India China Institute

India China Day 2022
2022-09-29 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011
Information Session for ICI Student Research Award & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

On Sep. 29 we will celebrate India China Day with our 2022 – 2023 Student Fellows in preparation for the 2022 – 2023 student research award for full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.

Join us in celebration and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of seven students who conducted research in 2022 – 2023 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.

2022 – 2023 Student Fellows

Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking
2022-09-09 00:00 - 2022-09-10 23:59 (America/New_York) | Centre on Asia and Globalization, 469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore, 259772, Singapore
The first in-person workshop that ICI hosts since Covid will takes place at CAG, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. The workshop addresses the changing relationships between expertise and policymaking in India, China, and beyond. In both countries, an increasing reliance on technical expertise for governance has been juxtaposed alongside new conceptions of who counts as a relevant expert. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the most vivid of many instances that illuminate the formation of novel epistemic communities and new institutional frameworks and infrastructures for knowledge production for policymaking. This in-person conference will bring SGEP fellows together to further strengthening fellowships among the fellows, and more importantly, review and critique the researches, in preparation for an academic publication of the fellows’ outstanding insightful research works.

SGEP Scholars

The Responses of India and China to the War in Ukraine
2022-04-14 09:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prompted immediate censure and sanctions against Russia by Western governments, has been met with a more ambivalent response by China and India. While both governments have issued statements deploring the harm to civilians and loss of life, for different reasons, they have abstained from United Nations’ resolutions condemning Russia and sought ways to avoid having to choose sides with either the US-led coalition or with Russia. To understand the responses to the conflict, please join a panel featuring foreign policy analysts from India and China.

The event is co-sponsored by Global Studies and Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School.

SPEAKERS

Shyam SaranFORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY OF INDIASenior FellowCENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Shyam Saran is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Governing Board at the Centre for Policy Research. He is a former Foreign Secretary of India and has served as Prime Minister’s Special Envoy For Nuclear Affairs and Climate Change. After leaving government service in 2010, he has headed the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a prestigious think tank focusing on economic issues (2011-2017), and was Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board under the National Security Council (2013-15). He is currently a Life Trustee of India International Centre, a Member of the Governing Board of the Institute of Chinese Studies, a Trustee at the World Wildlife Fund (India), and a Member of the Executive Council of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He has recently published a book, How India Sees the World.

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LU, YangResearch Fellow Institute of the Belt and Road InitiativeTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. LU, Yang is currently a research fellow at the Institute of the Belt and Road Initiative, Tsinghua University. She got her Bachelor’s in Xiamen University and her master’s and a doctorate in political science at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She was a post-doc at the Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University from 2015 to 2018, was a lecturer at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, awarded the China India Scholar Leaders Fellowship of India China Institute, The New School in New York, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, and fellowship of German Academy Exchange Service (DAAD). Her research area is international politics, focusing on India and South Asia, Germany, and Europe. In recent years she has been working on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and related regional cooperation programs. She has published numerous academic articles and opinion pieces, was invited by CGTN, CCTV-13, Phoenix TV commenting news related to South Asia and BRI.

Nimmi KurianProfessor CENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. Her research focuses in particular on the border regions between South Asia and Southeast Asia, India’s neighborhood policy, federalism and foreign policy, transboundary water politics, and comparative regionalism. Nimmi serves on the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and on the Fellowship Committee of the China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, Centre for China Studies, Ashoka University. She has held Fellowships from the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and the Charles Wallace India Trust. She holds an MA, MPhil, and Ph.D. in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.Nimmi has written and published widely on alternative spatial imaginations of South Asia, a theme that is explored in detail in her two books India China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre (Sage, 2014) and India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security (co-author) (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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DA, WeiDirector of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS)Professor, School of Social SciencesTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. Da’s research expertise covers China-US relations and US security & foreign policy. Da Wei has worked in China’s academic and policy community for more than 2 decades. Prior to his current positions, Dr. Da Wei was the assistant president of the University of International Relations (2017-2020), director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (2013-2017). He has written hundreds of policy papers for the Chinese government and published dozens of academic papers in journals in China, the US, and other countries.Da Wei earned his BA and MA from UIR and his Ph.D. from CICIR. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2006 to 2007, and a visiting senior associate at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University from 2008 to 2009.

