is a crucially important source for our understanding of the different ways in which the calendars and the various calculations of the passage of time in general developed in Tibet. It is also especially significant for the insights it provides into the numerous attempts that had been made in Tibetan intellectual circles to calculate the chronology of the life of the Buddha and the year of his passing. My talk will focus on this aspect of Gö Lotsawa's work and its place in Tibetan intellectual history

Leonard van der Kuijp is professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies and chairs the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. Best known for his studies of Buddhist epistemology, he is the author of numerous works on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Recent publications include An Early Tibetan Survey of Buddhist Literature (Vol. 64, Harvard Oriental Series, 2008), coauthored with Kurtis R. Schaeffer, and In Search of Dharma: Indian and Ceylonese Travelers in Fifteenth Century Tibet (Wisdom, 2009). Van der Kuijp's research focuses primarily on the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought, Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history, Tibetan Buddhism, and premodern Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Mongol political and religious relations



New Topics, Technologies and New Times: Japan Ahead
Conference
Dates: Friday, February 24, 2017 | 9:00 a.m.; Saturday, February 25, 2017 | 10:00 a.m.
Location: International House, Ida & Robert Sproul Room
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Academic communities play an important role in shaping international perspectives. Scholars work within broad networks, developing thoughtful insights on emerging changes long before others become aware of their implications. Students, whether within Japan and abroad, will in time become tomorrow's leaders. How we shape their understanding of Japan establishes powerful influence on the way they will think for decades ahead.

Japan's role in the world is changing. Its long era of postwar prosperity is signaled with a rich harvest of international awards. The Nobel Prize once seemed an elusive mark of success, but by 2014, there were three Japanese-born Nobel Prize winners and in 2015, two. Japan also boasts more native-born Pritzker Prize winning architects than any other nation, in spite of its small size. But the nation's future international influence is a larger question, its economy overtaken by China's. Both at home and abroad, Japan faces many other unmapped challenges.

We propose to bring together scholars form Japan and the West to discuss the future of Japan in our academic communities.

For more information, please go to the conference webpage: http://japanahead.weebly.com/

SCHEDULE

Friday, February 24

9:00 AM: Opening Remarks
Prof. Dana Buntrock, CJS Chair
Dr. Toru Tamiya, JSPS Director

9:15 AM–10:45 AM: Session 1 Cross-Cultural Exchanges: Study Abroad and Its Impact
Dr. Shingo Ashizawa, Toyo University
Dr. Peter McCagg, Akita International University
Moderated by: Dr. Keiko Yamanaka, Dr. Susan Holloway

11:00 AM–12:30 PM: Session 2 Language Education and Where It Leads
Dr. Mayumi Usami, National Inst. For Japanese Language & Linguistics
Dr. Dustin Wright, UC Santa Cruz
Discussant: Dr. Alan Tansman
Moderated by: Dr. Yoko Hasegawa

1:45 PM–3:15 PM: Session 3 Are Science, Technology, Engineering and Math a Part of Area Studies or Above it?
Dr. Masayo Fujimoto, Doshisha University
Dr. Robert Cole, UC Berkeley
Moderated by: Prof. Dana Buntrock

3:30 PM–5:00 PM: Session 4 Media Gateways, Transnational Frames
Dr. Shunya Yoshimi, Tokyo University
Dr. Christine Yano, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Moderated by: Dr. Miryam Sas


Saturday, February 25

10:00 AM–12:00 PM: Session 4 Area Studies Under Threat: How Will Japan be Taught in the Years Ahead?
Dr. Miriam Kingsberg, University of Colorado
Dr. David Spafford, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Yuma Totani, University of Hawaii
Ms. Andrea Horbinski (UCB)
Mr. James Stone Lunde (UCB)
Mr. Shoufu Yin (UCB)
Moderated by: Dr. Mary Elizabeth Berry

1:30 PM–2:30 PM: Keynote
Dr. Pat Steinhoff, University of Hawaii

2:30 PM–3:00 PM: Discussion
Moderator: Prof. Dana Buntrock

3:00 PM: Closing remarks
Prof. Dana Buntrock



East Asian Topologies of Power: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Currents Symposium
Symposium
Date: February 24, 2017 | 1:30–5:30 p.m.
Location: Stephens Hall, Room 220 — Geballe Room
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies

This symposium will bring into conversation the guest editors of three recent issues of the UC Berkeley-based e-journal Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review and three additional East Asia scholars to explore the special issues' thematic convergence on China and its neighbors, on space, and on cartography. Rather than regarding the emergence of the state as a top-down imposition, the three issues suggest that a vast range of state, ethnic, mercantile, and affective practices cohere to reify and give solidity to the fiction of the state. Further, the articles point to: 1) forms of territorial affiliation and sovereignty that are nodular and rhizomic, rather than spatially homogeneous; and 2) to tensions between the fiction of territorial fixity and the realities of a geopolitical footprint in flux. This roundtable discussion will, therefore, focus on two primary theoretical points: the state at the margins and territorial topologies. Audience participation in the discussion is encouraged.

The special issues are accessible on the open-access Cross-Currents website:

Frontier Tibet: Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham. Vol. 19 (June 2016) addresses questions of economic history and political legitimation in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-19).

Mapping Vietnameseness. Vol. 20 (September 2016) explores the emergence of Vietnam's geographical consciousness and the imagery of national belonging (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-20).

Cartographic Anxieties. Vol. 21 (December 2016) explores modern nations' desire for cartographic appropriation and the anxieties that this desire generates (https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-21).

Participants include:
 •  Wen-hsin Yeh (UC Berkeley)
 •  Pat Giersch (Wellesley)
 •  Peter Perdue (Yale)
 •  Kären Wigen (Stanford)
 •  Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard)
 •  Franck Billé (UC Berkeley)
 •  Stéphane Gros (CNRS)

Rethinking East Asia in the New Global Economy
Lecture
Speaker: Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Economic Geography, National University of Singapore
Moderator: T.J. Pempel, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: February 27, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

Drawing upon empirical research on South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, this speaker argues that production network-level dynamics and firm-specific initiatives are more critical to the successful industrial transformation of these East Asian economies.

This key mechanism of strategic coupling with global production networks offers a dynamic conception of state-firm relations in the changing context of global economic governance in East Asia. Based on his recent book with Cornell University Press, Strategic Coupling, he examines economic development and state-firm relations in East Asia, focusing on the region's emerging role in the new global economy. Much of the earlier social science literature on the political economy of industrial transformation has emphasized the role of the developmental state in picking selected domestic firms as “national champions” and in promoting their rapid growth through sectoral industrial policy.

Henry Wai-chung Yeung (PhD Manchester) is Provost's Chair and Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore, Co-Director of the Global Production Networks Centre (GPN@NUS), and Director of the JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre in the NUS Global Asia Institute. He is Principal Investigator of a S$4.95 million strategic grant awarded by the National University of Singapore to establish the GPN@NUS Centre. His research interests cover economic globalization, global production networks, East Asian firms, and the political economy of development. He was a recipient of the NUS Outstanding University Researcher Award (1998) and Outstanding Researcher Award (2008). His latest monographs are Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy Series, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, May 2016) and Global Production Networks: Theorizing Economic Development in an Interconnected World (with Neil Coe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, April 2015). His previous authored books are: Transnational Corporations and Business Networks (Routledge, 1998), Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms (Edward Elgar, 2002), and Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era (Routledge, 2004). He is also co-author of Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction (with Neil Coe and Phil Kelly, Wiley, 2007/2013). He has published another 7 edited books, over 92 academic journal articles, and 45 book chapters. He is Editor of two top journals in Geography — Environment and Planning A and Economic Geography and Past Editor of Review of International Political Economy (2004–2013), and serves on the editorial boards of 20 other international journals, including Asia Pacific Viewpoint, East Asia: An International Quarterly, European Journal of Development Research, Journal of Comparative Asian Development, Journal of Economic Geography, and Journal of International Business Studies.



Township leaders and village chiefs in contemporary China
Colloquium
Speaker: Zhe Ren, Institute of Developing Economies, CJS Visiting Scholar
Discussant: Daniel Mattingly, Stanford University
Date: February 28, 2017 | 2:00 p.m.
Location: 1995 University Avenue — IEAS Fifth Floor Conference Room
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

The relationship between a township leader and a village chief in contemporary China is something of a political puzzle. Researchers have maintained that China's bureaucratic system contains a very important political contracting framework. Within this framework, the career of a cadre is strongly related to the performance of a contract that may cover not only economic development but also other aspects of political and social development. Accordingly, previous research argued that political contracting was applied to leadership positions at both the town and village levels, making comparable 'contractual' demands on township leaders and village chiefs. Certain characteristics of the two positions, however, differ significantly in their implications for leadership performance and accountability. For instance, a cadre's career strongly depends on his or her performances and their assessments by upper-level and high-level cadres. In contrast, one can only become a village chief through a village election. Moreover, once elected a village chief cannot be dismissed by a township government unless the village chief is convicted of a crime. Furthermore, since a village chief is an elected leader, he or she does not necessarily have a clear and strong career plan akin to that of a cadre working and seeking to rise in the bureaucratic system. For these and other reasons, it is doubtful that the conventional political contracting model can adequately explain the complex relationships that exist today between township leaders and village chiefs in China.



The Steppe's Capital: the Meanings of Money in late-Qing Mongolia
Lecture
Speaker: Devon Dear, Independent Scholar
Date: February 28, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

Sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel famously described money as “colourless.” For many historians, money, like number, has been an equalizer capable of bringing previously-incomparable objects into relation. This talk challenges that idea as it explores the multiplicity of currencies and ad-hoc commodity monies used in Qing Mongolia in the 19th century as it explores Mongolians' roles in defining monies and currencies. Drawing upon data gathered from thousands of quotidian transactions, ranging from smuggling cases to the budgets of Manchu bureaucrats, the talk proposes a history of money beyond its computational and symbolic capacities.



Wide Angle, Close Up: Rethinking Twentieth-century Chinese Art
Colloquium
Date: March 3, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Speaker: Claire Roberts, Art History, School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne
Discussant: Winnie Wong, Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

This talk presents work-in-progress associated with the research project “Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency 1900s to Now” which examines twentieth century Chinese art from an international perspective. It will focus on two early works by Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Ye Qianyu (1907–1995), artists who have played key roles in the formation of xin guohua or what we have come to think of as modern Chinese brush-and-ink painting. The artworks chosen for discussion are striking but little known and studied; explanatory examples that offer insights into the methodology of the project. They move beyond national borders yet resist translation in universal terms. By taking into account the mobility of artistic ideas across time and space, probing influences and contexts that are both Sinophone and engaged with world currents, we can better understand the trajectories of the artists’ lives and the foundations of their artistic practice.



The Politics of Impeachment, Presidential Election, and Prospects for Foreign Policy in South Korea
Colloquium
Speaker: Chung-in Moon, Distinguished University Professor, Yonsei University
Date: March 6, 2017 | 12:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley APEC Study Center, Center for Korean Studies, East Asian Foundation

South Korea is mired in an imbroglio. Amidst the process of President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, the 2017 presidential race has begun. Meanwhile, its foreign policy is in a total disarray. Whereas the Trump shock has produced an uncertain future for ROK-US alliance, inter-Korean relations hit rock bottom. Furthermore, China-South Korean relations soured over the issue of deployment of American THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). Against this backdrop, this talk will examine Park’s impeachment process, prospects for the presidential election outcome, and the impact on South Korea’s foreign policy.

Chung-in Moon is Distinguished University Professor at Yonsei University and Editor-in-Chief of Global Asia, a quarterly journal in English. He is also Krause Distinguished Fellow, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UCSD. He has published fifty-six authored, co-authored, and edited volumes and over three hundred articles in academic journals such as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and World Development and edited volumes. He was a Public Policy Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a Lixian Scholar of Beijing University, and a Pacific Leadership Fellow at Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UCSD. He was executive director of the Kim Dae-jung Presidential Library and Museum. He also served as Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Northeast Asian Cooperative Initiative of the Roh Moo-hyun government, a cabinet-level post, and Ambassador for International Security of the ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He was Vice President of International Studies Association of North America and President of Korea Peace Research Association. He is currently co-convener of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, co-representative of Korea Peace Forum, and a columnist for the Korea Joongang Daily, and chairman of the Asia Research Fund.



Corporate Governance Reform and the Toshiba Scandal: Did a New System Hide an Old Mess?
Colloquium
Speaker: Christina Ahmadjian, Professor, Hitotsubashi University
Moderator: Steven Vogel, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: March 6, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies

An ongoing financial reporting scandal has stunned and puzzled observers of Japanese corporate governance reform. Toshiba was one of the first companies to adopt so-called “US-style” corporate governance practices. How could a company that had seemed to think so carefully about good governance have ended up like this? Where was the board? This presentation considers the possibility that the uneasy combination of elements from two very different business systems and institutions of governance at Toshiba may have created the conditions for scandal. This presentation uses the Toshiba case as an entry point to examine the larger theme of corporate governance reforms in Japan, and more generally, the unanticipated consequences of the convergence of business systems. Dr. Ahmadjian’s analysis of Toshiba and corporate governance reform in Japan is based on her experience as a researcher on Japanese corporate governance and Asian business systems, as well as her experience as a an external director at several large Japanese firms.

Christina Ahmadjian is a professor at Hitotsubashi University's Graduate School of Commerce and Management and former dean of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy. Her research interests include comparative corporate governance, globalization, systems of capitalism, business groups, and Japanese business and management. Her publications have appeared in journals including the American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and California Management Review. She teaches courses including organizational behavior, corporate governance, leadership, and global management. She received a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and a PhD in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at the Haas School at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to her position at Hitotsubashi, she was an assistant professor at Columbia Business School. Her business experience includes positions at Bain & Company and Mitsubishi Electric. Currently, serves as an Outside Director of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (since June 2012) and at Japan Exchange Group, Inc. (since June 2014). She was an Outside Director at Eisai, Ltd. from 2009–2013. She is an American citizen, but has lived in Japan for 20 years.



Calibrating the Chinese Citizen: Propaganda, E-Petitioning and Big Data-Driven Governance
Lecture
Speaker: Christian Göbel, Chinese Politics and Society, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna
Moderator: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: March 7, 2017| 12:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

In China, the majority of city-level governments has set up websites where citizen petitions and government responses can be reviewed by the general public. What is the political logic guiding the establishment of such open petitioning websites? Analyzing policy documents, government websites and open petitions, this paper argues that open petitioning websites represent a form of calibration of a government-operated system that seeks to guide the political activity of China’s citizens and at the same time monitors public service providers.

By means of official propaganda,open government information and online complaints, local officials seek to shape people’s preferences and define what constitutes, in the eyes of the government, legitimate and non-legitimate demands. By signaling their demands and grievances, citizens assist the government in the monitoring of local service providers. At the same time, they contribute information the government uses to update its propaganda, in particular authoritative narratives regarding China’s development, the parameters of good governance and the rights and responsibilities of Chinese citizens.

In China’s emerging big data-driven governance regime, such information will be used to calibrate a system whose purpose is to both shape and predict human behaviour.

Christian Göbel is professor of Chinese Politics and Society at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. His research is concerned with the adaptability of the Chinese Party-State to social, economic and political challenges. He is especially interested in effects of digital technology on local governance in China. His current project examines the interrelationship between petitions, protests and public policy.



Sovereign Peoplehood and Constitutional Founding in Postcolonial Korea
Colloquium
Speaker: Chaihark Hahm, Professor, Yonsei University
Moderator: Taeku Lee, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: March 7, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies

According to the preamble of the Korean constitution, it is 'We the People of Korea' that is drafting and promulgating the constitution as an expression of their sovereign will. But, who are these sovereign people, and how does one identify them? Are they the same as the ethnic Korean nation? Further, when the constitution is drafted under overbearing foreign influence, as was the case in postcolonial Korea, can we really say that the people are sovereign? And if the new constitution fails to categorically reject the evils of the past, as is often claimed to be the case in Korea, is the legitimacy of constitutional founding somehow compromised? Through a reflection on Korea's constitutional founding, Prof. Hahm will suggest a new approach to thinking about the relationship between popular sovereignty and constitution making.

Chaihark Hahm is Professor of Law at Yonsei University School of Law in Seoul, Korea. He teaches and writes on constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, Confucian political theory, Korean legal culture and history, citizenship education, and human rights. Dr. Hahm received his legal training in both Korea and the United States: Seoul National University (LL.B. 1986), Yale (LL.M. 1987), Columbia (J.D. 1994), and Harvard (S.J.D. 2000). He also studied theology at Yale Divinity School (M.A.R. 1989).

He is currently based in Stanford during the 2016–2017 academic year as a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held previous fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and The Hague Institute for the Internationalization of Law (2009–2010) and the National Endowment for Democracy (2001–2002).

Dr. Hahm is co-author (with Sung Ho Kim) of Making We the People: Democratic Constitutional Founding in Postwar Japan and South Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and co-editor (with Daniel A. Bell) of The Politics of Affective Relations: East Asia and Beyond (Lexington Books, 2004). He is an editorial board member of I•CON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, and his works have appeared in American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Democracy, and I•CON, among others.



The Prism of Youth: Life Writing by Japanese Children and Teenagers during WWII
Colloquium
Speaker: Aaron William Moore, Senior Lecturer, The University of Manchester
Moderator: Andrew Barshay, Professor, History, UC Berkeley
Date: March 7, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies

Even when compared with the West, Japanese children and teenagers arguably left the most extensive historical record of young people's personal experiences of total war from 1937 to 1945. In particular, evacuation, rationing, family life, compulsory labor, and conscription reach a level of detail rarely seen in adult accounts. Nevertheless, in the historiography of childhood and youth, the importance of "age as a category of analysis" can be in conflict with the notion that "children" and "teenagers" are culturally constructed categories which change throughout history. This talk will feature close readings of hand-written manuscripts, published, and self-published personal documents, including diaries and letters, to discuss how the war was described when we strictly limit our perspective to materials composed by young people aged 8 to 16. In doing so, we will see how important social expectations for young people were for framing their descriptions of the war years, but also how adult efforts to discipline youth were ultimately unsuccessful in controlling the process of learning about language, society, and the larger world.

Aaron William Moore is a Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Writing War (HUP, 2013), a major comparative study of Japanese, Chinese, and American soldiers' diaries describing combat experience and subjectivity in WWII. His second book, Bombing the City, is a narrative history of civilian accounts of the air war on British and Japanese cities, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2017. He has published articles on children's descriptions of war in China and Japan, and is currently preparing a book on Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and British youth accounts of WWII. In 2014 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in comparative history.



Conjunctural Urbanism: Cities, Financialization, and Late Neoliberalism
Colloquium
Speaker: Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia
Discussant: George C.S. Lin, Chair Professor of Geography, University of Hong Kong
Date: March 8, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Global Metropolitan Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

The field of critical urban studies has been moved in recent years by a series of poststructural and postcolonial interventions that have raised searching questions about the explanatory status accorded to “EuroAmerican” case studies, about the reach and relevance of political-economic theory claims concerning entrepreneurial (or neoliberal) modes of regulation, and about the respective utility of planetary, provincial, and particularized formulations of the urban. Conceived as a constructive response to these debates, the presentation will make a case for a “conjunctural” approach to critical urban studies. Here, a special place is reserved for the provisional formulation and ongoing revision of “midlevel” theories — from the entrepreneurial city to austerity urbanism and financialized urban governance — abstraction and contextualization being understood to be simultaneous, dialogic practices. More concretely, conjunctural approaches must also be especially attentive to the positioning of cities in relation to uneven geographical development, spatial divisions of labor, and multiscalar relations.

These arguments are illustrated with reference to the shift from entrepreneurial urbanism to fiscal crisis in Detroit and Atlantic City.



Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland
Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Jane H. Yamashiro, Author
Date: March 9, 2017 | 2:00–5:00 p.m.
Location: 554 Barrows Hall
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), The Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program

Lecture and Book Signing with Dr. Jane H. Yamashiro
Introduction by Michael Omi

Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan experience both racial inclusion and cultural dislocation while negotiating between the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive observations and interviews with Japanese Americans who are geographically, culturally, and linguistically diverse, Jane H. Yamashiro reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness. Her findings have major implications for both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration and global diasporic identity.

"Not only does Yamashiro give us engaging portraits of how Japanese Americans navigate the social and cultural terrain of contemporary Japan, but she also provides a fundamental rethinking of the analytic frameworks by which migrant identities have been contextualized and understood."
                                              Michael Omi,
                                              University of California, Berkeley

Jane H. Yamashiro is a sociologist whose comparative and transnational work on race and ethnicity, culture, globalization, migration, diaspora, and identity sits at the intersection of Asian American and Asian Studies. She has previously been based at USC's Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. She holds a B.A. from the University of California at San Diego and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. While conducting research in Japan, Dr. Yamashiro has been funded by the East-West Center and the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship, and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo and Sophia University. Her academic research has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies; AAPI Nexus: Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders Policy, Practice and Community; Sociology Compass; Geoforum; CR: The New Centennial Review; and Migrations and Identities.



Contents Tourism: Fictional narratives and locations that beckon us to travel
Conference
Dates: March 10–11, 2017 | 6:30 p.m.
Featured Speaker: Takayoshi Yamamura, Hokkaido University
Speakers:
 •  Millie Creighton, University of British Columbia
 •  Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Yokohama National University
 •  Michael Dylan Foster, University of California, Davis
 •  Margaret B. Swain, University of California, Davis
 •  Rongling Ge, Xiamen University
 •  Deirdre Clyde, City College of San Francisco, and University of
     Hawaii, Manoa
 •  Min Joo Lee, University of California, Los Angeles
 •  Kyungjae Jang, Hokkaido University
Discussants:
 •  Daniel Fischer, University of California, Berkeley
 •  Nelson Graburn, University of California, Berkeley
Speakers/Performers:
 •  Shinobu Myoki, Tohoku University
 •  Ryoko Nishijima, University of California, Los Angeles
Location: Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room, 221
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Cambria Press

The focus of this conference emphasizes the contemporary contents tourism, based mainly on the stories and characters of manga, anime, the internet, young peoples’ “virtual world,” rather than commercial or politically/geographically driven cases. The components are: the artist/creators who may or may not be professionals, the distribution media which may be broadcast programs or interactive media, the fans who admire and attribute special qualities to the fictional beings and places, and the tour, the (self)organized travel and the ritualized performances, often considered pilgrimages (Jang 2015) at the chosen destinations. These performances usually involve cosplay [costume play], that is the fans dressing up as or for the fictional characters.

These forms of contents tourism pertain to age groups, especially as a kind of rebellion of detachment of the (unmarried, underemployed) youth from those older, much as did Banana Yoshimoto’s inventive fiction since 1988. There is also a strong gender component with different personages and “cults” appealing to different genders. Prime is the proto-adolescent female figure engendering moe [burning, attraction] to young people of both genders but tending towards porno-attraction for middle-aged and older males (Yamamura 2008). There are more specialized programs, “cults” and events appealing to narrower gender audiences. For instance Yaoi-con consists of homo-erotic male figures which are designed to and in fact attract and fascinate — and arouse female “fans” (Uzama 2011) and this had grown to be popular abroad, especially in the United States (Masaki 2008). In 2015 the Yaoi-con (convention) took place in a hotel near San Francisco airport and two of the conference participants attended for research purposes.

Not all contents tourism is so esoteric or limited to Japanese fans. “Power Spot” tourism is a Japanese “spiritual craze” which designates certain places and spiritual destinations engendering “pilgrims” for “worshippers” in places not necessarily celebrated by Japanese traditional religions. While this relates culturally and overlaps with Japans animistic Shinto (the religion of 8 million kami [“gods’]),” it has generated its own fan groups and promoted visual consumption life styles such as Yama girls. It also bears resemblance to European-derived Geo-caching (Elder 2016) which is also practiced in Japan by tourists and Japanese alike. Clothilde Sabre, a French scholar associated with the Hokkaido équipe, is writing on Pokémon-Go as a driver of new tourism destinations in Japan (personal communication 2016). Above all, anecdotal evidence and preliminary research suggests that similar Contents Tourism phenomena are growing elsewhere in East Asia (McCarthy 2016), the USA and Europe.