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New Urbanisms of China and India: A Panel Discussion
2022-03-03 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
https://youtu.be/c5DLJsiBIvQWatch Here
A growing body of research on urban India and China shows that the concepts drawn from the histories of urbanization in the West are not adequate for understanding the new forms of power, networks, capital, and infrastructure that constitute the rapidly changing urban ecologies of China and India. The authors of two recent books will discuss the meanings and significance of the “urban” in two of the largest and most populous urban centers in the world: Greater Mumbai and the Municipality of Chongqing. Drawing from their research on transformational processes that span conventional boundaries of rural-urban, formal-informal, state-society, citizen-subject, the panel addresses questions of governance, migration, infrastructure, and public goods provision. Lisa Björkman is the editor of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021). Nick R. Smith is the author of The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Speakers

Lisa BjörkmanAssociate Professor, Urban and Public AffairsUniversity of Louisville
Senior Research AssociateMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and anthropologist interested in the material infrastructures and mediations of political life. She is the editor of Bombay Brokers, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her research in the Indian city of Mumbai has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention, and representation. Her current research builds on themes that emerged out of her doctoral research on everyday politics of infrastructural provisioning and access in Mumbai, to explicitly pursue anthropology of democracy, mediation, and mass-political representation in contemporary India.
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Nick R. SmithAssistant Professor, Architecture and Urban StudiesBarnard College of Columbia University
Nick R. Smith is a scholar of urban transformation and planning. His work explores the city as an institution and planning as a process of institution building. Combining the perspectives of new institutional economics, development anthropology, and urban sociology, Smith investigates how urbanization inscribes the “rules of the game” into the space of the city. Using a combination of ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research, he primarily pursues these processes through investigations of peri-urban villages—contexts of instability, liminality, and rapid change where new forms of urbanization are produced and contested.
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Foreign reporting on China from within and outside: An Indian perspective
2022-02-10 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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Since 2004, China has been offering undergraduate medical courses in English and has over the years emerged as a destination for foreign students, many of them from the subcontinent. Through a combination of word-of-mouth and an informal network of private educational consultants, thousands of aspiring doctors in India have opted for a Chinese medical degree. Over the years, fierce competition back home and limited medical seats have pushed more students to consider India’s neighbor as an option which has become an emerging player in a market that has traditionally been dominated by Russia and other east European countries.

Drawing on this specific story of the journey of hundreds of Indian students seeking a medical degree in China each year, the talk will look at the broader ways in which India and China interact across different fields. It was an Indian medical student returning from Wuhan to Kerala who was identified as Patient Zero when India began tracking Covid-cases in early 2020. The talk will follow the lives of students over the course of the pandemic as they make sense of online education, strict border control, and vaccine requirements. The talk will also touch upon information gathering and reporting in China, and the difficulties of looking in from outside. It will provide an understanding of the ecosystem in which Indian foreign reporting operates.

Speaker

Sowmiya AshokIndependent JournalistFormer Correspondent, The Hindu and The Indian Express

Sowmiya Ashok is an independent journalist based in Chennai. She has worked as a correspondent for two prominent Indian dailies The Hindu and The Indian Express.

In 2019, she was the Beijing correspondent for The Indian Express where she attempted to tell stories that go beyond the official bilateral frame. She has lived and worked in the US, China, and Australia and her work has been featured in several Indian and international publications. She writes about politics, culture, history, and the ways in which China and India interact away from geopolitics. Currently, she is learning Mandarin at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion: Book Launch and Author Panel
2021-12-02 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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Through illustrated case studies, twenty scholars and practitioners in this edited volume focus on the emerging public realm and the critical transformations of public space in the world’s most populous megaregion —the Greater Bay Area of southeastern China— projected to reach eighty million inhabitants by the year 2025.