Contents Tourism is already an important topic in Japan at the economic, sociological, geographical and cultural levels. There is an Academy of Contents Tourism (Academic, Governmental and Business Membership), there are two volumes on Contents Tourism (Nishikawa et al. 2015; another that I have just reviewed for a press); and there are a number of research centers. The British Association of Japanese Studies held a Mini-Conference: “Civil Society, Tourism, Anthropology” in July 2016, at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University. Above all it is a field of immense creativity, of importance to major groups of Japanese (and Korean and some Chinese) nationals. The power of the symbolism and attraction is perhaps best measured by reports (Jang 2016; Okamoto 2015) that these “cults” are the only successful way of getting hikikomori (self-imposed recluses), out of their isolation into civil society. About a million young people, mainly men aged 18–35, live permanently in their bedrooms parents’ homes! (Zielenziger 2006).

Schedule and Participants:

Friday March 10th

5.00pm — Opening Reception, Sponsored by Cambria Press
(P A Hearst Museum, Main Gallery, 102 Kroeber Hall)

6.30pm — Opening Address
Prof. Takayoshi Yamamura (Center for Advanced Tourism Studies, Hokkaido University)
“Who Creates ‘Contents Tourism’? A new tourism model induced by pop culture in the age of mixed media.”
(Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall)

Saturday March 11th
(All in the Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall)

9.15–11.00 am — Neo-Destinations and Community Focus
Millie Creighton (University of British Columbia)
Akiko Sugawa-Shimada (Yokohama National University)
Michael Dylan Foster (University of California, Davis)

11.15 am–12.25 pm - Media and Representations over Time
Shinobu Myoki (Tohoku University)
Margaret B. Swain (University of California, Davis) & Rongling Ge (Xiamen University)

12.25–1.40 pm - Lunch Break

1.40–2.50 pm - Media and creation of pilgrimage/tours
Deirdre Clyde (City College of San Francisco, and University of Hawaii, Manoa)
Bianca Freire-Medeiros (University of Texas at Austin and Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil)

3.10–5.00 pm - Multi-cultural, cross-cultural youth tourism
Min Joo Lee (University of California, Los Angeles)
Ryoko Nishijima (University of California, Los Angeles)
Kyungjae Jang (Hokkaido University, Japan)

5.15–6.00 pm - Discussants
Daniel Fischer (Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley)
Nelson Graburn ((Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley)

6.00–7.00 pm - Open Discussion among participants and audience


The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century
Lecture
Date: March 14, 2017 | 12:00–2:00 p.m.
Speaker: Stein Ringen, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford
Moderator: Rachel Stern, Berkeley School of Law
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

Professor Ringen will presents his book, The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century. The Chinese political economy is like no other system known to man, now or in history. This book explains how the system works and where it may be moving.

  • What are the intentions and priorities of the Chinese leaders?
  • What kind of leader is Xi Jinping, where is he leading China and how radically is he changing the regime?
  • How strong is the Chinese economy and how fast is it growing?
  • How does the socialist market economy work?
  • How is the apparatus of the party-state made up and how does it work?
  • What is the balance of pragmatism and ideology?
  • Is a new ideological foundation in the making?
  • What are the means of dictatorial control?
  • Is there a ‘totalitarianism with Chinese characteristics’?

Drawing on Chinese and international sources, on extensive collaboration with Chinese scholars, and on the political science of state analysis, the author concludes:

  • Under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the system of government has been transformed into a new regime, radically harder than the legacy of Deng Xiaoping;
  • China is less strong economically and more dictatorial politically than the world has wanted to believe.


Manchurian Sleepwalkers
Documentary Film
Speaker: Thomas Lahusen, Documentarian and Distinguished Professor of History, University of Toronto
Date: March 16, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

Harbin, Manchuria, was a temporary, provisional home for several hundreds of thousands of émigrés, who came to live there from Russia, Japan, and many other countries, as colonizers, military personnel, adventurers, or refugees, during the first half of the twentieth century. They were forced to leave after 1945. Many years later, the memory of their previous home has become an obsession for them. They collect and exchange photographs, write memoirs, get together in associations, etc. What unites them is a persisting, indelible, and often haunting memory of their life in China, which they transmit from generation to generation.

Footage was shot in China, Japan, Poland and Germany in 2009, 2014, and 2015. It includes interviews with Poles and Germans, born in China, and repatriated after 1945 to a homeland they had never known. Other interviews were conducted in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, among former rural settlers who survived the debacle of 1945, Soviet labor camps, and collective suicide. Interviews and street scenes alternate with archival footage and photographs. Sound is an essential part of the film: the different languages spoken, together with the Russian, Polish, or Japanese songs and tunes from before, alternate with the sounds and voices of the Chinese street. The nostalgic or tragic reminiscences of the former émigrés are challenged by images and sounds of present-day Harbin and other places in Northeast China, which have turned the remains of the foreign presence, such as Orthodox churches, synagogues, mosques, and cemeteries into food for the memory industry.



Donald Trump is No Friend of Taiwan
Lecture
Speaker: Shelley Rigger, Political Science, Davidson College
Date: March 20, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

Many Americans believe Taiwan is an important friend and partner to the US. The prospect of a foreign policy iconoclast in the White House appealed to many of Taiwan’s supporters in the US, especially those who are active in US foreign policy circles. Former officials of the George W Bush administration, in particular, have spent the past 8 years arguing that it is time for the US to upgrade its relations with Taiwan and take a firm stance against Beijing’s demand that the US distance itself from Taiwan. For this group, Donald J. Trump’s tough talk about China on the campaign trail appeared to be an opportunity to push through a more pro-Taiwan agenda. Their efforts seemed to bear fruit in early December when president-elect Trump spoke on the telephone with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen. That moment may well turn out to be the high point in US-Taiwan relations under Trump, however. Beginning only hours after the phone call, and continuing through the early months of his presidency, Trump took a series of actions that damaged Taiwan’s interests and undermined trust between Taipei and Washington. If the trend continues, Taiwan’s supporters may find themselves looking back at the Obama years with nostalgia.



Queuing into the Afterlife: The Politics of Branding Buryat Buddhism
Lecture
Speaker: Tatiana Chudakova, Department of Anthropology, Tufts University
Moderator: Franck Billé, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
Location: 180 Doe Library
Date: March 21, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

This paper discusses the inadvertent effects of transforming the marked into the marketable on the mundane strategies of “making a living,” both economically and cosmologically, in Buddhist Siberia. Building on anthropological discussions on marketing ethnicity, it tracks attempts to develop a regional brand in Buryatia, a self-governing republic within the Russian Federation that derives its political status from being home to an ethnically Mongol minority. Tracking local efforts to develop “Buryatia’s brand,” I am interested in what happens when local ethno-branding projects run up against and must make themselves legible to the state’s narratives and imaginaries of its national and international identity. In the context of present day Russia examined here, branding ethnicity is a complicated political gambit, in part because the state’s self-presentation has been fluctuating between privileging radical plurality on the one hand and, on the other, laying claims to equally radical cultural and ideological homogeneity. By looking at an instance of ethno-branding “at the edges” — in a region that has historically been situated at the periphery of several, competing spheres of political influence, the paper interrogates how the regimes of value that underpin ethno-branding work alongside a self-conscious politics of marginality.



Everyday Ironies: Mao Badges as the Biggest Consumer Fad in History
Colloquium
Speaker: Karl Gerth, History, UC San Diego
Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley
Date: March 22, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

Today’s bought, sold, collected, and inspected Mao badges seem to be at odds with their history as icons of loyalty to Mao Zedong during the early Cultural Revolution. It would be easy to imagine the postsocialist market for Mao badges as the perfect symbol of the transition from badges as symbols of socialist idealism and revolutionary commitment, culminating in their universal popularity at the start at the peak of the Mao cult around 1969, to badges as crass materialism and the ubiquitous market culture of today. One might argue that the market transacted Mao badges perfectly symbolizes the failure of Maoism and the central goal of the Destroy the Four Olds (破四旧) campaign: eliminating “feudal” and “capitalist” material remnants and thereby transforming China.

My paper will be the eighth chapter in a book I am finishing about the survival and transformation of consumerism during the socialist era. In this chapter and the book project, I argue that the postsocialist era is not the antithesis of the socialist era. Badges did not descend from sacred objects that symbolized the height of intense anti-consumerism and revolutionary fervor of the Cultural Revolution into the postsocialist era, when nothing was sacred or beyond commoditization, not even the image of Mao, and consequently they were treated as ordinary commodities, with market-determined values. Rather, the current market craze for Mao badge collecting is a resurgence of badge market value. The irony was present all along and, indeed, the markets and consumerism underlying the fad propelled the Mao badge phenomenon.

I interpret the Mao badge phenomenon as the biggest fad in history. Moreover, the biggest fad also represented the greatest irony of the socialist era: China at the height of its anti-capitalist, anti-market nationwide Destroy campaign in the summer of 1966 also produced the most intense outburst of consumerism, “capitalism,” and even the “feudalism” that the campaign was concurrently attacking. The fad led Chinese to steal, buy, trade, hoard, make, and even pin badges directly onto their chests. Examining the social uses of badges reveals a very different side to Chinese society than the one portrayed in studies that begin with the elite politics, purges, and violence of the Cultural Revolution. As with the previous book chapter on the Destroy campaign, which examines the unintended but widespread consequences of Red Guard activities, this chapter seeks to identify the same ironic unintended consequences through the specific case of the Mao badge fad.



Enmity, Amity, Comity, Normality, Abnormality: Korea-U.S. Relations in the Post Geun-hye, Post Obama Era
Lecture
Speaker: Edward Dong, Former Senior Foreign Service rank of Minister-Counselor, US Department of State
Moderator: Laura Nelson, UC Berkeley
Date: March 23, 2017 | 12:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies

Korea-U.S. relations have historically been fraught, with Korea more often than not part of a sub-issue in broader contexts such as the Cold War in Asia, U.S.-China and U.S.-Japan relations, and global non-proliferation. Even on a bilateral basis, the relationship is often defined by North Korea/military alliance and economic/commercial factors, leading to frictions. In more recent years, the relationship has broadened and diversified stemming in particular from a U.S. appreciation of the consequences of tremendous changes in the Republic of Korea, but the uncertainties stemming from new leadership in Seoul and Washington will have implications for whether the “abnormality” of fraught ties becomes “normality” again.

Edward Dong retired from the State Department after a thirty seven year career with the Senior Foreign Service rank of Minister-Counselor. Dong is an expert in East Asian affairs, fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language and well versed in security and economic policy. He spent three tours at Embassy Seoul, and was also the Director of Korean Affairs during Secretary Albright's visit to Pyongyang in October 2000. Dong held Principal Officer positions as the Consul General in Guangzhou, China, the Consul General in Osaka-Kobe, Japan, and the Director of the Japanese Language Field School in Yokohama, Japan. He was also a Member of the Policy Planning Staff for Secretary Christopher and had other tours in Taiwan, Singapore, and Mexico City. Dong has an AB in East Asian Studies, an MA in the Group in Asian Studies, and a JD, all from the University of California at Berkeley.



Workshop on Tannishō Commentarial Materials
Workshop
Dates: March 25–27, 2017
Location: Jodo Shinshu Center — 2140 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704 Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, Otani University, Ryukoku University

The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan. Beginning in 2017, the workshop will continue for five years, meeting twice a year for 3 to 4 days each time, in late March in Berkeley and early August in Kyoto, where it will be hosted alternately by Ōtani and Ryūkoku universities. Organized around close readings of the most influential materials produced in early modern, modern, and postmodern Japan, the workshop aims at producing a critical, annotated translation detailing the salient ways in which this text has been both inspirational and controversial, as well as a series of essays analyzing a wide spectrum of voices in Japanese scholarship and preaching that have spoken on this work. For the early modern or Edo period, the commentaries by Enchi (1662), Jinrei (1801–1808), and Ryōshō (1841) will be examined. For the modern period, works by Andō Shūichi (1909), Chikazumi Jōkan (1930), and Soga Ryōjin (1947) will be the major concern. And for the postwar/postmodern period, due to the sheer volume of publications (over 300 titles), reading choices will be selected at a later date in consultation with participants.

Format: The language of instruction will be primarily English with only minimal Japanese spoken as needed, and while the texts will be in primarily in Classical Japanese and Modern Japanese, with some outside materials in kanbun and English. Participants will be expected to prepare the assigned readings, and on occasion make relevant presentations in English about content.

Dates: Exact dates will vary from year to year based on academic calendars, but for 2017 the meeting hosted by U.C. Berkeley will take place from the 25th to the 27th of March at the Jōdo Shinshū Center in Berkeley, and in Kyoto the seminar will be hosted by Ōtani University from the 4th to the 7th of August.

Cost: There is no participation fee, but in recognition of the distance some will have to travel to attend, a limited number of travel fellowships will be provided to qualified graduate students, based on preparedness, need, and commitment to the project.

Participation Requirements: Although any qualified applicant will be welcome to register, graduate students will be particularly welcome and the only recipients of financial assistance in the form of travel fellowships. Affiliation with one of the three hosting universities is not required. We welcome the participation of graduate students outside of Japan with some reading ability in Modern and Classical Japanese and familiarity with Buddhist thought and culture as well as native-speaking Japanese graduate students with a scholarly interest in Buddhism. Although we welcome students attending both meetings each year, participation in only one is acceptable.

Application Procedure: Applications must be sent for each year that one wants to participate. To apply to register for either or both of the workshops for 2017, send C.V. and short letter explaining your qualifications, motivations, and objectives to Kumi Hadler at cjs@berkeley.edu by February 10, 2017. Applications are by email only, and application deadlines will remain as end-January in subsequent years as well. Requests for a travel fellowship money should be included in this letter with specifics of where you will be traveling from and if you plan to attend one or both meetings that year. Questions about the content of the workshop may be sent to Professor Blum at mblum@berkeley.edu.



Mongolian Archaeology: New Discoveries, New Concerns
Conference
Date: April 3, 2017 | 9:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Smithsonian Institution, Archaeological Research Facility

The ancient cultural interactions of Northeast Asia have left a now-imperiled record in stone across the steppes and forests of Mongolia. The historical implications of the archaeological record, and the race not only to study but to preserve this record in the face of growing threats from development, tourist access, and an insatiable art market, are the focus of this symposium, organized jointly with the Smithsonian Institution.

Participants include:

Jeffrey Altschul, Statistical Research, Inc.
John Vincent Bellezza, University of Virginia
Richard Ciolek-Torello, Statistical Research, Inc.
Julia Kate Clark, Northern Mongolia Archaeology Project
D. Erdenebaatar, Ulaanbaatar City College
William Fitzhugh, Smithsonian Institution
William Honeychurch, Yale University
Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, University of Oregon
Richard Dennis Kortum, East Tennessee State University
Daniel Rogers, Smithsonian Institution
Joan Schneider, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians
William Taylor, Max Planck Institute
Joshua Wright, University of Aberdeen

For the full conference program, abstracts, and participant bios, visit the conference website here.



Gamushara (Live Recklessly)
Documentary Film
Speakers:
 •  Hidekazu Takahara, Director and Filmmaker
 •  Yuka/Act Yasukawa, Professional Wrestler and Actress
Date: April 6, 2107 | 6:30 p.m.
Location: 142 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, Center for East Asian Studies

Hidekazu Takahara, 2015 (102 Minutes)
In Japanese with English subtitles

In Attendance:
Hidekazu Takahara, Director and Filmmaker
Yuka/Act Yasukawa, Professional Wrestler and Actress

In Hidekazu Takahara’s Gamushara (Live Recklessly), professional wrestling/joshi puroresu star Yuka/Act Yasukawa confronts her own past sexual trauma through the performance of violence in the ring. The fluidity between Yuka and her wrestling persona Act raises key questions: what are the documentary's limits in crafting a vision of a shifting identity, when so much of its subject’s personality is performed? Where is the Act in Yuka and the Yuka in Act? Where does Act's act begin? As a film that cannily and critically engages with the genre aesthetics of both documentary and pink film, the unreleased Gamushara has been heralded as a major work of documentary cinema by preeminent Japanese filmmaker Hara Kazuo.

Takahara, and the subject of the film, Yasukawa, will be on hand for a Q & A following the film. This will be an exciting opportunity to discuss the film with its creator and principal actor to probe the tensions between performing a transgressive femininity on camera and in the wrestling ring.



On Belonging: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Japan
Conference
Dates: April 7–8, 2017 | 2:00–5:30 p.m. (Friday); 9:45 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. (Saturday)
Location: Stephens Hall, Geballe Room, The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies

The UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies presents its fourth annual graduate student conference: On Belonging: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Japan. We invite proposals for papers from current graduate students and recent graduates from any discipline that focus on past and present inquiries into and expressions of identity and community formation vis-à-vis gender and sexuality in Japan. In particular we welcome abstracts that explore the role of identity (including gendered, sexual, social, and ethnic) in relation to Japanese Buddhist institutions, texts, and community practices.

This conference will also explore representations of and critical engagements with notions of gender, sexuality, and identity that illuminate where and how interpretations of such concepts have manifested barriers to belonging in the forms of discrimination and marginalization.

Friday, April 7, 2017

(2:00–2:10p)
OPENING REMARKS — Prof. Dana Buntrock

(2:10–3:40p)
Panel 1: "Transformations, Gender, and Buddhism in the Popular Imaginary"
 •  Kim McNelly (UCLA)
 •  Deirdre Clyde (University of Hawaii, Manoa)
 •  Stephanie Hohlios (UC Berkeley)
Respondent: Professor Mark Blum, Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair in Japanese Studies, UC Berkeley

(3:40–4:00p)
BREAK

(4:00–5:30p)
KEYNOTE TALK: Professor Jessica Main, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chair in Buddhism and Contemporary Society, University of British Columbia

Saturday, April 8, 2017

(9:45–9:55a)
OPENING REMARKS

(9:55–11:25a)
Panel 2: "Constructing Race and Gender"
 •  Wakako Suzuki (UCLA)
 •  Lani Alden (University of Colorado, Boulder)
 •  Asheli Mosley (International Christian University)
Respondent: Professor Alan Tansman, Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Japanese, UC Berkeley

(11:25–11:45a)
BREAK

(11:45–1:15p)
Panel 3: "The Construction and Consumption of Gender and Sexuality"
 •  Sayo Sakamoto (University of Washington)
 •  Hannah Dodd (Ohio State University)
 •  Kirsten Seuffert (USC)
Respondent: Professor Joseph Lavery, UC Berkeley

(1:15–2:00p)
LUNCH

(2:00–3:30p)
Panel 4: "Voice, Identity, and the Performance of Community"
 •  Pedro Bassoe (UC Berkeley)
 •  Pontus Andersson (University of Helsinki)
 •  Justine Wiesinger (Yale)
Respondent: Professor Jessica Main, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chair in Buddhism and Contemporary Society, University of British Columbia

(3:30–3:50p)
BREAK

(3:50–5:20)
Panel 5: "Economies of Identity"
 •  Andrea Horbinski (UC Berkeley)
 •  Valerie Black (UC Berkeley)
 •  Caitlin Casiello (Yale)
Respondent: Professor Karen Nakamura, UC Berkeley

(5:20–5:30p)
CLOSING REMARKS Prof. Dana Buntrock



The Bishan Project: 2010–2016
Colloquium
Speaker: Ou Ning, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University in the City of New York
Moderator: Weihong Bao, East Asian Languages and Cultures; Film Studies
Date: April 7, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

The Bishan Project was not just an art project. It started out from wanting to address those imbalances between cities and the countryside that had manifested grim realities such as the deterioration of agricultural industries, rural villages, and farm laborer empowerment, and were the direct result of excessive urbanization. The project relied on the accumulated experience of the rural reconstruction movement led by Chinese intellectuals since the Republican Era, as well as the cultural practices of various rural regions in Asia. Adopting the intellectual resources of China's traditional agricultural industry and rural philosophies, as well as leftist or even anarchist ideas, Bishan Project aimed to combat the encroachments of globalization and neoliberalism, and by using art and culture as the first point of entry, it ultimately hoped to influence politics and economics in rural areas. It’s interests lied in exploring the economics of rural life, establishing relationships between the city and countryside based on mutual sustenance, promoting labor practices based on mutual aid and exchange, establishing a social structure based on horizontal power, adopting consensus-based decision making, applying direct action, reviving the tradition of autonomy in China's rural areas, and transforming Utopian ideals into realpolitik.



Looking at Okinawa: Race, Gender, Nation
Conference
Speakers:
 •  Ishikawa Mao, Photographer
 •  Wendy Matsumura, Professor, UC San Diego
 •  Annmaria Shimabuku, Professor, NYU
Date: April 9, 2017 | 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Location: Moffitt Undergraduate Library, 340 (BCMN Commons Seminar Room)
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Center for Race and Gender, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures

This is a one-day event being held in order to create a dialogue on issues of race and gender in the study of Okinawa, and to contemplate the relationship between the study of Japan and the study of Okinawa.

We will initiate this dialogue with a lecture by photographer Ishikawa Mao, whose work explores the complex relationships of gender, race, and national identity in Okinawa and Japan. Her works have included including candid photographs of African American servicemen and their Okinawan and Japanese wives and girlfriends in Okinawa in the 1970s; and portraits of Japanese and Okinawan people with the national flag of Japan, interacting with it in various ways to demonstrate their complicated and often troubled relationship with the nation of Japan. Ishikawa is to give a slide show and talk about her work, focussing on her photographs of African American servicemen.

In the afternoon, we will hold a discussion between scholars, students, and members of the public, to be led by Professor Wendy Matsumura (UCSD) and Professor Annmaria Shimabuku (NYU), who, from the fields of cultural studies, sociology, and history, have been engaged in thinking about the role of Okinawan studies and its place in Japanese studies more generally. We will discuss what it means to study Okinawa in the American academy, and, drawing on Ishikawa's work, we will examine the complicated role of race and gender in Japanese studies and Okinawan studies.

Presenter bios:

Ishikawa Mao is an Okinawan photographer, who has been active since the 1970s. Having studied with Tomatsu Shomei in Tokyo, she went on to photograph soldiers and locals in Okinawa and Japan, and over 40 years has created a candid and intimate style of photography which humanizes her subjects while also offering political critique.

Wendy Matsumura is assistant professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. She works on Okinawan history, as well as the history of labor and race in the Japanese Empire. Her book, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, was published by Duke University Press in 2015.

Annmaria Shimabuku is assistant professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. She works on postcolonial feminism and theories of race in Japan, Okinawa, and beyond.



The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory
Panel Discussion
Date: April 10, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Speakers:
 •  Rebecca Karl, Department of History, New York University
 •  Lydia Liu, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University
Panelists:
 •  Colleen Lye, English, UC Berkeley
 •  Raka Ray, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Moderator:
 •  Weihong Bao, East Asian Languages and Cultures; Film and Media, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of International Studies Faculty Interdisciplinary Program on Gender and the Transpacific World

This panel discussion with Lydia Liu and Rebecca Karl, co-authors and co-translators, will focus on their book, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, a volume of English translation of writings by possibly the first Chinese feminist author He-Yin Zhen (1884–1920?) on issues of gender in relation to imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

He-Yin Zhen presents an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends. Ahead of her time, He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China's history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that remain relevant today.



ARCH Lecture: Kazuyo Sejima
Lecture
Speaker: Kazuyo Sejima, SANAA
Date: April 10, 2017 | 6:30–8:00 p.m.
Location: Zellerbach Hall
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, College of Environmental Design

Kazuyo Sejima is a principal of SANAA, a Tokyo-based architecture and design firm she co-founded with Ryue Nishizawa in 1995.

SANAA’s architects and designers work on projects ranging in scale from residential and interior design to large complex buildings and urban planning schemes, as well as product and furniture design. SANAA “approaches each project with a fresh perspective,” believing that designs “arise from conditions particular to the site and program.”

Recent work includes the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, the Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland, and the Louvre-Lens in France. In the United States, SANAA designed the recently opened Grace Farms in Connecticut as well as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio.

Kazuyo Sejima studied at the Japan Women’s University where she received a master’s degree in architecture in 1981. Shortly thereafter she worked in the office of architect Toyo Ito. Kazuyo Sejima has taught at Princeton University and Tama Art University among other institutions, and with her partner Ryue Nishizawa curated the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennial in 2010. She and Ryue Nishizawa were named Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates that same year.

This lecture is presented with the College of Environmental Design and the UC Regents Lectures Program.



Reconsidering and Re‑Framing Taiwan and its History: Aborigines, Colonial Rulers and Democratization
Lecture
Speaker: J. Bruce Jacobs, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Australia
Moderator: Wen‑hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley
Date: April 12, 2017 | 12:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

Although Chinese, such as Chiang Kai‑shek and Mao Zedong, insisted that Taiwan had been part of China since time immemorial, in fact both only claimed Taiwan as a part of China in 1942. Genuine historical research (as opposed to political “historical” research) demonstrates that no permanent Han Chinese communities existed in Taiwan until after 1624, when the Dutch arrived and imported Han Chinese for labor.

Looking back, we can frame Taiwan’s history into three large periods. The first period dates from about 6,000 years ago to the arrival of the Dutch in 1624. During this period aboriginal groups lived in Taiwan and conducted considerable trade with Southeast Asia. The second period comprises six colonial regimes with rule by outsiders in the interests of the outsiders: the Dutch (1624–1662), the Spanish in north Taiwan at the same time as the early Dutch period (1626–1642), the Zheng family (1662–1683), the Manchus (1683– 1895), the Japanese (1895–1945) and the authoritarian Chinese Nationalist regime under Chiang Kai‑shek and Chiang Ching‑kuo (1945–1988). The third period is democratization following the death of Chiang Ching‑kuo in January 1988.

This historical analysis enables us to explain current political phenomena in Taiwan such as rapidly increasing Taiwan identity.



Cover Girls: The Evolution of the Image of Female Stars in Chinese Movie Magazines from the 1920s to the Early Years of the People's Republic
Colloquium
Speaker: Paul Fonoroff, Independent film scholar
Date: April 12, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of International Studies Faculty Interdisciplinary Program on Gender and the Transpacific World

This talk will cover the evolution of the image of female stars from the 1920s to the early 1950s as reflected in their representation as "cover girls" from the 1920s (and the birth of Chinese movie "goddesses") to their makeover after the Communist victory in 1949. The talk will include many slides of images from the Fonoroff Collection, now held at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library.



Cinema Beyond Melodrama: Lee Chang-dong and Divine Justice
Colloquium
Speaker: Steve Choe, San Francisco State University
Moderator: Jinsoo An, UC Berkeley
Date: April 13, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies

According to scholars, no other genre or mode of film making has dominated Korean film production more than the melodrama. It is key for understanding the appeal of the films produced by Korea’s culture industry and the popularity of K-pop culture throughout Asia and the world. This presentation discusses two films by Lee Chang-dong, Secret Sunshine (2007) and Poetry (2010), to show how they attempt to think the concept of justice beyond the ethical and metaphysical principles proposed by the melodramatic mode in narrative cinema. By taking this cinema to the limit, these films propose new ways of critically representing and reconciling with loss, the other, and the politics of blame.

Professor Choe is Associate Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Previously he taught at the University of Iowa. His areas of research and teaching include film theory, philosophy, and the cinema of Germany and Korea. He is also a member of the research cluster on Violence, Trauma, and Health.



Roots of the Mongolian State: Genghis Khan's Survival and Pragmatism as Related in the Secret History of the Mongols
Lecture
Speaker: Robert Bedeski, Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria , Canada; Affiliate Professor, University of Washington (Jackson School of International Affairs); Honorary Doctorate, Mongolia Academy of Science Date: April 13, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 223 Moses Hall
Sponsor: UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

The year 1206 marked the beginning of the first Mongol State. Its genesis was overseen and led by Genghis Khan, whose conquests remain a formidable historical series of events. The Secret History narrates his biography as a tale of surviving repeated life threats and overcoming major enemies. From this history, I have extracted an existential framework to explain how he survived in a dangerous natural, social and political environment. The rise of this State compressed what probably occurred in most other historical States, and I will summarize my Anthrocentric Security Theory as general explanation of this phenomenon, drawing on Western philosophy, especially philosophical anthropology. The framework consists of four levels of Being — state of nature, life-community, State, and civil society. Each level has enabled humans to devise several Security Action Platforms from which are launched particular security actions, culminating in the State. Successful in three stages, but not in creating a civil society, the Mongol State assimilated and absorbed the strengths of natural men and life-communities, enabling the expansion into Eurasian empire under his sons and grandsons. Mongolian democracy today is engaged in completing a sovereign civil society inhibited by China and the Soviet Union in past centuries.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



The Quest for a Voice: Revisiting Asia’s Democratic Revolt
Conference/Symposium
Date: April 14, 2017 | 2:00–6:00 p.m.
Speakers:
 •  M.P. Lu. Bold, Member of Parliament, Mongolia
 •  Batchimeg Migeddorj, Office of the President of Mongolia
 •  Namhee Lee, Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
 •  Rowena He, History, St. Michael's College
 •  Mendee Jargalsaikhan, Political Science, University of British Columbia
 •  Teresa Wright, Political Science, California Sate University Long Beach
 •  M. Steven Fish, Political Science, UC Berkeley
 •  Robert Bedeski, Emeritus, University of Victoria, Canada
Moderator: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Mongolia Initiative

A quarter century ago, Mongolia, Asia’s first Communist power, was wracked by revolt among its young, educated elite, a revolt that ultimately culminated in the collapse of Communism and establishment of a democratic government. Only months earlier, demonstrations at Tiananmen had ended in tragedy and disaster. Earlier still, Kwangju’s youth rallied to the cry of democractic reform.

Looking back at this period from the perspective of hindsight, and in the context of our own contemporary conversations about the preservation of democratic forms and ideals, scholars and government officials, including those who lived through these cataclysmic events, discuss Mongolia’s journey in comparative political perspective.

This program commemorates the 25th anniversary of Mongolia's constitution. Consul General Erdene Saldan will offer opening remarks for the program.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



Saving Mes Aynak: A Film by Brent E. Huffman: Filmscreening and Discussion with Filmmaker
Documentary Film
Speaker: Brent E. Huffman, Associate Professor, Northwestern University
Moderator: Sanjyot Mehendale, Near Eastern Studies
Date: April 14, 2017 | 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
Sponsors: Near Eastern Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies

The 2015 documentary Saving Mes Aynak follows Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he tries to save a 5,000-year old site in Afghanistan from imminent demolition by a Chinese state-owned mining company that is eager to harvest $100 billion worth of copper buried directly beneath the archaeological ruins. The Chinese project directly threatens future discoveries that, according to some, could help redefine not only the history of Afghanistan but even the history of Buddhism itself. The documentary highlights Qadir Temori and his fellow Afghan archaeologists’ overwhelmingly difficult battle against the Chinese company, the Taliban, and local political groups to save this cultural heritage from likely erasure.

Following the screening, there will be a conversation with Brent E. Huffman to discuss the aftermath of the documentary and the current state of the site.

Brent E. Huffman is an award-winning director, producer and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs. His work ranges from documentaries aired on The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, NBC, CNN, PBS and Al Jazeera, to Sundance Film Festival premieres, to ethnographic films made for the China Exploration and Research Society. He has also directed, produced, shot, and edited short documentaries for online outlets like The New York Times, TIME, Salon, Huffington Post and PBS Arts.

Huffman has been making social issue documentaries and environmental films for more than a decade in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These films have gone on to win numerous awards including a Primetime Emmy, Best Conservation Film–Jackson Hole, Best Documentary–Fresno, three Cine Golden Eagle Awards, a College Emmy, a Student Academy Award, and a Grand Jury Award at AFI’s SILVERDOCS.

Brent Huffman is also an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he teaches documentary production and theory.

Event Contact: buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510&@8209;643‑5104



Understanding Taiwanese History by Reading LGBT Literature
Colloquium
Speaker: Ta-wei Chi, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Date: April 17, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

Literatures visualizing homosexuality are commonly found in various modern countries. In Taiwan, there is even a history of the LGBT literature as an eco-system extending from the 1950s to the 2010s. This presentation will provide a brief tour of Taiwanese history by introducing this eco-system.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑6321



China and Global Governance: What Have We Learnt So Far?
Lecture
Speaker: Yves Tibergien, Director of the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia
Moderator: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: April 18, 2017 | 12:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

How disruptive is the rise of China to the global order? Is China acting as a disruptor, a systematic stabilizer, or global governance innovator? The talk addresses these questions through a focus on global economic and environmental governance. At a time of new global systemic risks and demands, fundamental power shift, and global institutional erosion, China’s actual global behaviour exhibits a high degree of diversity. Yves Tiberghien maps out this behavior across domains and argues that China’s behaviour in any particular global governance arena is driven both a process of learning and a strategic dynamic of exit and voice. China has gradually accepted that the continuation of its domestic modernization (the China Dream) requires investment in the global system. Yet, China’s investment in the global system follows a highly interactive negotiated process with other systemic powers. The talk focuses on five contrast cases: G20, Paris Agreement on climate change, Belt and Road Initiative, and development financing (AAIB) and trade.

Yves Tiberghien (Ph.D. Stanford University, 2002) is the Director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Executive Director of the UBC China Council, and Associate Professor of Political Science. In 2014–2016, Dr. Tiberghien also served as Co-Director of the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA), which he founded as Chair of the UBC Public Policy Curriculum Committee in 2014. In 2014–2015 he chaired the President’s ‘Ad-Hoc Committee on International Strategy.’

Dr. Tiberghien is a Senior Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, a Senior Fellow with the Global Summitry Project at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and a visiting professor at Tokyo University. He is a Faculty Associate at both EHESS and Sciences Po in France. Dr. Tiberghien is a Harvard Academy Scholar (2004–2006 at Harvard). He has held visiting positions at Sciences Po Paris, National Chengchi University, and the Jakarta School of Public Policy.

He specializes in East Asian comparative political economy, international political economy, and global economic and environmental governance, with an empirical focus on China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

In 2007, he published Entrepreneurial States: Reforming Corporate Governance in France, Japan, and Korea (Cornell University Press in the Political Economy Series directed by Peter Katzenstein). His most recent publications include three books — 亚洲与世界未来 (Asia and the Future of the World). Beijing: 社会科学文献出版社 (Social Sciences Academic Press, China); L’Asie et le futur du monde, Paris: Science Po Press, 2012; and Leadership in Global Institution — Building: Minerva’s Rule, edited volume, Palgrave McMillan, 2013). He has published many articles and book chapters on Japan’s and China’s political economy, on global governance, global climate change politics, and on the governance of agricultural biotechnology in China and Japan.

On the domestic side, Dr. Tiberghien focuses on state responsiveness, innovative capacity, and adaptability to global economic forces and global risks. He has an interest in comparative institutional reforms that address the middle-income trap and the resource curse, as well as in the interface between global economic forces and domestic politics. His works also focuses on trade-offs between economic policy goals and public goods such as biodiversity protection, transparency in food policy, and climate change issues.

On the global side, Dr. Tiberghien focuses on the ongoing transition in the global economic and environmental order, in the face of new systemic risks, a changing balance of power, and the rise of populist political forces. He is also currently working on articles and a book on China’s role in global governance (including G20, AIIB, climate change, Belt and Road Initiative), as well as articles on the tensions between global integration and forces of entropy in the global economic system. He is leading an international team on the Paris Agreement on climate change. Dr. Tiberghien founded the Vision 20 group in 2015, a new coalition of global scholars and policy-makers aiming at providing a long-term perspective on the challenges of global economic and environmental governance. The V20 held two summits (Hangzhou, 2016, and Washington DC, 2017: http://www.thevision20.org).

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



One Belt, One Road: Remaking Eurasia?
Panel Discussion
Date: April 18, 2017 | 3:30–5:30 p.m.
Speakers:
 •  Deputy Consul General Ren Faqiang, Deputy Consul General of the
     Consulate General of the PRC — SF
 •  Vinod Aggarwal, Political Science, UC Berkeley
 •  David Roland-Holst, Agriculture and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley
 •  Lowell Dittmer, Political Science, UC Berkeley
 •  Yves Tiberghien, Director of the Institute of Asian Research, University
     of British Columbia
Panelist/Discussants:
 •  Consul Wang Dong, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
 •  Peter Lorentzen, Political Science, UC Berkeley
 •  Consul Li Yi, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
 •  Consul Sun Jia, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Moderator:
 •  Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

China's "One Belt, One Road" is one of the most ambitious infrastructure plans of the past century. PRC Deputy Consul General Ren Faqiang will introduce China's Belt and Road Initiatives, followed by a panel of political science and economics specialists engaged to discuss the plan, its goals, and its potential effects with delegates from the Consulate General of the PRC — SF.

Agenda

Welcome Remarks:
Kevin O’Brien (Moderator)
Deputy Consul General Ren Faqiang, Consulate General of the PRC — SF

The “One Belt, One Road Project”: An Introduction
Deputy Consul General Ren Faqiang, Consulate General of the PRC — SF

The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on Asian Regional Integration and Global Governance
Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia

"One Belt One Road" and Trump's Asia Policy
Lowell Dittmer, Political Science, UC Berkeley

Liberal Trading Under Assault
Vinod Aggarwal, Political Science, UC

“One Belt, One Road”: Opportunities and Challenges
David Roland-Holst, Agriculture and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

Roundtable Discussion:
Consul Wang Dong, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Peter Lorentzen, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Consul Sun Jia, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Li Yi, Consulate General of the PRC ≬ SF

Participant Bios:

Vinod AGGARWAL, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal is Travers Family Senior Faculty Fellow and Professor in the Department of Political Science, Affiliated Professor in the Business and Public Policy group in the Haas School of Business, and Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) at the University of California at Berkeley. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Business and Politics, and Co-Chair of the U.S. Consortium of APEC Study Centers. From 1991–1994, he chaired the Political Economy of Industrial Societies Program at UC Berkeley.

He has held fellowships from the Brookings Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, East-West Center, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was a Japan Foundation Abe Fellow. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the University of Geneva’s IOMBA program, INSEAD, Yonsei University, NTU Singapore, and Bocconi University. He is also an elected lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and founding member of the U.S. Asia Pacific Council.

Dr. Aggarwal consults regularly with multinational corporations on strategy, trade policy, and international negotiations, including Sutherland Global Services, Merck, Russell Investments, the Investment Management Consultants Association, Cisco, Statoil, ING Clarion, Genentech, Hewlett Packard, Qualcomm, Herman Miller, Italcementi, ARCO, and Nestle. He has been a consultant to the Mexican Government, the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Defense Department, U.S. State Department, World Trade Organization, OECD, the Group of Thirty, FAO, IFAD, the International Labor Organization, ASEAN, and the World Bank. In 1990, he was Special Adviser on Trade Negotiations to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and has worked with the APEC Eminent Persons Group. In 1997, he won the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at the Haas School of Business for PhD teaching; in 2003 he was first runner up for the Cheit Award for MBA teaching and won first place for the MBA program in 2005.

Lowell DITTMER, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Professor Dittmer received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 1971. His scholarly expertise is the study of contemporary China. He teaches courses on contemporary China, Northeast Asia, and the Pacific Rim. His current research interests include a study of the impact of reform on Chinese Communist authority, a survey of patterns of informal politics in East Asia, and a project on the China-Taiwan-US triangle in the context of East Asian regional politics. Professor Dittmer's recently published books and monographs include Sino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (University of Washington Press, 1992), China's Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, Cornell University Press, 1993), China Under Modernization (Westview Press, 1994), and South Asia's Nuclear Crisis (M. E. Sharpe, 2005).

Consul LI Yi, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Consul Li Yi has worked in the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco since December 2014. He acts as Head of the Press and Public Diplomacy section. Previously, he worked in the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China from October 2009 to December 2014. From March 2008 to September 2009, Consul Yi worked in the Chinese Embassy in Greece, and prior to that, from August 2005 to March 2008, he worked in the Chinese Embassy in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He holds a Masters degree of International Relations from Beijing University.

Peter LORENTZEN, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Peter Lorentzen studies the political economy of development and authoritarian governance, with a focus on China. He has written on authoritarian media control strategies, the role of entrenched economic interests in blocking environmental governance reforms, the management of popular protest, and the rise of rights consciousness in China, among other topics.

He is currently completing a book on how the Chinese Communist Party manages political participation in order to gather crucial information that improves its capacity for effective governance and social control, while also taking steps to mitigate the spread of that same information from citizen to citizen that could undermine its rule.

His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the China Quarterly, Genetics in Medicine, the Journal of Economic Growth, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Modern China, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and new research is forthcoming in World Development. His research has also attracted attention from mass media outlets including the Boston Review, California Magazine, The Diplomat, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books blog, and Slate.

He earned his PhD in Economic Analysis and Policy from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and his BA in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. He has also studied at the London School of Economics, Beijing Normal University, National Taiwan University, and on a Fulbright Scholarship at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Kevin O’BRIEN, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Kevin O’Brien is the Alann P. Bedford Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science. He is also the Director of Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies and the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies. A student of Chinese politics in the reform era, he has published nearly 50 articles on topics such as legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, popular protest, policy implementation, protest policing, and village-level political reform. He is the author of Reform Without Liberalization: China's National People's Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, 1990) and the co-author of Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge, 2006). He is the co-editor of Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford, 2005), Rural Politics in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2014), and Grassroots Elections in China (Routledge, 2011), and the editor of Popular Protest in China (Harvard, 2008). His most recent work centers on the Chinese state and theories of popular contention, particularly as concerns the policing of protest and types of repression that are neither "soft" nor "hard." He has won various grants and awards and serves on the editorial or advisory board of ten journals.

Deputy Consul General REN Faqiang, Deputy Consul General of the Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Deputy Consul General Ren Faqiang was born in 1971 in Shandong province. He has worked at the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco as Deputy Consul General since August 2015. From 2011 to 2015, he worked at the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka as Deputy Chief of the Mission and Political Counselor. Previously, from 2003 to 2011, he worked as Deputy Director and Director at the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China. Prior, he served as Vice Consul at the Chinese Consulate General in Chicago from 1999 to 2003. From 1996 to 1999, Deputy Consul General Faqiang served as a US Affairs desk officer at the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China. He is currently married with a daughter. Deputy Consul General Faqiang graduated from Shandong Teachers’ University and Foreign Affairs College in Beijing.

David ROLAND-HOLST, Agriculture and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley
David Roland-Holst is adjunct professor of agricultural and resource economics in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. He is an expert on the Chinese economy, international development, and environmental economics. Roland-Holst has authored six books and more than 100 professional journal articles and book chapters. He has also served in academic posts in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and conducted research in more than 40 countries, working with such institutions as the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), World Bank, and several United Nations agencies, as well as governments in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley.

Consul SUN Jia, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Mr. Sun Jia, born in Beijing 1983, is a Consul of Press and Public Diplomacy office of Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco from July 2015. He received education in Singapore Nanyang Technological University and China Foreign Affairs University. Sun joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in 2005. He served in Chinese Embassy in Qatar from 2005 to 2010. During 2010–2015, Sun served in the Information Department of Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Yves TIBERGHIEN, Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada
Yves Tiberghien (Ph.D. Stanford University, 2002) is the Director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Executive Director of the UBC China Council, and Associate Professor of Political Science. In 2014–2016, Dr. Tiberghien also served as Co-Director of the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA), which he founded as Chair of the UBC Public Policy Curriculum Committee in 2014. In 2014–2015 he chaired the President’s ‘Ad-Hoc Committee on International Strategy.’

He specializes in East Asian comparative political economy, international political economy, and global economic and environmental governance, with an empirical focus on China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. In 2007, he published Entrepreneurial States: Reforming Corporate Governance in France, Japan, and Korea (Cornell University Press in the Political Economy Series directed by Peter Katzenstein). His most recent publications include three books — 亚洲与世界未来 (Asia and the Future of the World). Beijing: 社会科学文献出版社 (Social Sciences Academic Press, China); L’Asie et le futur du monde, Paris: Science Po Press, 2012; and Leadership in Global Institution-Building: Minerva’s Rule, edited volume, Palgrave McMillan, 2013).

Dr. Tiberghien focuses on the ongoing transition in the global economic and environmental order, in the face of new systemic risks, a changing balance of power, and the rise of populist political forces. He is also currently working on articles and a book on China’s role in global governance (including G20, AIIB, climate change, Belt and Road Initiative). For a more expensive bio statement, see listing for his talk April 18 at 12:30.

Consul WANG Dong, Consulate General of the PRC — SF
Consul Wang Dong has worked in the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco since July 2014 as Consul for Press and Public Diplomacy. Prior, he worked in the Chinese Consulate General in Houston, from August 2006 to October 2013, as Consul for Cultural and Press Affairs. Consul Dong also previously worked as Consul for Cultural and Press Affairs in the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco from October 2000 to January 2004. He graduated from Renmin University, Beijing, in March 1995, with a Masters degree in International Politics.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



Documentary Film Screening: Island of Shadows: The Struggle for Worker’s Rights in South Korea
Documentary Film
Panelist/Discussants:
 •  Jinsook Kim, Activist and organizer
 •  Jeong Keun Kim, Director, Island of Shadows
Date: April 19, 2017 | 7:00–9:30 p.m.
Location: University Lutheran Chapel, 2425 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley Labor Center

Jinsook Kim, a female welder, emerged as a key figure in the “democratic” labor movement of South Korea in the 1990s as one of the most committed leaders of the metal workers’ union movement. In recent decades she has become the champion of irregular workers. Learn about the ongoing struggle for worker’s right in South Korea from Ms. Kim and from the documentary film, Island of Shadows, which gives voice to the unionists at Hanjin and highlights the historic 309-day high-altitude sit-in by Ms. Kim.

Screening of Island of Shadows will be followed by Q & A with Jinsook Kim and director Jeong Keun Kim.

Event Contact: pliem252@gmail.com



Stanford-Berkeley Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Chinese Humanities
Conference
Dates: April 21–22, 2017 | 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: 1995 University Avenue — IEAS Fifth Floor Conference Room
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

The conference will feature up to sixteen student presentations of original research on any aspect of premodern (technically, beginnings to 1911) Chinese humanistic culture, drawing on but not limited to the traditional disciplines of history, literature, religion, art, social sciences, and thought.

Visit the conference website here.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑6321



Reading Technopoetic Japan
Colloquium
Speaker: Earl Jackson Jr., National Chiao Tung University
Date: April 24, 2017 | 2:30 p.m.
Location: 142 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Film & Media Studies

What is often dismissed as “otaku culture” actually names a complex network of creative industries and equally creative engaged participants. The media that emerge and sustain these subcultural formations include anime, manga, novels, etc.. In studying these media I focus on relations among technology, representation, and subjectivity as well as the politics that inform and circumscribe those relations. In the course of these inquiries I have adopted the term “technopoetics” as a way to characterize both my object and method of analysis. In other words, I study representational technology on at least two levels: on one level, what it does; another level: what it means. The second level encompasses at least two registers of “meaning”: [1] changes in conceptual systems; [2] new metaphorical lexicon.