Editor and Moderator

Timothy JachnaDean, College of Design, Architecture, Art and PlanningUNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

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Editor

Miodrag MitrašinovićProfessor of Urbanism and ArchitecturePARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Speakers

Juan DuDean, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and DesignUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

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Mary Ann O’DonnellIndependent Artist-EthnographerCofounderTHE HANDSHAKE-302 ART SPACE, Shenzhen, China

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Brian McGrathProfessor of Urban DesignPARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Paul ChuDepartment HeadCHU HAI COLLEGE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

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Research Award for The New School Students
2021-11-30 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Information Session & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

https://youtu.be/FWvHgG6UycoWatch Here
India China Institute at The New School is pleased to announce the student research award 2022 and is now welcoming applications from full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.
Join the information session and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of six students who conducted research in 2019 – 2020 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.
2019 – 2020 Student Fellows

The Ecological Question in Global Health: A Panel Discussion
2021-11-18 09:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the interactions between climate change and global health and revealed the dangers of ‘siloization’ of these issues into different conceptual frameworks and governance regimes. The panel will explore how the understanding of the environment and public health can be bridged, and how these challenges are being addressed especially in India and China.

Panel Speakers

Arunabha GhoshFounder-CEOThe Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, India

Dr Arunabha Ghosh is a public policy professional, adviser, author, columnist, and institution builder. As the founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, since 2010, he has led CEEW to the top ranks as one of Asia’s leading policy research institutions (eight years in a row); and among the world’s 20 best climate think-tanks in 2013, 2014 and 2016. He was actively involved in conceptualising and designing the International Solar Alliance and is a founding board member of the Clean Energy Access Network (CLEAN). With experience in 45 countries, he previously worked at Princeton, Oxford, UNDP (New York), and WTO (Geneva). In 2018, Dr Ghosh was nominated to the UN’s Committee for Development Policy. In 2020, the Government of India appointed him Co-Chair of the energy, environment and climate change track for India’s forthcoming Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. His 2019 TED Talk on air quality (Mission 80-80-80) has over 250,000 views. He is co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Clean Air and is a member of the international high-level panel of the Environment of Peace initiative. He also serves on the Board of Directors of ClimateWorks Foundation.

Dr Ghosh advises governments, industry, civil society and international organisations around the world. This has included India’s Prime Minister’s Office, several ministries and state governments. In 2015, he was invited by France, as a Personnalité d’Avenir, to advise on the COP21 climate negotiations; and also advised extensively on HFC negotiations. He is the co-author/editor of four books and his essay “Rethink India’s energy strategy” in Nature was selected as one of 2015’s ten most influential essays. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford and topped Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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Lyle FearnleyAssistant Professor of AnthropologySingapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUTD. Trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, Fearnley received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. His book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter, is published on Duke University Press. Currently, he is conducting two research projects.

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Yifei LiAssistant Professor of Environmental StudiesNew York University Shanghai

Yifei Li is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. Professor Li’s research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm.

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Mridula PaulPostgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and DevelopmentUniversity of Northumbria, UK

Mridula Mary Paul is a lawyer and environmental policy specialist. She is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and Development, University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK. She works on the political ecology of zoonoses, with a focus on One Health and India. Mridula is a member of IUCN’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, and is the editor of Courting the Environment, a newsletter that aims to convey environmental and ecological research to lawyers.

Anti-Asian Racism in the Era of Great Power Competition
2021-10-14 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
The current wave of anti-Asian racism did not arise from a deliberate attack on the United States. Its causes have been much more indirect in nature. As such, those who inflame anti-Asian sentiment can do so in the name of “being accurate” on the supposed Chinese manufacturing of the COVID-19 virus, as President Donald Trump suggested. The political rhetoric that exaggerates China’s threat, including the insistence of the term “China virus,” has driven anti-Asian violence and continues unabated despite changes in the Administration as well as greater coverage by the mainstream media. In this talk, Jessica J. Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft will explore how the current climate reduces space for U.S.-China cooperation on vital issues of mutual concern such as climate crisis and pandemics, as well as endangers Asian Americans by reinforcing centuries-old fears about their influence in society.

Speaker

Jessica J. LeeSenior Research Fellow, East Asia ProgramQuincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft

Jessica J. Lee is a Senior Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. Her research interests include U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific region, with an emphasis on alliances and North Korea.

Jessica’s analysis has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, USA Today, the Washington Times, The Nation, Arms Control Today, and Quincy Institute’s news platform Responsible Statecraft. She has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and co-authored the Quincy Institute report, “Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia.”

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Discussant

Ying ChenAssistant Professor, Department of EconomicsThe New School for Social Research

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work mainly explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on.