In this lecture I will survey three anime (Serial Experiments: Lain; Perfect Blue; and Ergo Proxy) and examine the media-mix experiment of Otsuka Eiji’s MPD-Psycho Detetctive project. My technopoetical reading of these will be guided by the technopoetical readings the media themselves perform: one level they depict the functions of technology, and on another they exploit its imagery and the fantasies it elicits and sustains.

Earl Jackson Jr., Associate Professor emeritus from UC Santa Cruz, is currently Professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. He is author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation, and essays on Japanese literature and Japanese and Korean cinema. He worked in Korean indpendent cinema as screenwriter, editor, and actor. He appeared as the villain in Barbie (Sangwoo Lee 2010). He has recently completed a monograph on Japanese anime, Technopoetic Japan, and is currently writing a study of the relation of theory and practice in Japanese Cinema.

Event Contact: cjs@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑3415



China’s Economic Statecraft Toward Myanmar and North Korea
Colloquium
Speaker: James Reilly, Government and International Relations, University of Sydney
Moderator: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: April 24, 2017 | 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies

Tempted by their expansive authority over China’s economy, Chinese leaders are increasingly deploying economic resources such as foreign aid and overseas investments to influence policy decisions in other countries. To implement economic statecraft, China’s leaders rely upon state-owned companies, bureaucratic agencies, and local Chinese officials, even though they may be unreliable representatives of the central government. This presentation compares how central leaders’ delegation of authority shaped both the strategies and effectiveness of China’s economic statecraft in North Korea and Myanmar. In North Korea, the active engagement of top leaders and overlapping interests among key domestic actors enabled a higher level of coherence and effectiveness, while a severe principal-agent problem in Myanmar undermined the internal coherence and external effectiveness of China’s economic statecraft. My findings draw upon extensive field research in China’s border regions with both countries and in Myanmar.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑6321



Still Tomorrow
Documentary Film
Speakers:
 •  Fan Jian, Documentary Filmmaker
 •  Professor Linda Williams, Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley
Date: April 25, 2017 | 7:00–10:00 p.m.
Location: 142 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: Datong Society of China Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley

Still Tomorrow (yaoyaohuanghuang de renjian) was directed by Fan Jian. In Chinese with English subtitles.

Its content is based on the poignant story of an unusual Chinese poet — Yu Xiuhua. Yu Xiuhua was a peasant woman poet. She was born in a small village in Hubei Province, China in 1976, with cerebral palsy. In 2015, her poem “Crossing Half of the Country to Sleep with You” (chuanguo dabange zhongguo qu shuini) was forwarded by Poetry Periodical in WeChat, and she has traveled a bumpy road to fame. Almost overnight, she became a household name. Following her tremendous popularity, journalists swarmed into her village to interview her. She soon was able to publish her first book of poetry and she began to be called “China’s Emily Dickinson.” Her triply-marginalized identities — rural background, gender, and disability — have triggered nation-wide discussions about the rights of women in marriage, sexuality and attitudes towards disability. The film documents Yu’s yearning for sexual and emotional intimacy, a fundamental human right not readily available to the disabled.

Fan Jian is the leading documentary filmmaker in mainland China. After graduating from Beijing Film Academy, he has made more than 5 feature-length documentaries. His films have been selected into Berlinale, IDFA, BIFF, HKIFF and other film festivals. One of his most famous works, My Land (wutu), was been selected into the Panorama at Berlinale 2016. Still Tomorrow (yaoyaohuanghuang de renjian) is his latest work and has won the IDFA Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary in International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2016, one of the highest honors for documentary filmmakers.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu



Back from the Brink: The Global Revival of Manchu Studies: A Memorial Lecture for Professor Emeritus James Bosson
Memorial
Speaker: Mark Elliott, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Date: April 26, 2017 | 5:00 p.m.
Moderator: Jacob Dalton, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Center for Chinese Studies

Manchu studies proudly traces its origins back at least two hundred years, to the founding of the first chair in “Tartar Languages and Literatures” at the Collège de France in 1814. Yet as the 20th century neared its end, the field was moribund: not only was Manjuristics barely hanging on in the US, the great European schools of Manchu studies were also disappearing. Students were few and far between, with barely enough American specialists to mount a conference panel. The field scarcely existed in mainland China, and depended on the work of just a handful of scholars for its survival in Taiwan and Korea; for a time it appeared that Japan was the only place offering any kind of future. But by the time of James Bosson’s final retirement from active teaching in the early 2000s, Manchu studies had stepped back from the brink and was entering a new phase of growth. This lecture outlines the contributions of Berkeley’s eminent Manjurist and Mongolist to the return of a formerly marginal field of scholarship to new international prominence.

With the passing of Professor James Bosson the campus lost an early and important voice in the study of Mongolian, Manchu, and Tibetan language and culture. This memorial lecture in his honor is presented by his former student Mark Elliott, Harvard University.

Mark Elliott is the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of History at Harvard University and is a former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. An authority on post-1600 China and the history of relations across the nomadic frontier, he is known as a pioneer of the “New Qing History,” an approach emphasizing the imprint of Inner Asian traditions upon China’s last imperial state. From 2015 he is Harvard’s Vice Provost for International Affairs.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



Chulmun, the Middle in the Muddle?: Review of Holocene Niche Construction in the Korean Peninsula
Lecture
Date: April 26, 2017 | 5:00–6:30 p.m.
Speaker: Gyoung-Ah Lee, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Oregon
Location: 2251 College (Archaeological Research Facility), Seminar Room
Sponsors: Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, Center for Korean Studies

The Chulmun culture, documented by over 870 sites across the Korean Peninsula, presents one of the long-standing Neolithic traditions from the Early Holocene, comparable to the Jomon in Japan. The Neolithic landscape of Korea has been understood in a fragmented fashion, as rescue projects have driven archaeological investigations. A more fundamental problem lies in the mode of explanation of cultural changes, which has focused heavily on migration and environmental determinism. Departing from a one-way loop account of environmental impacts and cultural consequence, this research will illustrate the Chulmun culture using Niche Construction Theory (NCT). Humans are the most proficient niche constructors due to their cultural capacity, active social learning tendency, and multi-generational transmission of learned behaviors. NCT can therefore provide an intuitive framework applicable to various archaeological cases, including the Chulmun culture. Increasing evidence of early plant management indicates the Chulmun economy was not as simple as was previously thought. A series of questions in focus includes how Neolithic people manipulated economic plants and how this strategy affected both environmental and cultural niches. Examples come from diverse landscapes, including alluvial flats, hilly uplands, coastal regions, and islands. Multiple lines of evidence for the early transition to farming include macroscopic and microscopic plant remains and settlement patterns. This research evaluates the possibility of Neolithic management of economic plants and the transition to a more closely managed construction of farming landscapes.

Event Contact: 510‑642‑2212



Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Korea
Conference
Date: April 27, 2017 | 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Featured Speaker:
 •  Stella Xu, Roanoke College
Discussants:
 •  Martin Bale, Yeungnam University
 •  Jonathan Best, Wesleyan University
 •  Marjorie Burge, UC Berkeley
 •  Mark Byington, Harvard University
 •  Jack Davey, UC Berkeley
 •  Lauren Glover, University of Wisconsin
 •  Dennis Lee, Yonsei University
 •  Gyoung-Ah Lee, University of Oregon
 •  Rachel Lee, University of Washington
 •  Rory Walsh, University of Oregon
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies

Early Korea is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand human society on the Korean peninsula in ancient times, make the case for the relevance of the region to world history and archaeology, and critically appraise how ancient history is used in the present to foster notions of Korean identity. It has great potential as a case study for approaching broader topics in archaeology and history like state formation, cultural contact, technological development, social and political stratification, and urbanization. It draws together a number of traditional disciplines such as history, archaeology, art history, and linguistics and demands engagement with diverse methodologies and evidence.

There are two factors that have been limiting the field so far. First, interpretation is constrained by adherence to a small number of problematic textual sources, and engagement with non-historical, non-archaeological methodologies has been limited. Second, the archaeological environment in South Korea encourages extreme regional specialization, and expertise and integrative studies that look more broadly are not prevalent. Compounding this, contemporary geo-nationalism and lack of critical appraisal of the concept of ‘Korea’ as a subjective analytical category has prevented peninsular data from being placed effectively into its East Asian and world archaeology context.

This conference addresses these problems by showcasing interesting, innovative approaches to society on the Korean peninsula in ancient times that transcend and break down these limiting categories and mindsets. Younger scholars working on peninsular material from a historical, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, paleo-environmental, or other framework will have an opportunity to present their work and receive feedback from peers and senior scholars. The conference is also designed to bring scholars not working on Korean material into the discussion as well as draw attention to recent political developments in Korea that have had a significant impact on the academic freedom and future sustainability of the field of Early Korea.

SCHEDULE

10:00–10:15 OPENING REMARKS

10:15–12:00 SESSION I: Rewriting Three Kingdoms History with Material Culture

"Identification and Chronology of Some Koguryŏ Royal Tombs" Mark Byington, Harvard University

"Paekche King Kunch’ogo’s Twisted Journey to the South: A Textual and Archaeological Perspective" Dennis Lee, Yonsei University

"Wooden Inscriptions and the Culture of Writing in Sabi Paekche" Marjorie Burge, UC Berkeley

Discussant: Jonathan Best, Wesleyan University

12:00–1:00 LUNCH BREAK

1:00–2:45 SESSION II: Identity in Liminal Spaces

"Gendered Spaces and Mumun Period Households: A Case Study from the Jinju Area" Rachel Lee, University of Washington

"Becoming Middle Mumun: Identity and the Spread of Songguk-ri Culture in the Southern Korean Peninsula" Martin Bale, Yeungnam University

"Ritual Boundaries in Iron Age Southern Korea" Jack Davey, UC Berkeley

Discussant: Gyoung-Ah Lee, University of Oregon

2:45–3:00 COFFEE BREAK

3:00–4:45 SESSION III: Social Ramifications of Production and Exchange

"Ceramics and society in Mahan and Paekche" Rory Walsh, University of Oregon

"Overlooked Imports: Carnelian in the Korean Peninsula" Lauren Glover, University of Wisconsin

Discussant: Martin Bale, Yeungnam University

4:45–5:00 COFFEE BREAK

5:00–6:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS: “In the Shadow of History: Reconstructing Ancient Korean History and the Formation of Korean-ness”
Stella Xu, Roanoke College

This talk, based on Xu's recent book Reconstructing Ancient Korean History: The Formation of Korean-ness in the Shadow of History (Lexington Books, 2016), examines historiography on ancient Korean history and its relation to the construction of national identity in Korea through a critical and comparative analysis of Chinese and Korean primary sources. It also analyzes salient and contested issues in ancient history, particularly the ways in which historical narrative has correlated with Korean politics and culture, adding to our understanding of why ancient history has become the subject of history wars in East Asia. People live with the legacies of the past, which makes history and memory crucial in the political, cultural, and social aspects of human society. China, Japan, and Korea have shared a long history of cultural interactions. It should be noted that neither similarities nor continuities among East Asian civilizations, nor distinctions and discontinuities, can be disregarded in reaching a balanced, comprehensive understanding of history and culture in East Asia.

Stella Xu is an associate professor of history at Roanoke College in Virginia, where she teaches East Asian history. She received her Ph.D at the University of California at Los Angles. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Korean Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Pacific Affairs, ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, and Women and Social Movement in the United States, 1600–2000.

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑9787



Buddhist Sectarianism in Burma’s Last Kingdom
Colloquium
Date: May 2, 2017 | 5:00–6:30 p.m.
Speaker: Alexandra Kaloyanides, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies

"The Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Rangoon,"
chromolithograph, from Burma
by Albert Fytche, 1878

The collapse of Burma’s final kingdom was devastating for the Buddhist organizations that depended on its royal sponsorship. The nineteenth-century encroachment of the British Raj crippled both the Konbaung Dynasty and its once-powerful monastic establishment, but it also created opportunities for opposition parties. One adversarial Buddhist sect, the Paramats, was particularly active between the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 and the total colonization of the country in 1886. This reformist sect has been something of a mystery in the study of Burmese Buddhism because of minimal references to them in official Burmese materials. This paper examines a previously unstudied collection of documents dating from 1830–1880 found in an American missionary archive to argue that the Paramats were not a kind of Mahayanist group dedicated to propounding emptiness teachings, as scholars have argued, but rather, they were a Burmese Buddhist organization concerned with protesting laxity within mainstream monasteries and excess at royally-sponsored shrines. These archival documents suggest that scholars should attend to politics, as well as philosophy, to understand this particular sectarian development and similar religious reform movements at the end of the Konbaung Dynasty.

Alexandra Kaloyanides is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. She researches Burmese religions and American religious history. Her book manuscript, "Objects of Conversion, Relics of Resistance," examines the religious contestations, conversions, and transformations during the nineteenth-century American Baptist mission to Burma.

Event Contact: buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑5104



Return of Ten Thousand Dharmas: A Celebration in Honor of Patricia Berger
Conference
Dates: May 5–6, 2017
 •  Friday, May 5: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
 •  Saturday, May 6: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Featured Speaker: Patricia Berger, History of Art, UC Berkeley
Locations
 •  Friday: David Brower Center, Goldman Theater; 2150 Allston Way
 •  Saturday: Faculty Club, Heyns Room
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Mongolia Initiative, Center for Buddhist Studies, Jay D. McEvoy Chair, Department of History of Art, Townsend Center for the Humanities

Patricia Berger served as the curator of Chinese art at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco from 1982 to 1994. She then returned to her alma mater to mentor another generation of graduate students as Professor of Chinese Art at the University of California at Berkeley. In celebration of her well-deserved retirement, we invite you to join her current and former students and colleagues to honor her contributions to the field. This event begins on Friday, May 5, 4 pm, Brower Center with a keynote speech by Professor Berger.

Visit the conference website here.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑6321



2017 Seoul National University–UC Berkeley Korean Studies Graduate Student Conference
Conference
Date: June 20, 2017 | 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Location: Seoul National University, Asia Center Building, Room 230
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies, Seoul National University Institute for Gender Research, The Academy of Korean Studies

Join us for this interdisciplinary conference where UC Berkeley graduate students present their papers that are discussed by Seoul National University faculty members on exciting new scholarship in Korean Studies.

This conference is organized by the UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies, hosted by the Seoul National University Institute for Gender Research, and made possible with support from The Academy of Korean Studies.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Doors open (9:00)

Welcoming Remarks (9:20–9:30)
Professor CHO Eunsu, Department of Philosophy, Former Director of the Institute for Gender Research, Seoul National University

9:30–10:20
Lettered Worlds: Inscriptive Life in Paekche and Silla
Marjorie Burge, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor Sem VERMEERSCH, Department of Religious Studies, Seoul National University

10:20–11:10
Between Diaspora and Community: Koreans in Merida 멕시코 and the Politics of Belonging
Rachel Lim, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor KANG Yoonhee, Department of Anthropology, Seoul National University

11:10–12:00
Household Chores in China & South Korea within the Family
Allegra Midgette, Department of Education, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor BAE Eun-Kyung, Interdiscipinary Program in Gender Studies, Seoul National University

Lunch Break (12:00–1:00)

1:00–1:50
Understanding Anti-American Sentiments in South Korea: A Study of South Korean Secondary Students
Grace Jeon, Group in Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor KIM Hyung Ryeol, Department of Ethics Education, Seoul National University

1:50–2:40
Global Learning about Korea through K-dramas
Grace Kim, Department of Education, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor Olga FEDORENKO, Department of Anthropology, Seoul National University

Coffee Break (2:40–3:00)

3:00–3:50
The Sense of Nonsense in Cold War Korean Fiction
Evelyn Shih, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor CHO Sonjeong, Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University

3:50–4:40
A New History of the Cold War through Horror: Piagol and Kanal
Julia Keblinska, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor KANG Woosung, Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University

4:40–5:30
In Pursuit of Peaceful Resistance: The Non-Violent Street Protests in 2016–17 in South Korea
Joohyun Park, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor PARK Keong-Suk, Department of Sociology, Seoul National University

General Discussion and Closing Remarks (5:30–6:00)
Professor Laura Nelson, Chair of the Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley

ABSTRACTS

Lettered Worlds: Inscriptive Life in Paekche and Silla
Marjorie Burge, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley

Written material from Korea’s Three Kingdoms — Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla — survives in only a limited number of fragments. While Chinese and Japanese histories offer some source material for understanding early written culture on the peninsula, direct evidence of how writing was adapted and utilized is relatively sparse. Surviving stone steles and inscribed artifacts have long offered the most direct route for developing an understanding of the history of writing on the peninsula; however, recent archaeological discoveries of a growing number of wooden tablets (mokkan) now allow for a more nuanced picture of inscriptive life in ancient Korea. In contrast to stone steles, whose material nature and strategic placement ensured they would endure long into the future, wooden tablets were, at least in a basic material sense, a more everyday, disposable medium for inscription. Thus, their discovery allows for unprecedented access to the more mundane types of inscription that occupied the written landscape: receipts, labels, correspondence, and “jottings.” In this paper, I outline several important wooden tablets recovered from both Paekche and Silla sites, focusing in particular on the category of “jottings” in order to trace moments where writing begins to be used in a self-conscious manner that might be understood as creative or original. This investigation focuses on Paekche in the Sabi period (538–660CE), and particularly on writing as it was being used in the Sabi capital, and contrasts this with the situation in sixth and seventh century Silla prior to Silla’s unification of the peninsula in the 660s. I then briefly address to what extent the culture of writing in Silla was transformed by the unification of the peninsula and an integration of the former Paekche written culture into post-unification Silla’s inscriptive landscape.


Between Diaspora and Community: Koreans in Merida 멕시코 and the Politics of Belonging
Rachel Lim, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

This paper, based on preliminary ethnographic and archival research in Mexico, South Korea, and the United States, examines the construction of Korean ethnic identity and community in Mérida, México, among the descendants of Korean laborers who emigrated to the henequén haciendas of Yucatán in 1905. Drawing from scholars of Asian diasporas who have explored the dialectic between homeland and diaspora and the processes of displacement that characterize the dispersion of peoples, this paper moves across the geographical siloes of area studies to focus on the peripheries by highlighting the small but vibrant diasporic community in Mérida. While the transnational relationships that connect migrants’ homeland and country of residence have received sustained scholarly attention, relations among diasporic nodes have not been adequately addressed. In this paper, I utilize the case study of the Asociación Coreana de Yucatán (CORYUC) in Mérida, México in order to explore how the stratification of diaspora affects the construction, imagination, and transformation of ethnic boundaries. Rather than assuming that Koreans in Mérida already constitute a stable transnational “community,” this preliminary ethnographic research examines how a heterogeneous group of actors — Mexicans of Korean descent, Korean American missionaries, and representatives of the South Korean state-sponsored Overseas Korean Foundation — make different claims about authenticity and belonging through group-making practices. By centering Koreans in Mérida, I examine how the ambivalent transpacific connections between Asia and Latin America might produce different subjective experiences and definitions of diaspora.


Household Chores in China & South Korea within the Family
Allegra Midgette, Department of Education, UC Berkeley

Scholars have found that while women across cultures do on average two-thirds of all household labor, only 20–30 percent of women find these gendered distributions unfair. Meanwhile, previous research on moral reasoning about gender inequality demonstrates that men and boys tend to employ mostly conventional, or norm affirming, reasoning and therefore also find women doing most of the housework as legitimate. In other words, across ages and genders, individuals have been found to be less morally critical of gendered unequal distribution of labor in the home than expected. Employing a moral developmental framework, this paper will explore how culture interacts with individuals in a family’s reasoning about their own daily practices of housework distribution and beliefs about gender equality. The paper reviews findings based on observing and analyzing the behavior and moral reasoning of 12 households in China and contemplates how this is expected to differ from households in South Korea based on previous research. This paper will explore the value of comparing two East Asian countries that are among the most economically developed countries that are also facing concerns about gender inequity, while balancing older Confucian traditions with new ones. This paper will demonstrate how individuals’ moral reasoning about their actions and experiences in the family connect to their position in the family, gender, age, and nationality. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate and explore the interaction between cultural practices and individuals’ moral reasoning about gender inequity in the home.


Understanding Anti-American Sentiments in South Korea: A Study of South Korean Secondary Students
Grace Jeon, Group in Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

From the 1960 student protests against the rigged March 15 election and government corruption, to the recent candlelight vigil demonstrations in the new millennium, student demonstrations and protests have been common throughout South Korean history. At the height of anti-American protests in 2002 and 2003, it was not the older generation that exhibited much resentment towards the United States, but remarkably the younger generation that voiced an unfavorable opinion towards its Western neighbor. This study takes a quantitative approach to the analysis of current anti-American sentiments amongst secondary students in South Korea. Using the same 2002 questionnaire format by Professors Uichol Kim and Young-Shin Park, this paper examines the positive shift in attitudes, as well as the sources for such changes that are concretely affecting anti-American sentiments in South Korea. In using an open-ended questionnaire to examine their perception, the intention of this research paper is to present a resourceful analysis by observing the past and current trends in American perception amongst secondary students in South Korea.


Global Learning about Korea through K-dramas
Grace Kim, Department of Education, UC Berkeley

New media present manifold opportunities for youth to access cultures that may be unavailable to them in their local contexts. Virtual spaces offer youth freedom to engage with geographically distant people and places, but how can practices in such spaces reinscribe cultural differences? This paper is part of a larger study that explored the literacy and language practices of youth who populate a multinational online forum devoted to Korean dramas. The source for data collection was a free website on which people post, watch, and discuss Asian dramas. Qualitative data included writing, visual images, and interactions created by youth within the site’s K-drama forum. Findings included user-generated discussions that involved interpretations of traditional and contemporary Korea. Analyses of these discussions focus on how this forum functioned as a learning space in which youth who live outside of Korea constructed understandings and misunderstandings of Korean culture. Through these analyses, I argue that K-dramas have communicated aspects of Korean society and culture to a global audience in not only positive, but also problematic ways. Implications include ways that online transnational engagements with K-drama in particular, and Hallyu in general, shape current global learning about Korea. Through this illustrative case, I further argue that burgeoning hope for digital and networked media to mediate difference in positive ways requires critical analysis of how practices within such spaces may also reify cultural differences.


The Sense of Nonsense in Cold War Korean Fiction
Evelyn Shih, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley

The Cold War as an ideological struggle produced world systems of language laden with moral meaning. In South Korea, anti-Communist slogans and military language filled public space in the aftermath of the Cold War. This was particularly true in the late 1960s, as Korea normalized relations with Japan under the auspices of Pax Americana and began sending soldiers to Vietnam. Cultural policy became ever more draconian, with increasingly stringent censorship regimes in all media from publishing to film and television. Yet in equal and opposite reaction to these trends rose a culture of nonsense, an alternate system that could illuminate the absurd and horrifying aspects of everyday language. This paper argues that there was a turn to nonsense in literature of the late 1960s, focusing on works by author Yi Ho-chŏl, who was both adept at writing dialogue and sensitive to the potential absurdity of speech.

The nonsense of the 1960s built on a comic mode with a deep history in 20th century Korea. “Nonsense” as a concept in Korean letters can be traced back to the colonial period, when it was first translated and transliterated from Japanese during the Taisho-era craze for “ero-guro-nansensu.” After liberation, this nonsense was often evoked within popular culture, surfacing in cartoons, stage comedy, and film. As cultural censorship under Park Chung-hee became more pronounced, however, socially conscious literary writers found recourse in nonsense as both a satirical mode and as a modernist mode in which they could question the meanings of public language. Moments of nonsense were not just comic relief in otherwise serious contemplations of the social fabric, but the repository for the strongest voice of critique and self-reflexive contemplation. This paper argues for the significance of nonsense, a comic mode, in engaging public affect during the Cold War.