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Collision Course? The 1980s and the Transformation of Water Politics in Asia
2021-09-23 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/IBqzX7yL0H0

Until the 1980s, water featured relatively little in discussions of India’s relations with China. This talk delves into the history of that transformative decade of the 1980s, when first China and then India developed ambitious plans to dam the upper reaches of the Himalayan rivers, giving rise to new fears of future water conflicts. It seeks to situate those transformations in longer historical trajectories, going back to the mid-twentieth century. Our ways of envisaging the problem of shared water continue to be constrained by the models and choices made at the moment when China and India began their ascent to global economic power.

Speaker

Sunil Amrith

Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History

Yale University

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities.

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Discussant

Sophia kalantzakos

Global Distinguished Professor, Environmental Studies and Public Policy

New York University

Sophia Kalantzakos is Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University and a long-term affiliate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on resources and power; on new spatial imaginaries that reflect the changing ways that we think of global space and interdependence; and on the new emergent patterns and avenues of possibilist thinking as a way of re-imagining geopolitics for the 21st century.

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India, China, Africa: Emerging Transnational Politics in the Global South
2021-04-29 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/DHDUiKHFoJw

The panel will explore how Africa has become both frontier and partner for India and China in realms of trade, infrastructure, finance, technology, and most recently COVID diplomacy, creating new hierarchies and imperatives for transnational politics in the South.

Speakers:

Lina Benabdallah: Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University

Manjusha Nair: Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University

Xiaoyang Tang: Associate Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University and Deputy Director, Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy

Veda Vaidyanathan: Visiting Associate Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi

Histories of Global Health, COVID 19 and Asian Responses
2021-04-06 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/TUtBi1htsyA

The conversation with historian Jean-Paul Gaudillière will interrogate how global health has evolved as a field that is defined by philanthropy, public-private partnerships, and donor-driven technical assistance. The COVID 19 pandemic has revealed how this field, while guided by expertise from Geneva and Seattle, has not taken into account public health models adopted by many Asian countries. By comparing experiences of countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the discussion hopes to put a critical lens on what regimes of global health have privileged – and systematically ignored.

Speaker: Jean-Paul Gaudillière (in conversation with Manjari Mahajan).

Jean-Paul Gaudillière is a historian of science and medicine and research professor at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, and Director of the Center for Research on Medicine, Sciences, Health, Mental Health, and Society (CERMES3) in Paris.

Manjari Mahajan is an Associate Professor in the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs and Co-Director of the India China Institute at The New School.

(Watch Video) China Made: the techno-politics, materialities, and legacies of infrastructure development
2021-02-10 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
The China Made project seeks to build an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China Studies field. We approach infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions and approaches that help us explore more nuanced realms of techno-politics, everyday life, and spatio-temporal change in contemporary and historical China. In this panel, we focus on four key arenas of inquiry: the infrastructural state, infrastructure space, temporalities of infrastructure, and the everyday. Overall, we draw from two broad strands of inquiry in developing our approach. These include, first, recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or relatively stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge and develop, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies. Second, we draw on work that explores the often hidden (techno)political dimensions of infrastructures, through which certain intended and unintended outcomes emerge less from the realms of “policy” and “implementation” and more from the material dispositions and effects of infrastructural formations themselves. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China’s approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than what we have seen in the China Studies field thus far.

Speakers:

Timothy Oakes: Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Asian Studies University of Colorado Boulder.Alessandro Rippa: Associate Professor of Chinese Studies Tallinn University.Darren Byler: Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies University of Colorado Boulder.Dorothy Tang: Doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

CHINA Town Hall: Health & Climate
2020-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Join the India China Institute (ICI) for a two-part CHINA Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18, at 7:00-9:00pm EST.

Confronting the global challenges of climate change and communicable disease cannot be achieved by any single country, but must be met by constructive cooperation among nations. Although the United States and China will compete in many areas, it is imperative they join forces to face these universal problems that affect global stability and endanger the world’s most vulnerable people.

1. The first event is a panel from 7:00-8:00pm EST on Health and Climate in China, sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Margaret Hamburg (National Academy of Medicine), Ryan Hass (Brookings Institution), and Angel Hsu (Yale-National University of Singapore) will consider the roles of the United States and China in addressing these two major transnational issues. The conversation will be moderated by Merit Janow (Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs).

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2. Following the panel discussion, at 8:00-9:00pm EST ICI will host a talk by Jennifer Turner, Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, titled “Same Bed, Different Dreams: Is There a Path to Revive U.S.-China Climate and Environmental Relations?”