A New History of the Cold War through Horror: Piagol and Kanał
Julia Keblinska, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley

In his chapter in the edited volume Korean War Horror, Mark Morris proposes a new genre of “war-horror” to examine the phenomenology of violence in South Korean war films. Taking my inspiration from Morris, I suggest that the so-called war-horror genre is a powerful interpretive category with which to interrogate Cold War history. I examine how the iconography of horror functions in the 1955 film Piagol, which Morris references briefly in his text, and the 1956 Polish film, Kanal. In choosing films from South Korea and Poland to tell a story about the Cold War, I am also inspired by anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s The Other Cold War and take up his suggestion to critique Western discourses about the Cold War as “long peace” and understand how the conflict played out in the postcolonial non-West (to which, I argue, Poland and Korea both belong and should, though rarely are, be treated in comparative terms).

Although attentive to the films’ discrete historical contexts, the ideological and aesthetic similarities across these two texts are striking. In Piagol, the protagonists are communists, trapped in an anti-communist country, while Kanal, they are anti-communists, left to die in the occupied city by Soviet forces who waited for the Nazis to exterminate the Polish troops before liberating the city. Both films, then, must tread carefully in their characterization of people who are ideological persona non grata and in reality faced deadly persecution in each country throughout the 1950s. Both films rely on tropes of entrapment, body horror, descent into paranoia, and a “final girl.” They both showcase the chiaroscuro aesthetics made possible by black and white film stock, which produce not only a visceral horror phenomenology, but also register the historicity of film technologies in war-ravaged nations. By drawing out the similarities in the films’ formal horror structures and their mapping onto historical ideological conflict, I show that by exposing local histories and representations of “hot” violence the category of war-horror complicates accepted geopolitical narratives of a “cold” global conflict.


In Pursuit of Peaceful Resistance: The Non-Violent Street Protests in 2016–17 in South Korea
Joohyun Park, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley

The goal of this research is to examine what kinds of protests gain citizens’ attention and sympathy in South Korea. This research argues that only the peaceful struggle under the protection of moral justification and law seem to gain citizens’ attention. South Korea is one of the countries where massive protests emerged during the period of democratization, especially street protests. Street protests have become moderate so far. While the street protests in the 1980s and the 1990s typically involved the use of violence led by the police and well-organized activists, since the early 2000s, street protests have taken different forms, such as candlelight vigil, music concert, and performances, focusing on peaceful methods by voluntary participants. One of the interesting points to focus on is not only how non-violence forms appeared but also how those who are against violence and illegality come forward, especially in the street protests for presidential impeachment. People do not use violence against the police, but they even try to protect the police and clearly express concern for the police. While social protests are traditionally regarded as events/rituals/performances against power in violent forms, why do South Koreans favor peaceful protests? I would like to investigate the peaceful street protests in 2016–17 in terms of popular participation, radical flank effect, and police oppression by conducting participant observation, interviews with the protestors, and textual analysis of the related news articles and tweets. As a tactical development in social movements, the protestors differentiate themselves from traditional activists in the way they pursue democratic and aesthetic aspects of social movements. The peaceful resistances were more effective in spreading their political voice and attracting popular sympathy while avoiding existing regulations and stigmatization.


Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑5674



Mongolia excursion July 15-26, 2017
Tour
Speaker: Uranchimeg Tsultem, History of Art, UC Berkeley
Date: July 15, 2017
Location: Mongolia
Sponsor: UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

TRIP SUMMARY

Mongolia is a place with rich cultural and natural heritage. Learn about prehistoric monuments known as Hirgisuur, deer stones and stone men, and what forms of art were brought in by Buddhist monks. Visit ruins of ancient cities and look for traces of cultures once inhabiting eastern Mongolia. Meet some of the modern day nomads roaming the vast steppes of eastern Mongolia whose lives essentially have not changed for over several millennia.

Our expedition will start from Ulaanbaatar and move eastwards visiting places of Chinggis Khaan’s period and end with visits to the sites of the Gobi Desert where some of the first Buddhist monasteries have been set up. Join us on this exclusive trip co-organized with famous Mongolian art historian, Dr. Uranchimeg Tsultemin, to learn about Mongolia’s ancient culture and art.

Click here for a description with itinerary and costs.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510‑642‑2809



A Conversation with Min Seok Ahn
Colloquium
Speaker: Min Seok Ahn, South Korean National Assembly
Date: August 29, 2017 | 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Location: Morrison Library Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies, C.V. Starr East Asian Library

Min Seok Ahn (also spelled Ahn Minseok), a member of the South Korean National Assembly, has been instrumental in coordinating the impeachment trial of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye and the ongoing investigations of the Choi Soon-sil scandal. During his visit to UC Berkeley, he will be discussing these events and sharing his thoughts on the the involvement of Korean diaspora communities in South Korean politics.

Event will be in Korean.

Event Contact: jchang@library.berkeley.edu, 510‑643‑0652



Paper Tigers, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China's Technological Development
Colloquium
Speaker: Douglas Fuller, School of Management, Zhejiang University
Discussant: Lowell Dittmer, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Date: August 31, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

China presents us with a conundrum. How has a developing country with a spectacularly inefficient financial system, coupled with asset-destroying state-owned firms, managed to create a number of vibrant high-tech firms?

China's domestic financial system fails most private firms by neglecting to give them sufficient support to pursue technological upgrading, even while smothering state-favored firms by providing them with too much support. Due to their foreign financing, multinational corporations suffer from neither insufficient funds nor soft budget constraints, but they are insufficiently committed to China's development. Hybrid firms that combine ethnic Chinese management and foreign financing are the hidden dragons driving China's technological development. They avoid the maladies of China's domestic financial system while remaining committed to enhancing China's domestic technological capabilities.

In sad contrast, China's domestic firms are technological paper tigers. State efforts to build local innovation clusters and create national champions have not managed to transform these firms into drivers of technological development.

These findings upend fundamental debates about China's political economy. Rather than a choice between state capitalism and building domestic market institutions, China has fostered state capitalism even while tolerating the importing of foreign market institutions. While the book's findings suggest that China's state and domestic market institutions are ineffective, the hybrids promise an alternative way to avoid the middle-income trap. By documenting how variation in China's institutional terrain impacts technological development, the book also provides much needed nuance to widespread yet mutually irreconcilable claims that China is either an emerging innovation power or a technological backwater.

Looking beyond China, hybrid-led development has implications for new alternative economic development models and new ways to conceptualize contemporary capitalism that go beyond current domestic institution-centric approaches.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Locations of Reflexivity: South Korean Community Activism and its Affective Promise for Solidarity
Colloquium
Speaker: Mun Young Cho, Yonsei University
Moderator: Steven Lee, UC Berkeley
Date: September 7, 2017 | 4:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Center for Chinese Studies

What does “solidarity” mean to activists in moments when radical actions for resistance are on the ebb and project-based anti-poverty interventions such as aid, welfare, and care have become the dominant approaches to “the poor”? In this presentation, I explore the globalization of South Korean community activism amidst the rearrangement of the anti-poverty agenda among Asian countries, as well as the shifting political and social economy within the nation. My emphasis is on showing how South Korean activists have not so much abandoned the seemingly anachronistic slogan of “solidarity” as tried to reinterpret and revitalize it by remapping poor urban neighborhoods in Asian countries as “locations of reflexivity” (seong-chal-ui hyeon-jang ). With an eye to CO (community organization) training practices coordinated by grassroots activists, I demonstrate that the prevalence of reflexivity as an ethics of solidarity indicates an affective turn in activism, in which affective dialogues for sharing social suffering outweigh a teleological mission to complete a goal.

Mun Young Cho is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, activism, development, and youth in China and South Korea. She is the author of the book The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2013), the co-author of Jeong-chi-ui im-gye, gong-gong-seong-ui [Political Critique, Public Adventure] (2014) and 'Hell Joseon' In and Out (2017), and the translator of Bun-bae-jeong-chi-ui [Era of Divided Politics] (2017).

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9787



“The Crown Jewel of our Realm:” The Forgotten Story of Künzang Chöling, a Tibetan Buddhist Nunnery in Nepal
Lecture
Speaker: Charles Ramble, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Date: September 7, 2017 | 5:00-6:30 p.m.
Location: Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room, 315
Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies

In Nepal’s Mustang District, on the right bank of the Kali Gandaki river facing the large settlement of Tshug, is a low hill known as Gompa Gang, the “convent ridge”. Standing on the ridge are the ruins of a Buddhist site, Künzang Chöling, whose dilapidated condition belies the fact that it features the finest example of Nyingmapa mural art outside Tibet. Until recently, nothing else was known about the building beyond the fact that it had once been a nunnery. This situation has now changed significantly with the discovery of the archives of the convent and the autobiography of its founder. Thanks to these materials we are able to reconstruct a substantial part of the life of Künzang Chöling, from its foundation in the 1680s to the dissolution of the religious sorority in the early twentieth century. This presentation will examine the circumstances in which the nunnery was founded, the regulations and management of its community, its integration with the local laity, and its relationship with certain lamas whose ambitions were ultimately responsible for its disintegration.

Charles Ramble is Directeur d’études (Professor of Tibetan History and Philology) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, and a member of East Asian Civilisations Research Centre (Paris, France).

Event Contact: buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104



AIA Lecture — Beads, trade, and the emergence of complexity in ancient Southeast Asia
Lecture
Speaker: Alison Carter, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: September 12, 2017 | 7:00 p.m.
Location: 370 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsors: AIA, San Francisco Society, Institute of East Asian Studies, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

Around 500 BC people in South Asia (primarily India and Sri Lanka) began interacting with people in Southeast Asia. Some of the earliest indicators of this contact are stone and glass beads that were imported from South Asia and widely traded across Southeast Asia. These beads were important symbols of prestige and power. In this presentation I discuss my study of beads from 12 archaeological sites in Cambodia and Thailand and what we can learn from these beads about early trade networks, how beads were being exchanged, and who may have been trading and wearing beads.

Event Contact: sheltonk@berkeley.edu



The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up
Colloquium
Speaker: Michael Meyer, English, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: Thomas Gold, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Date: September 15, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies

In 1995, at the age of twenty-three, Michael Meyer joined the Peace Corps and, after rejecting offers to go to seven other countries, was sent to a tiny town in Sichuan. Knowing nothing about China, or even how to use chopsticks, Meyer wrote Chinese words up and down his arms so he could hold conversations, and, per a Communist dean’s orders, jumped into teaching his students about the Enlightenment, the stock market, and Beatles lyrics. Soon he realized his Chinese counterparts were just as bewildered by the country’s changes as he was. Thus began a 20-year journey through China that Meyer will recount via photographs, as well as talking about the challenges of reporting from China and how a freelance writer can fund and produce books that reach a wide audience.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Risk Communication and Post-disaster Tourism Recovery: Evidence from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster
Lecture
Date: September 15 | 5-6:30 p.m.
Speaker: Hiroaki Matsuura, Shoin University
Location: Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room, 221
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group

A tremendous amount of radioactive products were discharged as a result of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, which resulted in radioactive contamination of the plant and wide surrounding areas. When describing the geographical distribution of radioactive contamination just after the disaster, the government, media, and other organizations largely used administrative boundaries (prefectures, municipalities etc.) or distance from the radiation source as a reference. I examine how this sometimes misleading information about risks, as opposed to the actual risks of radiation significantly and negatively affected local tourism and its long-term recovery in Fukushima and Kanto area. Although health risk information based on prefecture has an obvious advantage of distilling large and complex risk information into a simple one, the government, media, and other organizations need to recognize and carefully examine the potential of misclassifying non-contaminated areas into contaminated prefectures. Doing so will avoid unintentional consequences to the region's tourism recovery.

Hiroaki Matsuura is currently Provost and Vice President of Shoin University in Japan. He is also Interim Dean of the Faculty of Tourism, Media, and Cultural Studies at Shoin University. Before he moved to Shoin, he served as Departmental Lecturer in the Economy of Japan at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Hiroaki received his B.A. in Economics from Keio University, M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, M.S. in Project Management from Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Sc.D. in Global Health and Population (Economics track) from Harvard University's School of Public Health. He has also served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics (UNU-WIDER). He is currently an editorial board member of the Child Abuse Review, Sociological Research Online, and International Journal of Population Studies. His main interests are economics and demography, with a special interest in human rights in population issues.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Fake News and Information Leaks: Constructing Documentary Authority in Late Imperial China
Colloquium
Discussant: Nicolas Tackett, History, UC Berkeley
Speaker: Emily Mokros, CCS Postdoctoral Fellow, 2017-2018
Date: September 18 | 4-6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

In seventeenth-century China, the Qing dynasty inherited a troubled information order. Within the bureaucracy, lengthy procedural correspondence buried urgent messages and covert networks troubled official hierarchies. Beyond the reach of the state, gossip and rumor endangered the stability of the new dynasty. This paper analyzes the negotiation of information scandals in the first century of Qing rule in China. It argues that in their attempts to restore the information order, Qing political agents established new boundaries between influence and authority, clerks and officials, and conversations and texts. The court promoted gazettes as authoritative foils to the rumors, tabloids, and forgeries that made up the “fake news” of early modern China. In so doing, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing state shifted the material basis of politics from talk to text, and from story to document.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Koto and Voice
Performance
Performer: Kyoko Kawamura
Date: September 18 | 8-10 p.m.
Location: CNMAT (1750 Arch St.)
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)

An evening of traditional and contemporary works for koto and voice performed by Kyoko Kawamura. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Kawamura began studying the koto at the age of 10, inspired by the performance of Kinichi Nakanoshima, a designated living national treasure. She studied Japanese traditional music at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, majoring in koto. A multi-instrumentalist, Kawamura also studied shamisen and Japanese flute. In the last 20 years, Kawamura has also gained recognition as an interpreter of contemporary music and has performed all over the world with performers such as Yo-Yo Ma and the Nieuw Ensemble.

In addition to traditional works, Kawamura will present two contemporary works by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa and UC Berkeley's Ken Ueno.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Diplomacy, Climate and U.S.-China Relations in the Age of Trump
Lecture
Moderator: Thomas B. Gold, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Speaker: The Honorable David Rank, Charge d'affaires and Former Acting Ambassador, China
Date: September 20 | 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Location: Doe Library, Morrison Library
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Library, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Dave Rank resigned from his position as the senior American diplomat in China in the wake of the decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change. He will discuss the decision to end his 27-year career as a State Department Foreign Service Officer and the implications of this American disengagement on U.S. interests, our relationship with China and our standing in the world.

David Rank spent 27 years as a State Department Foreign Service Officer, including his final assignment as Deputy Chief of Mission and, following the 2016 election, as the Charge’ d’Affaires (acting Ambassador) at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. In addition to six Foreign Service assignments in greater China (three in Beijing, two at the American Institute in Taiwan and one at the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai), Rank served at the U.S. embassies in Kabul, Athens, and Port Louis (Mauritius). His domestic assignments included jobs as Director of the State’s Office of Afghanistan Affairs, Senior Advisor to the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and Korea desk officer. From 2012-13, he was a Dean and Virginia Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. In 2015 he received the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award for his role in the release of the only American service member held by the enemy in Afghanistan. He is also the recipient of the American Foreign Service Association’s Sinclaire Award for the study of languages and their related cultures. Rank speaks Mandarin Chinese, French, Dari and Greek. He and his wife, Mary, have three children.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2480



Climate Change and Migration in the Midst of Elusion: Insights from Cambodia
Lecture
Speaker: Sara Vigil, Research Fellow, Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, University of Liège; Research Fellow, International Institute for Social Studies (The Netherlands), Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, University of Liège; Research Fellow, International Institute for Social Studies (The Netherlands)
Date: September 20 | 4-5:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies

Despite progress in the understanding of the complex links between climate change and migration, the so called ‘climate change-migration nexus’ occludes more than it reveals. On one hand, academic and policy analysis still tends to focus on the biophysical impacts of climate change as ‘push’ factors, naturalizing migration drivers, simplifying their impacts, and eluding the ways in which climate change politics and migration discourses are (re)shaping access to fundamental natural assets. On the other hand, in the burgeoning literature on land and green grabs, displacement and migration remain relegated to a secondary level of consideration, often depicting migrants as little more than passive victims of capitalism. Drawing on case studies conducted in the Cambodian provinces of Koh Kong and Kampong Thom, this talk will analyse the variegated and complex interactions between climate change politics, land grabs, and migration. In so doing, it will show how and why powerful framings on causes, impacts, and solutions translate into interventions that often increase, rather than alleviate, the very pressures that they intend to redress.

Sara Vigil is a Research Fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S- FNRS) at the University of Liège (Belgium) and at International Institute for Social Studies (The Netherlands). Her PhD research analyses the interconnections between climate change politics, land grabs, and migration and she has conducted fieldwork in Senegal and Cambodia. She has consulted for the World Bank, the Nansen Initiative, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. She lectures on international cooperation, migration governance, and environmental politics at Sciences Po Paris, Paris 13 Sorbonne, and IHECS.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



The Bacchus Lady (featuring filmmaker E J-yong)
Film Screening
Moderator: Jinsoo An, UC Berkeley
Speaker: E J-yong
Date: September 21 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies (CKS)

Poles apart from the Korean obsession with youth and beauty that reign over both screen culture and society’s everyday dealings, E J-yong’s latest film tells a tale of shame and disgrace that feels as fresh as an open wound. And yet, The Bacchus Lady (죽여주는 여자) is as funny and elegant as it is devastating. The incomparable Youn Yuh-jung, one of Korea’s most revered actresses, gives another masterful performance as a sixty-something prostitute who spends her days in public parks, offering bottles of Bacchus (a brand-name energy drink) to old men as a code for sexual favors. But when a touch of gonorrhea leaves her unable to ply her trade, she is forced to find other services to offer her clients and soon turns to a darker business.

We will be joined by the filmmaker E J-yong, who will introduce the film and stay for a Q&A.

E J-yong is a film director best known for Untold Scandal (2003), My Brilliant Life (2014), and The Bacchus Lady (2016).

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9787



We've been here before: ‘America First’ and a Century of Defending Japanese language learning
Colloquium
Speaker: Noriko Asato, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Date: September 21 | 4 p.m.
Location: East Asian Library, Art History Seminar Room
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Noriko Asato will explore the efforts to control Japanese language schools in California a century ago as part of anti-immigrant nativism. This presentation develops from her book, “Teaching Mikadoism,” which looked at how nativists and Japanese Americans battled over their identity and education in Hawaii and the West Coast. Her presentation briefly explores how Japanese Americans resisted, and eventually won a Supreme Court decision that found such school control legislation unconstitutional. Even though Japanese Americans won in Court, her presentation also demonstrates the danger of an unsubstantiated nativist narrative, which demonized Japanese Americans and helped contribute to the unconstitutional “internment” of 120,000 Nikkei during World War II. This brief history of the Japanese American experience highlights the importance for immigrants and ethnic groups in America to have agency for their own voices. It also warns us to be better news consumers.

Noriko Asato, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Hawaii Manoa. Her research areas include Intellectual Freedom, East Asian Librarianship and Asian Informatics.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Maritime Diffusion of Buddhist Philosophical Thought and Art
Lecture
Speaker: Osmund Bopearachchi, UC Berkeley
Date: September 21 | 5-6:30 p.m.
Location: 315 Wheeler Hall
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies

Trade is understood mainly as the transfer and exchange of commodities to make profits, and this was also the driving force of economic activities in ancient time. However, as revealed by epigraphic and literary evidence, among the earliest donors and important patrons of Buddhist establishments in South and South-East Asia were caravan merchants and wealthy seafaring traders. The spread of Buddhism from South Asia to Southeast Asia is also closely connected with the growth of a trading network that facilitated the movement of Buddhist merchants, traveling monks and teachers. The resources needed to build gigantic religious monuments in South and South-East Asia would thus have come from both the royal patronage as well as from the devout mercantile classes. Their wealth was based on the flourishing inland and international trade centers located in the ports along the coast and navigable river.

Osmund Bopearachchi is Adjunct Professor of Central and South Asian Art, Archaeology, and Numismatics, University of California, Berkeley, and Emeritus Director of Research of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.-E.N.S. Paris). A numismatist, historian, and archaeologist, he has published ten books, edited six books, and written over 150 articles.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu



New Traditions: Korean Culture Week Launch
Workshop
Speakers: Miran Lee, artist; Kay Kang, artist
Performer: Soo-yeon Lyuh, musician
Date: September 23 | 2-6 p.m.
Location: Mils College Art Museum
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Mills College Art Museum, Consulate General of the Republic of Korean in San Francisco

The Mills College Art Museum and the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco present a day of family friendly Korean arts workshops led by exhibiting artists Miran Lee and Kay Kang. Workshops will be followed by a performance with internationally renowned haegeum musician Soo-yeon Lyuh in collaboration with contemporary Bay Area musicians performing new compositions.

This event is sponsored by the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco for San Francisco Korea Week.

Event Contact: museum@mills.edu, 510-430-2164



Guangzhou Dream Factory
Documentary Film
Speaker: Erica Marcus, filmmaker
Date: September 26 | 4-6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for African Studies

Guangzhou, a.k.a. Canton, is southern China’s centuries-old trading port. Today the booming metropolis of 14 million is a mecca of mass consumption, its vast international trading centers crammed with every “Made in China” good imaginable. Every year more than half a million Africans travel to Guangzhou where they buy goods to sell back in Africa. Over time, some have chosen to stay, and for these Africans China looks like the new land of opportunity, a place where anything is possible. But is it?

Featuring a dynamic cast of men and women from Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, GUANGZHOU DREAM FACTORY weaves the stories of Africans chasing alluring, yet elusive, “Made in China” dreams into a compelling critique of 21st century global capitalism. Following a filmmaker’s journey from Ghana to China and back to Africa, GUANGZHOU DREAM FACTORY provides a rare glimpse of African aspirations in an age of endless outsourcing.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Celebrating 100 Years of Modern Korean Literature
Conference
Featured Speaker: Kyung-Ran Jo, author
Additional Speakers: Youngmin Kwon, UC Berkeley; Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia
Date: September 26 | 5-7 p.m.
Location: Berkeley City Club, Drawing Room
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco

The publication of Yi Kwang-su’s novel Mujŏng (The Heartless) in 1917 is often cited as the starting point of modern Korean literature. Please join us for a discussion of the fruits of a century of modern Korean literature dating from the appearance of that landmark novel. Presentations will be made from the point of view of a literary scholar and critic, Professor Youngmin Kwon; a long-time translator (with Ju-Chan Fulton) of modern Korean fiction, Professor Bruce Fulton; and a prize-winning fiction writer, Kyung-Ran Jo.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Youngmin Kwon is currently Adjunct Professor of Korean Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. He is an Emeritus Professor at Seoul National University and Chair Professor of Korean Literature at Dankook University. He has published numerous works on modern Korean literature, including History of Modern Korean Literature (in Korean, 2002) and The Encyclopedia of Modern Korean Literature (in Korean, 2004). He is co-editor with Bruce Fulton of Modern Korean Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005), and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Culture and Art Critics Award of Seoul (1988), Modern Korean Literary Critics Award (1990), Manhae Academic Prize (2006), Academic Research Award of Seoul National University (2009), and Sejong Cultural Award (2017).

Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction; co-editor with Youngmin Kwon of Modern Korean Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005); editor of the Korea section of the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (2003); and general editor of the Modern Korean Fiction series published by the University of Hawai’i Press. He is the co-recipient of several translation awards and grants, including the first National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work, and the first residency awarded by the Banff International Literary Translation Centre for the translation of a work from any Asian language. He is the translator with Ju-Chan Fulton of Cho Chongnae’s novel Chonggul malli, published in English as The Human Jungle (Chin Music Press, 2016).

Kyung-Ran Jo was born in 1969 in Seoul, where she went on to study creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Jo has lived in Bongcheon-dong for nearly 20 years in a small rooftop apartment that her father built. She made her literary debut in 1996 with the short story “French Optical,” which won the Dong-a Ilbo Prize.