Discussant:

Jennifer Turner has served as Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum for nearly two decades. She is a widely-quoted expert on U.S.-China environmental cooperation as well as climate-related challenges and governance issues facing the world’s most populous country. As head of the Center’s Global Choke Point multimedia reporting initiative, Turner has worked to combine on-the-ground research with visual storytelling on water-energy-food nexus issues in China, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. She and her team are currently focusing heavily on U.S.-China climate actions, ocean plastic innovation in China and Indonesia, and Chinese distant fishing fleets. Her favorite new project is creating an educational video game on ocean plastics together with the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative. Check out her work at www.wilsoncenter.org and blogs at www.newsecuritybeat.org.

Moderator:

Mark Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School, where he also serves as Co-Director of the India China Institute. His research interests focus on labor and social policy in China, and more recently on political conflict over urbanization, migration, and citizenship in China and India. His latest book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010), The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (2018). He has authored op-ed pieces and essays for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat.

If you encounter technical difficulties during the ICI webinar, you may view the first panel via the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, then return to this webinar for the discussion with Dr. Turner, beginning at 8:00 p.m. If you have questions about registering or problems with your link, please contact ICI at indiachina@newschool.edu.

Explore additional events in the 2020 CHINA Town Hall series

(Watch Video) Exemplars in Global Health? Comparing Asia’s Many Responses to COVID 19
2020-11-12 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Watch again HERE:

Even as the COVID 19 pandemic continues to be marked by ebbs and flows, a handful of countries in Asia have had relatively sustained success in curtailing morbidity and mortality due to the virus. No single reason – such as regime type, surveillance technology, or experience with past epidemics – seems to explain these countries’ comparative achievements. This panel will bring together experts from different states including Japan, Vietnam, China, and South Korea. The juxtaposition of these national experiences will aim to illuminate the constellation of historical, political, infrastructural and other factors that undergird competent public health responses.

Yanzhong HuangSenior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations, and Professor and Director of Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations

Pan Suk KimProfessor of Global Public Administration, Yonsei University

Todd PollackCountry Director, The Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Kazuto SuzukiProfessor of International Politics, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

Manjari Mahajan (moderator)Associate Professor of International Affairs and Co-Director, India China Institute, New School University

Thursday, November 129:00-10:30am EST/7:30pm New Delhi/10:00pm Beijing

(Watch Video) India and China in the New Asian Geopolitics
2020-10-22 09:30 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | New York
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Former Ambassador and Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon will address how the increasingly tense relations between India and China are producing a “New Asian Geopolitics.” The talk will be moderated by Manjari Mahajan, Co-Director of India China Institute and Associate Professor at Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs, Schools of Public Engagement, The New School. Mary Watson, Executive Dean, Schools of Public Engagement will make introductory remarks. Ambassador Menon has had a distinguished career in government; he was Foreign Secretary of India from 2006-2009, and also served as the Indian Ambassador or High Commissioner to China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Israel. At present he is Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, India; Chairman, Advisory Board, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi; Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (formerly Brookings India); Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore; Member, Board of Trustees, International Crisis Group; and a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, New York. Ambassador Menon’s many publications include Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy (Brookings & Penguin Random House, 2016). He has been a Fisher Family Fellow at the Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2015 and a Richard Wilhelm Fellow at MIT in 2015. He was chosen one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine in 2010. The talk is sponsored by the India China Institute. We thank our co-sponsors, the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School, and the New School Global Studies Program. Thursday, October 22 9:30am – 10:30am US EDT/ 7:00pm – 8:00pm New Delhi/ 9:30pm – 10:30pm Beijing

Border Politics: A Panel Discussion
2020-09-22 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | New York
The lethal skirmishes between Indian and Chinese border patrols that took place in June in the Himalayan sector of their disputed border and continuing tensions have raised new questions about a possible “re-set” of relations between the two Asian giants and the prospects for regional stability. A panel of historians, diplomats, and political scientists will address these concerns through the long lens of history and more recent geopolitical trends.
-Shyam Saran: Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and former Foreign Secretary of India.

-Nimmi Kurian: ICI Fellow, Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and author, most recently, of India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security.

-Xiaoyu Pu: Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Nevada.