Jo’s work is famous for taking trivial, mundane, and everyday occurrences and delicately describing them in subtle emotional tones. Jo tends to dwell on the impressions things make with precision and sensitivity, describing their effect on the inner world of the protagonist. She often describes her characters minimally or presents them like objects lacking personality, thereby accentuating human alienation and the difficulty of communication in the modern world.

Her work has won the Munhakdongne New Writer Award, Today’s Young Artist Award, Contemporary Literature Award, and Dong-in Literary Award and has been translated into French, German, Hebrew, and English.

This event is sponsored by the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco for San Francisco Korea Week.

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9787



Modern Myanmar History and the Crisis of Community, 1948-2017
Lecture
Speaker: Maitrii Aung-Thwin, Associate Professor of History, National University of Singapore
Date: September 27 | 4-5:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies

In recent months, the international community, media, and transnational advocacy groups have drawn attention to the worsening humanitarian crises brewing in Rakhine State, located along the western coastline of Myanmar that borders Bangladesh. Commentators have focused on the suffering of the “Rohingya”, a vulnerable community of contested origins that have come to represent the latest chapter in Myanmar’s modern political history. Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration has come under fierce criticism for seemingly ignoring the plight of these people, while the democracy icon herself was criticized for her silence and apparent complicity in what some claimed to be state-sponsored genocide.

The media’s focus on the Rohingya has overshadowed the optimism over the liberalization initiatives that commenced in 2010 under President Thein Sein’s administration and brought Aung San Suu Kyi to office in 2015. While many viewed her rise to leadership as the arrival of “genuine democracy” in Myanmar, continuing ethnic tensions, persistent inequity, and the enduring role of the military in state matters led many to question whether the aspirations and objectives that fueled the over twenty-five-year old democracy campaign were actually achieved.

This presentation questions the usefulness of interpreting Myanmar’s modern history exclusively through this democratic narrative. By examining Myanmar’s modern history as an ongoing crisis of community, we may take into account the diverse and often divergent priorities and worldviews that are currently in play; enabling us to interpret the contemporary debate over democracy as a continuation of a much older contest to define Myanmar’s identity.

Maitrii Aung-Thwin is Associate Professor of Myanmar/Southeast Asia History and Convener of the Comparative Asian Studies PhD Program at the National University of Singapore (NUS). After receiving his PhD in History from the University of Michigan, he joined the Asia Research Institute as a post-doctoral fellow and subsequently moved to the Department of History at NUS. He has written on resistance movements, law, colonialism, nation-building, and intellectual history.

Aung-Thwin’s research has been concerned with the histories of domination, resistance, and identity in Southeast Asia during the late colonial age. Among his publications include, A New History of Southeast Asia (2010), The Return of the Galon King: History Law and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (2011), and A History of Myanmar Since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations (2013). His current work is concerned with the epistemological construction of Myanmar through public history, natural history, legal geography, and media studies.

Aung-Thwin has served on the Board of the Directors for the Association of Asian Studies (USA), as Chair of the AAS Southeast Asia Council, President of the Burma Studies Group, and as a member of UNESCO’s Southeast Asian “Shared History” project. He is currently a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation and editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



Mongolian Buddhism
Conference
Date: September 28 – 30, 2017
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Center for Buddhist Studies

Thursday, September 28, 4-5:30
Friday, September 29, 10-6
Saturday, September 30, 10-1

This conference explores the philosophies, texts, arts, and practices of Mongolian Buddhism. As Carolingians did with Christianity and Abbasids for Islam, Mongols have determined the history of Buddhism. During the Yuan dynasty their tutelage afforded the Buddhist community unprecedented means. Their grace tolerated venerations of Buddha that were of nothing but the finest quality. And their persuasions and predilections brought favor to certain schools and teachings leaving others to decline. During the period after having been expelled from China but before they would concede the Yuan dynasty, the predicament of one of their lords led to the ascendancy of the Gelugpa School and the creation of the Dalai Lama as an institution. And after their submission under the Qing dynasty they acted as intermediaries between Manchus and Tibetans to help promulgate a Gelugpa-Qing empire. Over time, as with every other nation in the Gelugpa fold—in bold defiance of logic’s law of the excluded middle—they became part and parcel of a greater Gelugpa world order and their own world order at the same time. As a world unto themselves, they forged their own brand of the Yellow Dominion and, making it strong, saw aspects of it come to be an influence abroad. Some twenty-five years ago, after three generations of repression, the fall of communism left a void for Buddhism to return. Yet the residual of communism’s modern understanding of religion has Mongols uncertain over what the role of Buddhism should be. Today, with world order foundering for loss of the meaning of religion, Mongols are in a position once again to determine the history of Buddhism.

Speakers include:

  • Agata BAREJA-STARZYNSKA, University of Warsaw
  • Brian BAUMANN, UC Berkeley
  • Isabelle CHARLEUX, National Centre for Scientific Research
  • Jacob DALTON, UC Berkeley
  • Hildegard DIEMBERGER, University of Cambridge
  • Johan ELVERSKOG, Southern Methodist University
  • Matthew KING, UC Riverside
  • ErdeneBaatar ERDENE-OCHIR, UC Santa Barbara
  • Weirong SHEN, Renmin University of China
  • Uranchimeg TSULTEM, UC Berkeley
  • Vesna WALLACE, UC Santa Barbara

Mongolian Buddhism Program

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809



Buddhist Revelations in Mongolian Contemporary Art: Artist Soyolmaa Davaakhuu in Conversation with Uranchimeg Tsultem
Colloquium
Speaker: Soyolmaa Davaakhuu, Mongolian artist
Interlocutor: Uranchimeg Tsultem, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative Steering Committee
Date: September 28 | 2-3 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Mongolia Foundation, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Center for Buddhist Studies

Mongolian artist Soyolmaa Davaakhuu will discuss her work with art historian Uranchimeg Tsultem. Soyolmaa Davaakhuu's art is based on her profound interest and practice of Buddhism. She is one of very few artists in Mongolia who aim to find new modernist style of expression of Buddhist images, motifs and symbols. She studied Buddhism and with the approval of her guru, she is able to create new forms and iconographies for Buddhist deities and their manifestations. Works by the artist will be on display. Her art was shown in UK, USA, Canada, South Korea, Vietnam, and Mongolia. The exhibition opening will include the artist's talk.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809



South Korea's Five-Year Plan for National Affairs of the Moon Jae-In Administration
Conference
Speaker: Jin-pyo Kim
Date: September 29 | 5-7 p.m.
Location: 155 Dwinelle Hall
Sponsor: Physical Education Program, Martial Arts, Center for Korean Studies (CKS)

As tensions between South and North Korea are as contentious as ever, the South Korean State Affairs Planning Committee Chairman Jin-pyo Kim will discuss the state's five-year plan for national affairs, including the issue of military tensions between South and North Korea. During his trip to UC Berkeley, Chairman Kim will share his thoughts and answer questions that individuals might have regarding the current state of affairs.

Jin-pyo Kim's Professional Background:

  • Since May 2017 - Chairman, State Affairs Planning Advisory Committee
  • 2004 - present - Member of the 17.18.19.20th National Assembly
  • 2011-2012 - Floor Leader of the Democratic United Party
  • 2005-2006 - Deputy Prime Minister and Minister, Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development
  • 2003-2004 - Deputy Prime Minister and Minister, Ministry of Finance and Economy
  • 2002-2003 - Minister, Office for Government Policy Coordination
  • 2002 - Senior Secretary for Policy and Planning to President Kim Dae-Jung

Event Contact: ahnc@berkeley.edu



The Question of Tartar Textiles: Dante, Cangrande I della Scala, and the Vatican Archive
Lecture
Speaker: Mariachiara Gasparini, Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer, Santa Clara University
Date: October 2 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, The Program for the Study of Italy, IEAS

The Chinese-Islamic cultural encounter in Central Asia found its maximum expression with the Pax Mongolica in territories that, although vast in area, became similar in aesthetic culture, and brought into existence a unique “dress code” among various social classes from China to Italy. Similarly to the Tang, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols established their domain with a multicultural policy which was inclusive of all those artistic and religious processes that created a Eurasian production of textiles and costumes. Often found under the name of “Tartar,” these compounds appear very similar in style although different in technique and material.

Before the Mongols, however, the Crusades had already created an occasion for the four Italian Maritime Republics to establish their own colonies in Eastern territories, and to trade textiles and other luxury objects. Original meanings of patterns and inscriptions were often lost in translation, transmission, and re-interpretation of the textiles traded in Trans Mediterranean areas. It was in Southern Italy that those items were first acquired and reproduced, not without arousing astonishment in the Italian society, which described them as strange (strani) and marvelous (meravigliosi).

The Royal Ṭirāz Workshop established in Palermo, possibly around the twelfth century, was a major step in the advent of the Italian textile production that moved only between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth to Lucca (when, coincidentally, a few Italian merchants reached mainland China), and Tartar patterns were reinterpreted as pure decorative or “exotic motifs.” Same patterns began to appear not only on textile grounds but also on paintings and as architectural elements.

Through a visual and textual analysis, based on Eastern and Western textiles, and written sources preserved in the Vatican Archive in Rome, this paper analyzes the so-recorded panni tartarici, which still today, no without questions, represent an example of pre-modern cultural and artistic interaction between various Eurasian societies that, thanks to the Mongols, found a universal style.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809



Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1969
Colloquium
Speaker: Andrew Walder, Sociology, Stanford University
Discussant: Heather Haveman, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Date: October 4 | 4-6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Drawing on accounts in more than 2,200 published county and city annals, this presentation provides an overview of the successive waves of rebellion and repression that spread across China from mid-1966 to the end of 1969. Several new observations emerge from broad patterns in these accounts. First, the collapse of civilian state structures due to rebel power seizures spread with remarkable rapidity far across China, and deeply into rural areas. Second, the power seizures in early 1967 were not due primarily to student and worker insurgencies, but to internal rebellions by party-state officials against their own superiors. Third, the violent factional battles of 1967 and 1968 despite widespread local interventions by the armed forces, and intensified as the rebellions neared their end. And fourth, the number of people killed and otherwise victimized by the forces of order near the end of this period was vastly larger than the numbers generated previously by rebellion and factional conflict. Although the overall number of victims was large, as a percentage of the population the intensity of the violence was well below comparable historical episodes.

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Chinese Overseas: Celebrating the Legacy of Scholarship and Collection Treasures at UC Berkeley
Conference
Featured Speaker: Ling-Chi Wang, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Date: October 5 | 8:10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Location: 101 Doe Library,
Sponsor: Library, Department of Ethnic Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Bancroft Library, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

This symposium celebrates the intellectual contributions of UC Berkeley’s research on Chinese communities overseas, including its archival collections from around the world. UC Berkeley created one of the first Chinese American studies programs in North America and holds one of the world’s largest Chinese American archives.

Speakers:

  • Penny Edwards, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
  • Harvey Dong, Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley
  • Sine Hwang Jensen, Asian American Studies & Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian, University of California, Berkeley
  • Theresa Salazar, Curator, Bancroft Collection of Western Americana, University of California, Berkeley
  • Jianye He, Librarian for Chinese Collections, University of California, Berkeley
  • Virginia Shih, Librarian for the Southeast Asia Collection, University of California, Berkeley

Event Contact: vshih@library.berkeley.edu, 510-643-0850

Document: Chinese Overseas Program



If I can K-Pop dance, I’ll be part of your beauty revolution.
Colloquium
Featured Speaker: kate-hers RHEE Moderator: Catherine Ceniza Choy, UC Berkeley Date: October 5 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Gender and the Trans-Pacific World Program

In this lecture, kate-hers RHEE will discuss the evolution of her politically engaged work as an artist and her dogged pursuit of cultivating creativity and playful improvisation in her artistic practice. She’ll touch on past work and influences to frame the context of her current interdisciplinary project, called Modern Beauty Ideals in the Age of Digital Technology or If I can K-Pop dance, I’ll be part of your beauty revolution. This work takes the form of photography, drawing, sculpture, video, internet art, installation, and social intervention to engage hetero-patriarchal global beauty ideals and accompanying digital technology from a transnational feminist perspective.

About kate-hers RHEE

kate-hers RHEE was born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in a racially segregated working class suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Her interdisciplinary work reflects the complex nature of miscast identity, cultural dislocation, and gendered interactions. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where she was a Graduate Studies Diversity and Jacob K. Javits fellow. Artist and Art Center Pasadena professor Tom Knechtel says of RHEE’s interdisciplinary practice, “Whether she is trying to re-insert herself back into her birth society of Korea or jamming the culinary tropes of German society with Korean cooking, revealing the underlying racism behind a much-beloved German treat, or mining the double entendres in an image of two pug dogs, she directly addresses the complexity of social and racial identities in ways that are funny and scathing, all at once.”

RHEE’s work has been shown nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions and interactive projects at the SOMA Art Gallery - Berlin (2017), Art Space One - Seoul (2016-17), Asian Arts Initiative - Philadelphia, PA (2017), Seoul Art Space SEOGYO (2017), British Museum – London (2016), Asian Art Museum – Berlin (2016-2017), the Neuer Berlin Kunstverein (2016), Humboldt Lab Dahlem Museum - Berlin (2015), Korean Cultural Service - New York (2015), and the Berlinische Galerie - Museum for Modern Art (2014). She has been honored with several residency fellowships, including from the MacDowell Colony and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has been recognised by the AHL Foundation - New York with the 1st Prize of the Visual Arts Competition (2014) and has been funded by the Puffin Foundation (2015) and the Berlin Senate with a Travel Grant (2016) and the Visual Artist Fellowship (2015). RHEE’s work was featured in the essay by scholar Mei Heberer in “Back to Myself: Negotiating German Belonging and Transnational Asianness in Experimental Video,” in The Autobiographical Turn in German Documentary and Experimental Film, edited by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (2014). Her current project will be featured in a chapter of an upcoming publication, The (Geo) Politics of Beauty: Race, Transnationalism, and Neoliberalism in South Korean Beauty Culture, by scholar Heijin Lee.

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9787



100 Years Later: The Russian Revolution and its Consequences
Workshop
Date: October 6-7 | 1:15-4 p.m.
Location: 270 Stephens Hall
Sponsors: the Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), the UC Berkeley History Department, the Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), and the Townsend Center for the Humanities

“The Soviet socialist revolution was the great utopian adventure of the modern age,” wrote the late Berkeley professor Martin Malia in the opening to his 1994 book The Soviet Tragedy. Utopian and pragmatic, top-down and bottom-up, tragic and fortunate: historians have affixed many adjectives to the year 1917 to describe it and its impact on Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the wider world. Long before the opening of the Russian archives in the early nineties, scholars have spilled much ink to debate the Revolution’s origins and causes, goals and shortcomings, beginning and end. Nearly all historians agree that the Revolution stands virtually unrivaled in its ambition, influence, and global legacy.

To mark the Revolution’s centenary, the University of California, Berkeley will host a workshop where graduate students in the dissertation writing phase can present and receive feedback on work that relates to the theme of the Russian Revolution and its consequences, broadly defined. How did the ideas, actors, and events that undergirded the Bolshevik program reverberate across the Soviet Union and beyond? In what ways did Soviet socialism serve as a model for non-Soviet governments, revolutionaries, reformers, elites, and ordinary citizens to follow, reject, or improve upon? What effect did the collapse have on socialist and non-socialist governments, and what role does memory of the Soviet past play in the former USSR and beyond today? Our goal is to bring together young scholars from universities across the United States whose work is adding to and changing the way we think, research, and write about the world that 1917 forged.

For more information, including the full program and pre-circulated papers, please visit berkeley1917.wordpress.com.

Event Contact: berkeley1917@gmail.com



In the Province of the Gods: Disability, Sexuality, Mortality and Things Japanese: Kenny Fries in conversation with Karen Nakamura
Colloquium
Featured Speaker: Kenny Fries, Author
Moderator: Karen Nakamura, UC Berkeley
Date: October 9 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

A disabled foreigner in Japan, a society most people think of as hostile to difference, Kenny Fries finds himself on a journey of profound self-discovery. As he visits gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and atomic bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, requiring him to find a way to reenter life on new terms.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, says, ““In this subtle page turner, Fries helps reinvent the travel-as-pilgrimage narrative. He neither exoticizes nor shies away from the potential pitfalls of a western mind traveling abroad; instead he demonstrates how, through an all too rare open heart and a true poet’s eye, bridges can be built, and understanding deepened, one sincere action at a time.”

Kenny Fries will read briefly from his new memoir In the Province of the Gods, then have a conversation with Professor Karen Nakamura, as well as a discussion with the audience. Join us to hear two luminaries of disability studies who have never met before talk about disability, sexuality, intersectionality, HIV, mortality, and Japan.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



A New Past: Hidden Narratives of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese
Lecture
Speaker: Hai Nguyen, Postdoctoral Fellow, Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University
Date: October 10 | 4-5:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies

This talk will examine the motivations of some North Vietnamese fighters as derived from their personal memoirs, in particular unpublished documents collected directly from the battlefield by the CIA and U.S. allies and archived at the National Archives and at the Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University. These letters, diaries and military records in Vietnamese offer important clues to understanding the enlistment, deployment, and rationale of the People’s Army of Vietnam, as well as political struggles within North Vietnam’s Worker’s Party and divergent opinions over the war’s cause. These materials also reveal the soldiers’ feelings of national, familial and individual duty, along with their personal impressions of life at war, depression, and their nostalgia for home and their families. The analysis here seeks to show how personal memory may conflict or be compatible with collective memory, as well as how it may be used to shape or even reshape the stories of history, to amplify understanding of and fill gaps in historical narratives. Such organic memories contribute an unvarnished immediacy that can clarify the North Vietnamese fighters' perceptions and activities during the war.

Hai Thanh Nguyen (pen name Van Cam Hai) is a writer, filmmaker, journalist, and scholar. He is an advisory board member of an ongoing public health research project on war and trauma among elderly Vietnamese for the University of Utah, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University, where he recently received his Ph.D. in History. He has written and directed documentary films in Vietnam and other countries, primarily for Vietnamese television. Along with a number of publications in Vietnamese, his poems have appeared in translation in Three Vietnamese Poets (2002) and The Deluge (2013), both translated by Linh Dinh. He has been a U.S. State Department Cultural Affairs Fellow, a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University, and a visiting scholar at the William Joiner Center of the University of Massachusetts Boston. His project “Memory of Conflict: A New Past of the Vietnam War from Vietnamese Perspectives” in which he has conducted interviews with 100 Vietnamese veterans and politicians, was sponsored by the First Division Museum McCormick Research Center in Illinois.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



You Can Succeed, Too: Media Theory and Kitsch in Toho's early 1960s popular song films
Colloquium
Speaker: Michael Raine, Western University
Date: October 11 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Andrew Barshay has argued that after the ANPO protests in 1960, "the 'postwar' utopianism that had marked Japanese thinking about democracy was definitively transvalued, literally 'translated' from the political to the economic realm." This presentation explores the role of the early 1960s Toho musical comedy in translating utopia for an aspirational "white collar" urban culture in Japan. By the 1960s, cinema was no longer the king of mass entertainment: it was part of a leisure industry dominated by television that also included popular music and live performance consumed in "amusement zones." Yuriko Furuhata has emphasized the live "actuality" of Japanese television as informing the remediating practices of the Japanese New Wave but it was another aspect of televisuality that was most significant to the Toho musical films: the close relation between product placement, advertising, and "media mix" celebrity on the television variety show. The growth of the variety show, and the talent agencies that produced them, only accelerated the tendency toward paratext and intertextuality in the high volume, low budget film production system, characterized by the ubiquity and propinquity of familiar series and stars. Taking the musical comedy You Can Succeed, Too (Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru, 1964) as its main example, this presentation argues that the films featuring televisual celebrity, often dismissed as kitsch, exhibit an ironic "double coding" that interrogates contradictions that it also magically resolves. Toho took the indigeneity (dochaku) turn of the early 1960s in a different direction than the Toei yakuza genre or Imamura's art films. Drawing on concepts such as "vernacular modernism" and "transcultural mimesis," the presentation argues that the ambivalent copying and critique of American things in You Can Succeed, Too was a form of immanent and "irresponsible" media theory that highlighted some of the questions of modern Japanese history that also occupied the Japanese new wave.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Shadow History—Archive and Intermediality in Chinese Cinema:  A conference in honor of the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection
Conference
Date: October 12-14
Locations: 180 Doe Library
142 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Osher Theater
Sponsors: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Institute of East Asian Studies, C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), Film and Media Department

This meeting honors the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection, a unique and invaluable archive of print materials and ephemera documenting nearly a century of Chinese cinema and media culture, and recently acquired by the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The conference will span two and half days of scholarly talks and workshops, in conjunction with a museum exhibition in the grand atrium of the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) of rare Chinese film posters. There will also be a series of public screenings of early Chinese cinema at BAMPFA.

A Golden Age of Chinese Cinema, 1947-52

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan
Colloquium
Speaker: Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara
Date: October 18 | 4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

In Playing War, Sabine Frühstück makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Frühstück identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Robert Thurman | Why does the Dalai Lama say he is "Son of Nālandā"?: The inaugural ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World
Lecture
Speaker: Robert A. F. Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Department of Religion, Columbia University; President, Tibet House U.S., President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies
Moderator: Jake Dalton, Khyentse Professor and Chair, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
Date: October 18 | 5-7 p.m.
Location: Bechtel Engineering Center, Sibley Auditorium
Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Vedanta Society Berkeley, Center for Buddhist Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, Himalayan Studies Program, Townsend Center for the Humanities, The Mira and Ajay Shingal Center for Dharma Studies-Graduate Theological Union, P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

The Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) at UC Berkeley in collaboration with the Vedanta Society Berkeley (VSB) are proud to launch a new lecture series on religion in the modern world. Titled the ISAS-VSB Lectures on Religion in the Modern World, this series seeks to invite distinguished scholars of world religions to campus with the aim of improving and diversifying conversations about the role of religion in modern societies.

Our first lecture in this series will be delivered by Prof. Robert A. F. Thurman, a recognized worldwide authority on religion and spirituality, Asian history, world philosophy, Buddhist science, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and H.H. Dalai Lama.

Talk Abstract

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, at 82 years of age is a distinguished scholar and author. He is the virtual headmaster and teacher in the large Buddhist monasteries that Tibetan exiles have re-constructed in India, serving many thousands of monks from among the exiles, from Tibet, Mongolia, China, Japan, and Russia. As he has matured as a scholar, he has emphasized his debt to the great master scholar/sages of Nalanda Monastic University that flourished for at least 700 years in the Bihar province of India. During his studies as a youth, he memorized in toto key works by Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Maitreyanatha, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti, and Gunaprabha. More recently, he wrote a poem eulogizing the "Seventeen Great Pandits of Nalanda," and he even commissioned and personally designed a set of larger than life statues of the Panditas on a parikrama circling the Golden Temple in Elista, capital of the Kalmykia Mongolian Republic of the Russian Federation. In his effort to create an "Abhidharma 2.0" he has instituted the teaching of modern materialist science in the large monasteries, so that the Buddhist "Inner Sciences" can more effectively collaborate with the modern "Outer Sciences." In short he considers himself and his Tibetan tradition as the heir and continuer of the academic tradition of ancient Nalanda University.

Speaker Bio

Robert A.F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, President of the Tibet House U.S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific treatises from the Tibetan Tengyur.

Time chose Professor Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.” The New York Times recently said Thurman “is considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.”

Thurman is known as a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings. He is a riveting speaker and an author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, including The Central Philosophy of Tibet, Circling the Sacred Mountain, Essential Tibetan Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet, Worlds of Transformation, Inner Revolution, Infinite Life, the Jewel Tree of Tibet, Why The Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World, and, most recently, with Sharon Salzberg, Love Your Enemies.