-Tansen Sen: Professor of History and Director of the Center for Global Asia, NYU SHANGHAI, and Global Network Professor, NYU. His most recent book is India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017).

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China
2020-04-01 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | New York
ICI Co-Director Mark Frazier’s Interview with Professor Arunabh Ghosh, author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020).

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Universities Under Attack
2020-02-26 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | 63 5th Ave
Speakers:Manu Bhagavan, Professor of History at Hunter College, The City University of New York. His interests include modern India, human rights, and sovereignty.Marcial Godoy, sociocultural anthropologist and Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).Kumru Toktamis, Associate Professor of Social Science & Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. She is an educator, transnational activist, and human rights researcher.Moderator: Mark Frazier, Professor, Politics Department, NSSR

This event is organized by India China Institute and Studly Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Fueling Revolution: Carbon Technocracy in the Early People's Republic of China
2019-11-14 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | New York
RSVP: Fueling Revolution

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, industry, and the environment. His research interests revolve around questions of how technological developments intersect with economic life and environmental change in the making and unmaking of industrial society. Geographically, he focuses on East Asia, which, in the modern era, witnessed monumental transformations across its vast expense and multiple environments as regimes that ranged from imperialist to socialist pursued industrial expansion through heavily technological means. His research sets out to map the contours of those transformations in the past that gave rise to outcomes with which the region still grapples in the present, from despoiled environments to divided societies. At the same time, his work situates East Asia within a global frame and seeks to show how attention to East Asian experiences may sharpen historical and contemporary understandings of technology and the environment in our modern world.

Seow is currently finishing his first book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, which explores how coal resources and mining technologies shaped Chinese and Japanese experiences with global industrial modernity. Centered on the Fushun colliery in Manchuria, which once boasted the largest coal mining operations in Asia, this project examines how the various Chinese and Japanese regimes that had at different times owned and operated the Fushun coal mines became committed to large-scale, state-led energy extraction amidst concerns over economic growth, resource scarcity, and national autarky. Pivotal to this process was the development and deployment of technologies of extraction: from methods such as open-pit mining and shale oil distillation that enabled the extraction of carbon energy to mechanisms such as fingerprinting and calorie counting that allowed for the extraction of the human labor undergirding the entire enterprise. Grounded in a range of Chinese and Japanese sources, including engineering students’ practicum reports, workers’ oral histories, and the personal papers of mining managers, this project uncovers links between the intensification of coal extraction and the rise of technocratic governance in transwar East Asia, ultimately contributing to interdisciplinary debates about the relationship between energy and the state.

Other ongoing projects include a history of scientific management in China and an environmental history of Chinese innovation as well as two collaborative projects: one on Mr. Science in May Fourth China and beyond (with Sean Hsiang-lin Lei) and the other on technologies of production in East Asian history (with Dagmar Schäfer).

At Harvard, Seow offers or will be offering courses in the history of modern science and technology in East Asia, the history of the factory, and the history of technology and capitalism.

Born and raised in Singapore, Seow received his B.A. in History and Political Science from McGill University and his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2017, he was an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University.

The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay
2019-10-29 17:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | New York
Zha Jianying’s Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival – Part 2 Zha Jianying is sharing the second installment of her [...] By India China Institute|2025-10-12T12:41:49-04:00January 27th, 2025|Categories: featured, News Archive, Visiting Scholars|Comments Off on Zha Jianying’s Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival – Part 2Read More

Zha Jianying’s Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival ICI long-time contributor, Zha Jianying, is pleased to share her [...] By India China Institute|2025-10-12T12:43:30-04:00December 4th, 2024|Categories: featured, News Archive, Visiting Scholars|Comments Off on Zha Jianying’s Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and SurvivalRead More

Former Fellow Mahendra P. Lama’s Understanding India’s China Dependence Syndrome

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Former Fellow Mahendra P. Lama’s Understanding India’s China Dependence Syndrome

News Archive, Uncategorized

Former Fellow Mahendra P. Lama’s Understanding India’s China Dependence Syndrome An article by Mahendra P. Lama, titled Understanding India’s China Dependence [...] By India China Institute|2024-12-05T00:10:49-05:00December 2nd, 2024|Categories: News Archive, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Former Fellow Mahendra P. Lama’s Understanding India’s China Dependence SyndromeRead More