His own search for enlightenment began while he was a student at Harvard. After an accident in which he lost the use of an eye, Thurman left school on a spiritual quest throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He found his way to India, where he first saw H.H. the Dalai Lama in 1962. After learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk and was the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. However, some years later, he offered up his robes when “he discovered he could be more effective in the American equivalent of the monastery: the university”. He returned to Harvard to finish his PhD. A very popular professor, students call his classes “life-changing”.

As part of his long-term commitment to the Tibetan cause, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama, Thurman co-founded Tibet House US in 1987 with Tenzin Tethong, Richard Gere, and Philip Glass. Since then Uma Thurman, Melissa Mathison Ford, Natalie Merchant, Leila Hadley Luce and many others served on the board. Tibet House US is a non profit organization in New York City dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of Tibetan civilization. It maintains a lively museum and cultural center, and offers programs in all aspects of the Tibetan arts and sciences. It recently founded the Menla Mountain Retreat Center in the Catskill Mountains to advance the healing arts and wisdom of Tibetan and Asian medicine traditions and offer their resources to the growing demand for alternative and complementary health practices.

Inspired by his good friend the Dalai Lama, Thurman stands on Buddhism’s open reality, and thence takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world, whether the sweep of history, the subtleties of the inner science of the psyche, or the wonders of the life of the heart. He always shares the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens a door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful future.

Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies

Event Contact: isas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3608



Seeing Necropolitics: The Work of Death in Philippine Photographs
Lecture
Speaker: Nerissa Balce, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, Stony Brook University
Date: October 19 | 12-2 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Filipino and Philippine Studies Working Group

Necropolitics is a theory about violence and the nation-state. It refers to the absolute power of the state to kill, to allow to live, or to dehumanize people. In the early 20th century, we see necropolitics at work in American colonial photographs that depict Filipino natives as dead or docile bodies. In stereographs, postcards and other photographic images from the Philippine-American War, the Filipino corpse became a symbol of American victory, modernity and "peace".

More than 100 years later, Filipino corpses appear again in Western media, in this case as victims of President Duterte's drug war. President Duterte, who continually brings up American atrocities committed during the Philippine-American War, has himself resurrected the image of the Filipino corpse in his ongoing genocide against the poor. He has been inspired by the necropolitics of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, whom he has given a hero's burial, against widespread protest, in the national Tomb of Heroes (Libingan ng Mga Bayani). Duterte is a "fascinating fascist" whose presidency is haunted by a corpse - that of the late dictator's - as well as the bodies of 11,000 victims of extrajudicial killings. In the early 21st century, what is the work of death in past and present photographs of Filipino corpses? What necropolitical ghosts do we see in the edges of the photographic frame?

BIO: Nerissa Balce was born and raised in Manila. She teaches courses on race, popular culture, Asian American studies and ethnic studies. She is the author of Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive (2016). She is currently working on a book about Filipino popular culture and literature during the Marcos regime. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2002.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



Comparative Industrial Policy in the Cybersecurity Industry: Policies, Drivers, and International Implications
Conference
Date: October 20 | 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), BASC, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity

Cyber attacks of varying severity, ranging from email hacking to Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) to advanced persistent threats (APT) to industries are commonplace. Yet at the same time, with the economy being increasingly data-based, these attacks pose a significant security and economic problem. The issue of how to cope with such intrusions raises critical questions about the role that governments should play in regulating the data economy. While few would doubt the importance of maintaining secure data, whether the government should go beyond sharing best practices for data security and implement more aggressive industrial polices to secure data is debatable.

Tracing how businesses, governments, and other actors interact is crucial for understanding how to develop sound cybersecurity policy. Firms’ efforts to secure government protection of a sector by pointing to national security is hardly new. In reality, however, claims about a given sector being critical to national security have often been abused. In the 1950s, the wool industry argued for the protection of domestic production, claiming that “there is a need for 150 million to 200 million woolen blankets to ensure survival in case of an atomic war.” Yet cybersecurity is clearly seen in a very different light by governments and genuine security concerns exist given the pervasiveness of vulnerable data in all sectors of the economy

This project will evaluate the role of firms, governments, and other key stakeholders in the rise of industrial policy in important states in the cybersecurity industry. In particular, we focus on the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, the EU and key European states. Our goals are as follows: 1) to inventory existing measures employed by these countries; 2) to understand the driving forces of cybersecurity industrial policy on a comparative basis in these countries; and 3) to examine the likely conflicts that will arise from the competitive pursuit of such industrial policies and how they might possibly be resolved through institutional cooperation both domestically and internationally.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809



Blown across the Sea: Glass along the Maritime Silk Road
Lecture
Speaker: Sanjyot Mehendale, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley
Date: October 20 | 2-3:30 p.m.
Location: 141 McCone Hall
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

This lecture will highlight the results of underwater surveys of a 2000-year-old shipwreck uncovered off the coast of the small fishing village of Godavaya, Sri Lanka. The ship's cargo of glass ingots, among other objects, will be the starting point of a discussion on the movement of glass raw materials and finished objects along the intertwined maritime and overland trading networks commonly referred to as the Silk Road. In particular, the talk will focus on the implications of this evidence for archaeological analysis of early patterns of globalization.

Sanjyot Mehendale is Chair of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, at UC Berkeley. An archaeologist specializing in cross-cultural connections of early Common Era Eurasia, she teaches on Central Asia in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu



Dwelling In-Between: Korean Americans in the Bay Area
Symposium
Moderators: Laura Nelson, UC Berkeley; Elaine Kim, UC Berkeley; Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Mills College; Stephanie Hanor, Mills College Art Museum
Featured Speakers: Rosemarie Nahm, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation; Laura Kang, UC Irvine; Myung Mi Kim, SUNY Buffalo; Linda Inson Choy, Independent Art Curator; Jung Ran Bae, Artist; Minji Sohn, Artist
Date: October 21 | 2-6 p.m.
Location: David Brower Center
Sponsors: Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Mills College Art Museum

Dwelling In-Between (사이에 머물다) will feature Korean American artists, writers, and scholars who will discuss the transnational connections of the Korean American experience. As bicultural, bilingual, and/or binational subjects, Korean Americans describe their identity as in-between “Korea” and the “West”, as both physical locations and diasporic imaginaries. This symposium will celebrate Korean American immigration histories and modes of cultural production, with particular focus on the Bay Area as a dynamic hub of Korean culture.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

2:00-2:15 Opening Remarks
Laura C. Nelson, Chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies

2:15-3:30 Part I: Writing Our History
Rosemarie Nahm, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation
Laura Kang, UC Irvine
Myung Mi Kim, SUNY Buffalo
Moderated by Elaine Kim, UC Berkeley

3:30-4:00 Coffee Break

4:00-5:15 Part II: Art and Identity
Linda Inson Choy, independent curator
Jung Ran Bae, artist
Minji Sohn, artist
Moderated by Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Mills College

5:15-5:30 Closing Remarks
Stephanie Hanor, Director of the Mills College Art Museum

5:30 Reception

ABSTRACTS

Part I: Writing Our History

“Early Korean Pioneers and their San Francisco Beginnings”

Rosemarie Nahm will discuss the history of Korean Americans in San Francisco, which, unbeknownst to many, is at the heart of early Korean immigration history. The earliest group of Korean immigrants to the U.S. mainland consisted of contract laborers from Hawaiian sugar plantations who transmigrated to San Francisco in the early 1900s. Another 1,000 Koreans were admitted at the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay, which served as the main port of entry for Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940. This was the time of Japanese occupation of Korea, and many Koreans were fleeing the harsh realities of living under Japanese rule. Some of the most effective and lasting Korean American organizations were established in San Francisco during this early migration period, and many of the early community leaders coordinated their organizational strategies and advocacy work here. The discussion is intended to raise awareness about these deep local roots, with the hope that Korean Americans will be compelled to preserve and share this lesser-known history through individual and collective actions.

“Myung Mi Kim’s ‘From DURA’ and the Korean American Arts Festival (1994)

Laura Kang will examine Myung Mi Kim’s three early poetry volumes, Under Flag, The Bounty, and Dura through the prism of the Korean American Arts Festival, a multi-media community event that was convened in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco in 1994. As part of the festival, Myung Mi Kim performed a public reading at the Luggage Store gallery, which featured a multi-artist visual arts show, and also published an excerpt from Dura in writing away here: an anthology of korean/american writings. In returning to this specific time-place of collective cultural enunciation, this talk attempts to historicize the shifting exigencies of “Korean American” identification and the irreducible poetics that baffle and defy its enclosure.

“Transl(i)tive Attentions”

Myung Mi Kim will read her poetry and reflect on the translingual imaginary.

Part II: Art and Identity

“Introducing In-Between Places: Korean American Artists in the Bay Area”

Linday Inson Choy will introduce the special exhibit In-Between Places: Korean American Artists in the Bay Area on view at the Mills College Art Museum through December 10, 2017. As the title indicates, the exhibition regards Korean American artists whose work in the exhibition addresses their own experiences as artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. The theme of the exhibition investigates Korean American identity and the individual interpretations expressed in their art. Common experiences the artists of this exhibition highlight include struggles with alienation and assimilation, languages barriers and racism, and existing within in-between places, not grounded in this or that place. This exhibition will show how Korean American artists identify themselves simultaneously as Koreans/Americans/Californians and that their work embraces a wide range of expression, including California landscapes and environments, cultural symbolism, and politically charged works that address current issues.

“What Identity?”

Jung Ran Bae will speak about her personal experiences of identity.

“A Ghost Story”

Minji Sohn will provide background into the systematic nature of her art-making through two different narratives of her personal life. The first is the fear of ghosts; her performances are based on repetition and endurance, and are formed from habits lasting from her childhood—checking for imaginary dangers in corners of the room, behind the curtains, and under the bed, and counting numbers as a ritual to chase the ghosts away. Alternatively, Sohn’s experience of growing up as a foreign student and a racial minority is presented as another force influencing the production of her artistic work and its obsessive quality. Through the particular case of studying abroad, she investigates the ways that the transnational power relationship between two countries may produce psychosocial effects on an individual. Drawing parallels between these two aspects, the ghost stands as a metaphor for social oppression and surveillance, and the larger sociopolitical structures that the individual may feel powerless over, while simultaneously standing for another reality in itself. Cho’s art creates aestheticized spaces playfully performed within the gray areas in-between two continents, real and imagined oppressions, cultural and gender identities, and right and wrong. Her endurance and labor are presented as formed of compliance and the refusal of dominant social structures at the same time.

BIOS

Laura C. Nelson is Chair of the Center for Korean Studies, and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Stanford, and holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley with a focus on housing and community economic development. Her current research focuses on breast cancer as a medical, cultural, personal, environmental, political, and transnational phenomenon, and the lives and social-presentation strategies of older women without children, both in South Korea. She is the author of Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (Columbia University Press, 2000), which examine how institutions shaped consumer culture in pursuit of national goals in South Korea during the period of 1960 to 1997.

Rosemarie Nahm immigrated to the United States in 1972 and has been researching and writing about early Korean immigration history since 2011. She is an attorney and a board member of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF), a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and raise awareness about Angel Island immigration history as well as all Pacific Coast immigration. She is passionate about the need to record and preserve immigration history for her American-born children and generations after them. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley Law School.

Laura Kang is Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She is the author of Traffic in Asian Women (2018) and Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002). She is the editor of writing away here: an anthology of korean/american writings (1994) and echoes upon echoes: new korean/american writings (2003) co-edited with Elaine H. Kim.

Myung Mi Kim is a Korean American poet noted for her postmodern writings. Her books include Penury, Commons, DURA, and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award. She has received fellowships and honors from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative North American Poetry, and the Fund for Poetry. She holds the James H. McNulty Chair of English and serves as Director of the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo.

Elaine H. Kim is Professor of the Graduate School and former Head of the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She is widely published in her field. Some of her books include Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (co-editor with Chungmoon Choi); Making More Waves: New Writings by Asian American Women (co-editor with Lilia V. Villanueva and Asian Women United of California); and East to America: Korean-American Life Stories (co-editor with Eui-Young Yu). She has also received numerous awards and is cofounder of the Asian Women United of California, the Oakland Korean Community Center, and the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

Linda Inson Choy is an independent curator specializing in contemporary Korean art and culture. Her curatorial work includes The Offering Table: Women Activist Artists from Korea at Mills College Art Museum in 2008 along with a corresponding symposium entitled "Places at the Table" cosponsored with the UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies, and most recently, In-Between Places: Korean American Artists in the Bay Area at Mills College Art Museum in 2017 along with this corresponding symposium. She previously worked as a curatorial assistant from 1996 to 2004 at the Asian Art Museum’s Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture and the Korean Art Department, where she held a major role in organizing several major exhibitions culminating in The Age of Enlightenment: Art of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty in 2003. Choy was also the Curator in Residency at Incheon Art Platform in South Korea in spring 2011 and a research curator at Gyeonggi Creation Center in South Korea in fall 2011. She has presented papers and organized panels for numerous College Art Association conferences, with emphasis on Asian American women artists and their role in the context of greater art communities. She received her B.A. from Mills College and an M.A. from San Jose State University.

Jung Ran Bae was born in Seoul, South Korea. She has a background in creative writing and received an M.F.A. in ceramic sculpture from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. After college, she continued to work on installation and performance projects at the Headlands Center for the Arts, California. Bae works primarily in large clay sculptures that often extend to large scale installations incorporating various media. Bae has exhibited at the Triton Museum and the Newport Art Museum in California, and numerous other galleries.

Minji Sohn is a Korean artist currently living and working in Jeju, South Korea. She was born in 1990 in Yokohama, Japan and raised in South Korea and Canada. She received her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2015. The obsessive, repetitive nature of Sohn’s current performative work illustrates an attempt to control and the inherent failure existing within this attempt. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Again, and Again, and Again, Aggregate Space Gallery, Oakland; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… 100, 2291 Third Street, San Francisco; Green Pigment, Daejeon Eegong Gallery, Daejeon, South Korea; Present Tense 2015: Future Perfect, Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco; and Bang!, Bass & Reiner Gallery, San Francisco.

Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Professor of Asian Art History, holds the Carver Chair in East Asian Studies, and is Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Mills College. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her early work focused on classical Indian and Indonesian art for which she wrote on and curated exhibitions, including The Image of Women in Indian Art, and Myths and Symbols in Indonesian Art. Since the mid-90s, she has been working with women artists in India. In 1997, she curated Women Artists of India: A Celebration of Independence, an exhibition that was part of the Festival of India that celebrated India’s fifty years of independence from British colonial rule. In 2001, she curated the first retrospective of Zarina Hashmi’s art. She has written extensively on Indian women artists, and written and curated exhibitions of Asian American artists. In 2012, she was an NEH fellow at the Institute for Asian American Art at New York University. She is also a founding member of SACHI (Society for Art and Cultural Heritage of India) and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Society for Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum.

Stephanie Hanor has been the Assistant Dean and Director of the Mills College Art Museum since 2009. Prior to joining the Mills College Art Museum, she was the Senior Curator and Curatorial Department Head at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. During her 8 years at MCASD, she curated over 40 exhibitions and projects. At the Mills College Art Museum, she oversees an active contemporary exhibition program featuring new work by Binh Danh, Kathryn Spence, Frances Stark, Sarah Oppenheimer, and Karen Kilimnik. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas.

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  • Linda Inson Choy, independent curator
  • Stephanie Hanor, Mills College Art Museum
  • Hyonjeong Kim Han, Asian Art Museum
  • Stephanie K. Kim, UC Berkeley Center for Korean Studies
  • Jayna Swartzman-Brosky, Mills College Art Museum

Event Contact: cksassist@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9787



Stéphane Gros | Why Marry? Comparative Perspectives on Kinship, the House, and Marriage in the Eastern Himalayas
Lecture
Speaker: Stéphane Gros, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for 2017; Researcher, Centre for Himalayan Studies, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Moderator: Alexander von Rospatt, Professor for Buddhist and South Asian Studies, and director of the Group in Buddhist Studies
Date: October 24 | 5-7 p.m.
Location: Stephens Hall, 10 (ISAS Conf. Room)
Sponsor: Institute for South Asia Studies, Himalayan Studies Program, Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

Join us for a talk by Dr. Stéphane Gros, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for 2017, is a Researcher at the Centre for Himalayan Studies, CNRS-France, who works in the areas of Himalayan Studies, Social Anthropology, Ethnicity, Kinship and Gender, and Popular Religion.

Talk Abstract
ß What we think of family and marriage today is being rapidly redefined in ways far exceeding the terms of the anthropological debate around the marriage customs of the Nayar of Kerala in the 1950s. More recently, the so-called “visiting system” of the Na (Moso) of Southwest China came as a new challenge to conventional understandings of the universality of marriage and anthropological definitions of the family. This talk aims at discussing this “visiting system”—a kind of non-contractual sexual relationships associated with natolocal residence—by presenting the preliminary results of fieldwork research conducted in the Tibetan region of ‘Drapa (nDrapa) where a form of visiting partnership similar to that of the Na (Moso) is found.

Such a practice has often been described as a form of union based on a matrilineal rule of descent. I propose to shift the angle of analysis to foreground the importance of the household as a key social unit. I argue that the visiting system is not dependent on the respect of a matrilineal descent rule. The prime factor to be taken into consideration here is the importance of maintaining some continuity in the household. I will discuss matrifocality in relation to household-centric orientation and the importance of the “house”—and the applicability of the notion of “house-society”—and call for cross-regional comparisons.

Speaker Bio
Stéphane Gros is a researcher at the Centre for Himalayan Studies, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S., France). A social anthropologist by training (PhD. Paris-Nanterre University, 2005), he has published a monograph entitled La Part Manquante (Société d’ethnologie, 2012) about the Drung (Dulong), a long-deprived minority of swidden agriculturalists of Yunnan province (China). This book engages with a broad array of theoretical and political debates and explores many themes that fall within the purview of a classical ethnographic enterprise: kinship, religion, mythology, exchange, domestic organization, and gender relations—particularly the seldom researched practice of facial tattooing among Drung women.

He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on issues of interethnic relations and ethnic classification, representations of ethnic minorities, poverty and categorization, as well as rituals and cosmology. He has edited or co-edited four collections of relevance to ethnographic theory, Chinese studies, and area studies. He has served as Managing Editor (2011-2014) for the launch of the open-access anthropology journal Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

For the last four years, he was the Principal Investigator for a European-Research-Council-funded project (Starting Grant No. 283870, 2012-2016) titled Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Kham Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. In the framework of this project, the multidisciplinary team investigated topics such as trade, territoriality, cultural politics among others.

More recently, Stéphane Gros’ personal research investigates aspects of kinship and social organization, conversion to Christianity, as well as heritage politics and environmental discourses in this region.

Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies

Event Contact: isas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3608



The Afterlife of Migration: Balikbayans and the Return Economy in Contemporary Manila
Lecture
Speaker: Eric Pido, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University
Date: October 25 | 4-5:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies

This presentation examines the role of balikbayans, specifically those Filipinos returning to their homeland after living in the U.S. for several decades, in the economic development of the Philippines. While studies on the effects of global migration tend to focus on remittances or the impacts of out-migration on local economies, the model of return economies provides an illuminating case to understand how emerging trends of return migration are propelling transformations within various economies throughout the Global South. Built upon previous strategies of economic development, these return economies convey the material afterlife of migration embodied, in this case, by balikbayans resettling into their homelands and the manner in which they have come to play a central role in the development of their homeland’s economy.

Eric Pido received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2011.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu



Women's Rights in Myanmar
Lecture
Speaker: Ma Khin Lay, Founder and Director, Triangle Women's Support Group (Yangon)
Moderator: Penny Edwards, Associate Professor of South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
Date: October 26 | 1-2 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Asian Region Policy Group, Goldman School of Public Policy

Ma Khin Lay leads a women’s organization in Myanmar that has worked for women's empowerment at the grassroots level across the country. Programs have included activities on reproductive health, parenting and child psychology, human trafficking, human rights, and sexual and gender-based violence. Triangle also offers vocational training to young women including training on digital literacy, English, leadership and organizational management. Previously, Lay was the leader of Kamaryut Women’s Wing of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ma Khin Lay is currently in the U.S. as a 2017 Eisenhower Fellow.

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



40 Years of Documenting Asian Art: from Alchi to Angkor
Lecture
Speaker: Jaroslav Poncar, Emeritus Professor of Photography, University of Cologne
Date: October 26 | 5-6:30 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Buddhist Studies

Professor Emeritus of Technical University Cologne, Dr. Jaroslav Poncar looks back upon nearly four decades of photographically documenting Buddhist monuments in the Himalayan region—notably Alchi in Ladakh, Tabo in Spiti, and Mustang in Nepal—and at Angkor Wat and elsewhere in Southern Asia. In this talk Dr. Poncar will reflect on his rich oeuvre, discuss the challenges of photographing particular sites and the technical solutions adopted, and also ponders on the ways in which digital photography has impacted this work. a

Born in Prague in 1945, Jaroslav Poncar has lived in Cologne since 1973, where he served as professor in the Department of Imaging Sciences, Technical University, Cologne. Besides Africa and Arabia, his photographic projects have taken him to Southern and Central Asia, especially to the Western Himalayas, Tibet, India, Burma, Cambodia and Afghanistan. Between 1996 and 2005 he was in charge of the photographic documentation of Angkor Wat and served as co-director of the German Apsara Conservation Project at Angkor Wat. After his retirement in July 2010 he was contracted for a year to photographically document the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, and since 2015 he has been part of a project documenting the manuscripts and material culture of monasteries in the Tibetan kingdom of Mustang in Nepal.

Event Contact: buddhiststudies@berkeley.edu, 510-643-5104



Heritage and Community in Asia and Beyond
Conference
Date: October 27 | 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

This two-day conference focuses on the relationship between heritage and community in the following ways: the impact of top-down heritage projects on the residents who live and work in and around the project sites; the sociopolitical process of creating heritage projects that involves different actors with competing values and unbalanced power positions; and using heritage project as a strategy of community building and social mobilization.

Event Contact: ccs-vs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6322



Shi-yee Liu and Tamara Bentley on Chen Hongshou
Lecture
Speakers: Shi-Yee Liu, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Tamara Bentley, Colorado College
Date: October 28 | 1 p.m.
Location: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Auditorium
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Scholars Shi-Yee Liu and Tamara Bentley, both contributors to the Chen Hongshou exhibition catalog, illuminate different periods in the artist's career. Liu, assistant research curator of Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considers the role of popular culture in the artist’s early work, demonstrating possible inspiration from woodblock illustrations of novels and plays, popular and functional paintings and prints, and cult and theatrical imagery. Bentley, associate professor of Asian art history at Colorado College, explores enigma and intertextuality in Chen’s late work.

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6492



The Future of Fukushima: A New Generation Rises to the Challenge
Colloquium
Date: October 30 | 6-8 p.m.
Location: 2150 Allston Way
Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Berkeley Lab’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area

How did high school students – using innovative sensors – promote the recovery from an environmental disaster?

Fukushima Prefecture has achieved a remarkable recovery after the nuclear accident in 2011. Thanks to extensive clean-up, more than 97% of the region is at natural background levels; the area as large as the State of Connecticut. However, negative perception still persists across Japan and the world, causing economic and psychological damages in the region. Rising up to this challenge, a group of local high-school students teamed up with Professor Ryugo Hayano at the University of Tokyo in 2015 to collect their own radiation data using a new portable sensor, called D Shuttle. Their results – featured on Forbes – have shown that the radiation level in Fukushima is not at all higher than other places in the world. These students are pioneering an approach to tackle environmental disasters; new technologies and democratizing data can empower communities and support socioeconomic recovery.

This event features presentations by Professor Ryugo Hayano and three high-school students from Fukushima. They will talk about their motivation and experiences in this project as well as their daily life in Fukushima. This event will also include the talks by two American journalism students who participated in a two-week’s program in 2015 organized by the Dilena Takeyama Center at San Francisco State University and Fukushima University, in which they documented the daily life in Fukushima, including those living at temporary housings. After the talks, some Japanese food and drinks will be served in the gallery. Please enjoy Fukushima’s folk song by Koko Komine and some beautiful photos by Jun Takai with traditional meal.

Agenda

6:00 pm Doors Open

6:30 pm Opening Remarks
Dr. Haruko Wainwright, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

6:40 pm The Future of Fukushima: A New Generation Rises to the Challenge
Professor Ryugo Hayano, University of Tokyo
Shunya Okino, Fukushima High School
Honoka Ara, Fukushima High School
Ryo Endo, Futaba Mirai High School

7:30 pm Fukushima: We are Here
Natalie Yemenidijan, San Francisco State University
Guadalupe Gonzalez, San Francisco State University

7:50 pm Environmental Remediation in Fukushima: From Now to the Future
Daisuke Uesako, Ministry of Environment, Japan

8:00 pm Closing Remarks
Dr. Haruko Wainwright, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Biographies

Professor Ryugo HAYANO is currently the professor of experimental nuclear physics at the University of Tokyo. He has been the spokesperson of an “antimatter” research team called “ASACUSA”, at CERN’s antiproton decelerator facility, since 1997. In 2008, he received the Nishina Memorial Prize, the most prestigious physics prize in Japan, for his study. He earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1979. Since March 2011, his tweets related to the Fukushima Daiichi accident attracted some 150,000 followers; his activities in Fukushima include systematic measurement of school lunch for radiocaesium, study of internal exposures using whole body counters, development of a whole-body counter for small children (BABYSCAN), and comparison of external radiation doses of high school students living in Fukushima, outside of Fukushima, France, Poland and Belarus.

Shunya OKINO (Fukushima High School) Shunya is a second-year high-school student in Fukushima High School, Fukushima City, Japan. He leads the Earth Science Component of Super Science Club in his school, investigating various aspects of earth and environmental science, including the geological origin of local mountains and radiation measurements in the local community. Currently, he has been studying the issues related to decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. He played an active role in the Radiation Protection Workshop in Paris in March, 2017, presenting the results from his research on decommissioning.

Honoka ARA (Fukushima High School) Honoka is a second-year high-school student in Fukushima High School, Fukushima City, Japan. In her extra-curriculum activity, she has been investigating food safety issues in the Fukushima prefecture such as the radiation measurements in rice and vegetables grown in the region as well as fish caught in the Pacific. Her mission is to inform people in Japan and around the world about the true situation in the Fukushima prefecture, including the safety of food and environments. She has presented her results in the Radiation Protection Workshop in Paris in March, 2017.

Ryo ENDO (Fukushima High School) Ryo is a second-year high-school student in Futaba Mirai High School, Iwaki City, Japan. He was born and raised in Okuma village which is less than 5 km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. He has been evacuated for the past six years. He is determined to contribute to the recovery from this accident and redevelopment of the region. He has been actively engaged to develop courses in elementary and middle schools for exploring the better approaches for the recovery and redevelopment from the next-generation perspective. Recently, he has been studying the decommissioning of a damaged nuclear power plant.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



2017 CJS-JSPS International Symposium: Drive for the Nobel Prize
Symposium
Speakers: Yuan T. Lee, Academia Sinica
Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley
Takaaki Kajita, University of Tokyo
Date: October 31 - November 1 | 9:45 a.m.-5 p.m.
Location: International House, Chevron Auditorium
Sponsors: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, World Premier International Research Center Initiative, Bay Area Science Festival

Join us for this exciting two-day symposium featuring public talks by Nobel Laureates Yuan T. Lee (Chemistry, 1986), Saul Perlmutter (Physics, 2011), and Takaaki Kajita (Physics, 2015), as well as several exciting panels discussing the Nobel Prize's impact on institutions, journalism, and research. In addition to his talk, we will be honoring Professor Kajita with the 2017-2018 Berkeley Japan Prize.

Co-sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Endorsed by the Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco.

For more information, please go to our website: https://cjs090.wixsite.com/nobel

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Air/Qi Connections: Notes from the History of Science and Medicine
Colloquium
Speaker: Ruth Rogaski, History, Vanderbilt University
Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley
Date: November 3 | 4-6 p.m.
Location: Faculty Club, Heyns Room
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

What is the relationship between the air we breathe (in Chinese, kongqi) and the qi of Chinese medicine? This talk explores the history of this intersection in order to better understand the cultural underpinnings of the connection between health and environment in China today. Typically translated into English as “vital energy,” qi has long been at the core of traditional Chinese conceptions of nature, the cosmos, and the human body. In classical medical texts, qi was intimately linked to air, but qi could not be reduced to an equivalence to atmosphere alone. Ever since the European Jesuits tried to tutor Chinese scholars about the Four Elements, Westerners had attempted to persuade Chinese to embrace "air" and leave qi behind. By the late nineteenth century, translated texts about chemistry, physiology, and medicine began with treatises on the existence of air and gas. Impacted by these texts, physicians of Chinese medicine selectively adopted certain aspects of Western science into their understanding of qi, yet maintained an understanding of qi as something that went beyond air. The talk concludes with some musings about the relationship between qi and air today, in an era when enthusiasm for the health benefits of qigong coexists with the presence of an increasingly unbreathable atmosphere.

Event Contact: Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



The Mongols and the Changing Patterns of Indian Ocean Connections
Lecture
Speaker: Tansen Sen, NYU Shanghai
Date: November 3 | 5-7 p.m.
Location: Alumni House
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Mongolia Initiative, Institute for South Asia Studies

In the thirteenth century, the expansion of Mongol forces under Genghis Khan and his descendants resulted in the formation of a vast Eurasian empire stretching from the Korean peninsula to central Europe. Despite the eventual fragmentation of this Mongol empire into four contending khanates, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented interactions between polities and societies across the Eurasian realm. Past studies highlighting these exchanges have primarily focused on the overland connections. This paper will demonstrate that the formation of the Mongol empire also had a significant impact on the Indian Ocean world. It will argue that new patterns of maritime exchanges emerged as a consequence of the connections between the Yuan empire in China, South Asia, and the Ilkhanate in Iran. These new patterns are discernible with regard to the use of naval power, diplomacy, commercial linkages, and cultural diffusion. The Ming voyages led by the eunuch admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century and even the initial Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean, the paper will contend, followed some of the key patterns of maritime exchanges that developed during the Mongol period.

Tansen Sen is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Professor, NYU. He received his MA from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu



Food, Agriculture and Human Impacts on the Environment: Japan, Asia and Beyond
Conference
Date: November 6 | 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Location: 180 Doe Library
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Archaeological Research Facility, Berkeley Food Institute, Department of Anthropology, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

The goal of this workshop is to link local and regional case studies of food, agriculture, and human-environmental interaction with the broader discussion of global environmental issues and long-term sustainability. Special emphasis is on case studies from Japan, East Asia and the North Pacific Rim. Topics that will be discussed in this workshop include issues on food production, circulation and consumption, changes through time in human environmental interaction in relation to societal and economic developments, and water-food- energy nexus.
This event is organized in collaboration with the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, with which UC Berkeley has an MOU.

For more details, please go to our website.

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415



Slow Accretion: Producing Harm in Ulaanbaatar’s Air Pollution Crisis
November 7, 2017
Lecture

Speaker:
Chisato Fukuda, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moderator:
Franck Billé, Program Director, Silk Road Center, UC Berkeley

What counts as evidence of harm for those living in the midst of air pollution? Over the past two decades, air pollution has become a seasonal disaster in Ulaanbaatar, prompting widespread concerns about its harms to human bodies and the environment. These concerns have promoted various investments to document air pollution’s effects, from monitoring technologies, to interactive pollution maps, to epidemiological research. Despite these interventions, what counts as evidence of harm remains disputed. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic field research in Ulaanbaatar, I examine how various techniques of evidence-making – maps that spatialize harm, marketing strategies that mitigate harm, sensory practices that inflict social harm, bodily attunements that detect long-term harm, and “body fact” building in public health activism – coalesce and compete to identify and construct particular notions of harm. I show how evidence-making of harm must be examined through histories of inequality, hierarchies of knowledge production, and politics of place.

Sponsors:
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
Public Health, School of

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2809



Sittwe
November 8, 2017
Film - Documentary

Panelists:
Jeanne Hallacy, filmmaker; U Myo Win, Smile Education and Development Foundation (Yangon)
Kenneth Wong, Lecturer, South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

Moderators:
Andrea Lampros, Communications Director, Human Rights Center
Eric Stover, Faculty Director, Human Rights Center

This event will feature the screening of a short documentary about two teenagers affected by conflict in Burma’s Rakhine state. Phyu Phyu Than, a Rohingya Muslim girl, and Aung San Myint, a Buddhist, were both displaced by communal violence in 2012. Interviews filmed over two years explore their ideas about each other’s communities, their aspirations for education and the possibility of reconciliation.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker Jeanne Hallacy, U Myo Win of the Smile Education and Development Foundation (Yangon) and Kenneth Wong from the Department of South & Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley in conversation with Eric Stover and Andrea Lampros from UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.

Smile Education and Development Foundation (SEDF) was founded in 2007 in response to rising intolerance and discrimination in Burma. SEDF began working with religious leaders and schoolteachers to promote religious tolerance and civic consciousness, and more participatory learning approaches in educational institutions. SEDF expanded its work to train youth, women and human rights defenders on peace building across Burma.

U Myo Win was born to a Muslim family in a suburb of Yangon. In 2006 he initiated the inter-faith program of Shalom foundation, which continues its work today. In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, Smile delivered emergency healthcare services in affected areas of Yangon division and the Delta region. Working with Doctors Worldwide, Smile operated mobile clinics in vulnerable rural communities when the military government barred access to humanitarian aid.

U Myo Win received a degree in Islamic theology and in 2004 completed a graduate degree in psychology from the University of East Yangon. In 2008, he received the Chevening Fellowship to pursue studies in conflict resolution at the University of York.

Jeanne Hallacy has lived in Thailand for decades, producing stories about human rights and social justice issues in Southeast Asia. She served as the Director of Programs at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand from 1997-2010. She is the director of the award-winning InSIGHT OUT! Photo Storytelling project that trains children in conflict areas to create media.

Aside from Sittwe, her other films include This Kind of Love (2015), a profile of Burmese human rights activist Aung Myo Min; Into the Current: Burma’s Political Prisoners (2012); Mercy (2002) about a Thai girl who lost her family to AIDS; and Burma Diary (1997), a journal of a refugee family displaced by war.

Kenneth Wong is the Burmese language lecturer in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. Born in Yangon, he has lived in the Bay Area since 1989. He is a writer and poet, and has also translated many works of modern Burmese poetry into English. His own work and his translations can be accessed via his online blog, kennethwongsf.blogspot.com.

Sponsors:
Center for Southeast Asia Studies
Human Rights Center

Event Contact: cseas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3609



Market Entanglements: Fortune and Risk in a Chinese Bubble
November 9, 2017
Colloquium

Speaker:
Bryna Goodman, History, University of Oregon, Eugene

Discussant:
Wen-hsin Yeh, History, UC Berkeley

In 1921-2 Chinese entrepreneurs established more than one hundred and fifty stock exchanges in Shanghai and several other cities, more exchanges than existed in the rest of the world at that time. Nearly all of these new, Western-styled financial institutions collapsed within a year. What were people thinking? Using a variety of sources—financial texts, newspaper advertisement, satirical essays, fiction, graphic art, and popular pedagogies of the market—this talk examines visions of fortune and risk in the market bubble. The copious representations of stock market practices in print culture suggest how developing understandings of finance were intertwined with dynamic understandings of both Chinese gambling and Chinese governance under global capitalism.

Sponsors:
Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



International Sanctions and the Sino-North Korean Border Economy
November 9, 2017
Colloquium

Speaker:
Kevin Gray, University of Sussex

Come join us as Kevin Gray talks about the unintended consequences of economic sanctions against North Korea on the Sino-North Korean border economy.

Kevin Gray is a Reader in International Relations at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. He has researched widely on the political economy of both North and South Korea. His current project focuses on marketization and economic development in North Korea. His research has been published in in Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Pacific Review, North Korean Review, Globalizations, New Political Economy, Third World Quarterly and New Left Review. He is also the author of Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation (Routledge, 2008), Labour and Development in East Asia: Social Forces and Passive Revolution (Routledge, 2015). He has co-edited volumes on (with Barry Gills) People Power in an era of global crisis: rebellion, resistance and liberation (2012); (with Craig Murphy) Rising Powers and the Future of Global Governance (2013); (with Barry Gills) Rising Powers and South-South Cooperation (2017).

Sponsors:
Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Event Contact: anjinsoo@berkeley.edu



The 19th Party Congress and the Future of the Chinese Communist Party
November 13, 2017
Conference

The Communist Party of China held its 19th Party Congress in October 2017. Aside from the sweeping personnel turnover, this Congress introduced ideological and organizational innovations that will guide the leadership and the nation for the next five years and beyond. China's direction is of global import, as China has in surprisingly short order become a global superpower, challenging the balance of power and in some ways challenging the United States for leadership in what it calls the New Era. This international conference, cosponsored by People's University in Beijing, Shandong University in Jinan, and the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, is the first to analyze the content and implications of this Congress.

Document (PDF): Download agenda here

Sponsors:
Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)
People's University (Beijing, China)
Shandong University (Jinan, China)
Institute of East Asian Studies

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



China’s Hong Kong SAR at 20: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
November 14, 2017
Conference

Two decades after its transformation from a British colony to become China’s Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong is an arena of tensions punctuated by local-Mainland discord and mutual distrust. 4 political leaders and 6 academics from Hong Kong pinpoint the dynamics shaping their city of 7.2 million amid a contest between the local liberal values/democratic aspirations and the authoritarian orthodoxy of its party-state sovereign. Anchored in multidisciplinary approaches with divergent ideo-political perspectives, this half-day seminar engages the Berkeley community with Hong Kong front-liners.

Agenda

1:00 pm Kevin O’Brien, IEAS Director: Welcoming Remarks

1:15 – 2:30 pm Panel 1

“HKSAR Political Dynamics” Chair: Thomas Gold, Sociology, UC Berkeley

“Ideologies and Factionalism in Beijing-HK Relations: Nationalism vs Localism” (by Sonny S. H. LO— SPACE-HKU Deputy Director, PhD pol sci, Toronto; President, HK Political Science Association)

“Party Under-Development in Arrested Democratization: 20 years after 1997 in Hong Kong” (Ngok MA—Associate Professor Gov’t Dept, CUHK; PhD pol sci, UCLA)

“Stages of the Democratic Movement in Hong Kong” (Benny Y. T. TAI, Associate Professor, HKU law faculty; LLM Harvard)

2:30 – 3:45 pm Panel 2

“HKSAR Socio-Economic Dimensions” Chair: Lynn T. White, III, Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University

“HKSAR’s Role in PRC Financial Globalization” (Vic Y. W. LI—Assistant Professor, EdUHK; PhD in pol econ, Wilfred Laurier, Canada).

“Constitutive Censorship: A New Face of Newsroom Control in Hong Kong” (Allan K. L. AU, Professorial Consultant, communication & journalism school, CUHK; PhD in communication, CUHK; award-winning documentary films director/producer; Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford, 2005-06).

“State-Society interface--Policing HKSAR Popular Protests, 1997-2017” (Lawrence K. K. HO, Assistant Professor, SoSci Dept, EdUHK; PhD in criminology, HKU).

4:10 – 6:00 pm Keynote speeches

“HKSAR Socio-Economic Dimensions” Chair: Lynn T. White, III, Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University

Chair: Kevin O’Brien, IEAS Director; Political Science, UC Berkeley

Martin LEE (HK Democratic Party founding chair, HK Basic Law drafter, ex-legislator, HK Bar Association ex-president).

Cheong CHING (veteran journalist; ex-deputy chief editor, Wen Wai Po (HK) ; chief China Correspondent, Singapore Straits Times; co-founder, Independent Commentators Association).

Jasper TSANG (Democratic & Progressive Alliance for a Better HK founding chair, HKSAR legislature ex-president).

WANG Zhenmin (PRC Central Government Liaison Office-HK Legal Dept Director; Tsing Hua Law School ex-Dean; PRC NPC HK Basic Law Committee member; 2007 Stanford HK Symposium speaker)

Sponsors:
Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)
Institute of East Asian Studies

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321



New Nationalism and Universities
Global Perspectives on Politics and Policy and the Future of Higher Education: An International Conference to Celebrate the Center for Studies in Higher Education’s 60th Anniversary
November 16–17, 2017
Conference

To celebrate the Center for Studies in Higher Education's (CSHE) 60th Anniversary, the Center is hosting a two-day international conference on 16 and 17 November 2017 at the iconic UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California.

The conference will gather CSHE alumni and affiliated researchers, along with leading scholars and practitioners from throughout the world, focused on the theme 'Nationalism and Universities'.

Participants will explore the influence of nationalism, old and new versions, on major national universities in different regions of the globe.

Sponsors:
Center for Studies in Higher Education
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
Institute of Governmental Studies
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)
University World News
Carnegie Corporation of New York

Event Contact: loren.delacruz@berkeley.edu, 510-643-9212



Lineage of Japanese Prose Fiction
November 17, 2017
Panel Discussion

Speakers:
Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College
Reiko Abe Auestad University of Oslo
Keith Vincent, Boston University
Alan Tansman, UC Berkeley

A roundtable discussion of the lineage of Japanese prose fiction. Many critics and readers have long agreed that the peaks in this tradition are the writings of Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century and of Natsume Sôseki in the early twentieth century. But these are writings rarely thought of together. Do they allow us to think of a long tradition of Japanese prose fiction? Is the modern writer writing in the lineage of his predecessor?

Please join four scholars who have written and thought about these two authors: Dennis Washburn, translator of The Tale of Genji, Reiko Abe Auestad, author of Rereading Sôseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels, Keith Vincent, author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction, and Alan Tansman, author of The Rise and fall and Rise of Japanese narrative: Murasaki, Sôseki, Nakagami.

Each participant will speak briefly and then open the conversation to the audience.

Sponsor: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Event Contact: cjs-events@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3415/p>



They Came From Everywhere: The People of the Amur
November 20, 2017
Colloquium

Speaker:
Victor Zatsepine, History, University of Connecticut

Moderator:
Franck Bille, Program Director, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

This talk, based on Victor Zatsepine’s recently published book, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850-1930 (UBC Press, 2017), illuminates the varied social, economic and political contacts that enlivened the borders of the two empires (Qing China and Romanov Russia) and their successor states. The author argues that the Amur ‘frontier’ region functioned as a meeting place between empires, shaped by migration, settlement and trade networks, where different cultures (Chinese, Indigenous, Korean, Manchu, Mongol, Russian) learned and borrowed from each other. This talk discusses the unique evolution of local society and how the physical environment affected people living there, their habits, occupations and economic activities. Beyond the Amur adds a modern socio-economic dimension to predominantly ideological histories of Sino-Russian relations through analysis of the roles of migration, railways, urban development, and wars in shaping the frontier region.

Dr. Victor Zatsepine is an assistant professor in the history department of the University of Connecticut. He holds degrees from Beijing Language and Culture University, Harvard and the University of British Columbia, and specializes in China’s frontier and international history. Prior to joining the UConn, he was a research assistant professor at the Hong Kong University. Among his recent publications is a volume, co-edited with Laura Victoir, Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940 (HKU Press, 2013).

Sponsors:
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)
Center for Korean Studies (CKS)
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6492



State-Building And Political Development In US Foreign Policy
November 30, 2017
Lecture

Speaker: Dr. Francis Fukuyama, Freeman Spogli Institute

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is professor (by courtesy) of political science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, was published in September 2014. Other books include America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. He previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University and at George Mason University's School of Public Policy. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Global Development. He holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Democracy. He is also a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs.

Sponsors:
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
Institute of International Studies

Event Contact: iis@berkeley.edu, 510-642-2474



Golden Mountain, Iron Heap: A Poetic Ethnography of Extraction in Eastern Mongolia
December 5, 2017
Lecture

Speaker:
Jessica Madison, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz

This paper explores Mongolia’s mineral extraction boom through an examination of local concepts of landscape. In order to engage seriously with local place-making practices, it analyzes the steppe topologically, looking at attributes of landscape that transcend material upheaval. In eastern Mongolia, poetry is a primary means of mediating human interaction with space, and thus poetic literacy is necessary for producing and understanding knowledge that turns space into landscape. The paper focuses on a central puzzle: how does what otherwise appears to be a closed and harmonious magical ecology accommodate a zinc mine? I ask: how can a tradition that sacralizes the unbroken earth also name mines after mountains? Considering both mountain and mine as ovoo, nodes that function as both “energy centers” and “sacrifice zones” within the landscape, the paper interfaces with local theories that illuminate poetry to be a creator of worlds, and highlights the ambivalence, ambiguity, and poetic irony of mineral extraction in Mongolia.

Sponsors:
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6492



Trans-Regionalism and Economic Co-Dependency across the South China Sea
December 6, 2017
Lecture

Speaker:
Derek Thiam Soon Heng, Northern Arizona University

Throughout history, the South China Sea has been a maritime zone that saw primary economies of its littoral zones exercise influence over smaller, outlying economies by binding the latter into co-dependent relationships with the former. This may be witnessed in such areas as the currency systems adopted by the smaller economies, alignment of foreign and trade policies with those of the larger economies, and in the ways in which the trade of products from one economy to another was developed from being uni-directional and non-crucial, to being one where the economies became mutually dependent. This trans-regional economic phenomenon may be witnessed between China and the Malay Region during the tenth to fourteenth centuries. This paper seeks to explore the multi-facetted nature of the economic interaction between these two regional economies, and how a vertically integrated economic zone developed across the South China Sea over the course of the early second millennium AD between these two economic regions.

Derek Heng is Professor and Chair of History at Northern Arizona University. He specializes in the pre-modern trans-regional history of Maritime Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, utilising textual and archaeological data to study the interactions between Southeast Asia and China, and their impact on the state formation process in coastal Southeast Asia.

Sponsors
Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu



An Epic Transformation: The Transition of the Oirat Oral Epic Jangar from ‘Culture’ to ‘Cultural Resource’
December 7, 2017
Lecture

Speaker:
Michael Long, Cambridge University

This fieldwork program attempted to follow the conceptual transformation of the Epic of Jangar—a traditional oral epic of the Oirat Mongols of XUAR—as a social phenomenon in Hoboksar Mongolian Autonomous County from the end of the Cultural Revolution to present, particularly from the mid-2000s onward. In this time, Jangar transformed from a curious cultural artifact of ‘folk culture’ with near ‘religious’ properties to a ‘cultural resource’ of ‘immaterial cultural heritage’ and ultimately incorporated into political development discourse. State-centered preservation policies transformed the epic from an important and complex ritualized social performance that required from hours to days to complete, to a standardized stage performance of mere minutes. State-centered approaches to cultural preservation, transmission, and diffusion through policies of ‘cultural development/construction’ have resulted in Jangar being simultaneously ‘protected’, but also appropriated by the state as a tool of nation building, economic development, and ideological education. While the literary content of Jangar remains intact, its social content, context, and complexity remain at risk, effectively having been replaced by the language and interests of the state. Moderated by Franck Bille, Program Director, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies.

Michael Long is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge Division of Social Anthropology with a Xinjiang (PRC) and Central Asian regional focus, and is a Confucius China Studies Plan Fellow (2016-2017). Michael received his LL.M. in International Politics from Fudan University (2013) concentrating in Sino-Central Asian relations, and MPhil in Anthropology from the Cambridge (2015) with a Xinjiang regional focus.

Sponsors:
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

Event Contact: ieas@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6492