Two Facets of National Humiliation in China: Based on the Nanjing Case By Runjie Ou, PhD in Politics, New School for [...] By India China Institute|2024-11-10T19:28:51-05:00November 10th, 2024|Categories: India, Uncategorized|Tags: Blog, Inida, Student Fellow|Comments Off on Two Facets of National Humiliation in China: Based on the Nanjing CaseRead More

Two Facets of National Humiliation in China: Based on the Nanjing Case By India China Institute|2024-11-10T18:56:39-05:00November 10th, 2024|Categories: Uncategorized|Comments Off on Two Facets of National Humiliation in China: Based on the Nanjing CaseRead More

Fudan University Delegation

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Fudan University Delegation

China, News Archive, Scholars Leaders & World

Fudan University DelegationICI hosted a roundtable discussion with a delegation of seven [...] By India China Institute|2024-10-31T01:52:24-04:00October 31st, 2024|Categories: China, News Archive, Scholars Leaders & World|Comments Off on Fudan University DelegationRead More
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Fifth International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar - Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Gender and Religion
2019-10-24 - 2019-10-26 | New York
RSVP for The Fifth International Conference on Unfinished Legacy of Dr. Ambedkar

From October 24-26, 2019, the New School will host the Fifth International Conference on the Legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. This year’s conference theme is Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Gender and Religion.

Ambedkar Conference Agenda Final

5th International Ambedkar Conference Bios

The conference will explore critical issues faced by the Dalit community, with a focus on the intersecting nature of gender, religion, and caste-based discrimination. Since its inception, the Ambedkar Conference has convened various scholars and practitioners, institutions and organizations across the world, creating a space to discuss the politics of equal dignity and equal rights for Dalits. This year, we hope to further this conversation.

While the New School is this year’s host, the conference is a collaboration between the following universities and think tanks:

Brandeis University Barnard College, Columbia University University of Massachusetts, Amherst The Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, India SAMATA Foundation, NepalUniversity of CincinnatiCASTE: a Global Journal on Social Exclusion International Ambedkar Mission, USABoston Study GroupIndia China Institute, The New SchoolJulien Studley Graduate Study Program in International AffairsThe Global Studies Program, The New School

Related Event:

Second Annual Ambedkar Lectures at Columbia University, organized by Anupama Rao

Oct. 17th: Race, Caste, and American Pragmatism

Oct. 18th: Remaking Publics: Gender, Affect, Insurgence, Presence

Other Related Events:

Workshop (invite-only) on Dalits in Global Context: Rethinking Religion and Gender Sponsored by The Henry Luce Foundation

From October 21-24, 2019, the India China Institute at The New School is hosting a focused workshop along the theme of the conference. The primary goal of the workshop is to convene an invited group of Global Dalit Change-makers — young and emerging scholars from within and outside of the Dalit community who are already working at the junction of gender, religion, caste, and social justice. ICI will also invite established scholars and practitioners in the field to help inspire the workshop with intellectual rigor, deep critical inquiry, and innovative practices.

This will be a new kind of conversation— the first workshop of its kind outside of South Asia, one that combines scholarship and activism, and strengthens conversations between scholars and practitioners when analyzing caste-based discrimination. The selected group of workshop participants will then join the Ambedkar Conference at the New School, where they will present their work.

100 Years of New

2019 marks The New School’s centennial year, and thus provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the university’s history of critical social inquiry, but also the early days of the school’s founding. B.R. Ambedkar, while a student at Columbia University, studied under one of The New School’s co-founders, John Dewey, and was greatly influenced by him. The Ambedkar Conference is an opportunity for the New School to convene individuals who are writing and researching in the New School’s spirit of creative and critical scholarship, and who, more than anything, are training their gazes on a future we’ll soon inhabit.

The Bluestone Rising Scholars Prize

Brandeis University, original convener of the International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, awarded inaugural Bluestone Rising Scholar Prizes to two early career scholars, to be published in CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. The prize recipients will take part in an Award Ceremony at Brandeis University, and then join the International Conference at The New School.

More Conference Information:

Information for Call for Papers

Call for Papers

I am born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu, for that is in my power.

B. R. Ambedkar, Yeola Conference, Maharashtra, India, 193

The most problematic aspect of Hindutva is the issue of the treatment of lower castes and tribes. It’s not only that you can ignore some people, but that you identify who it is that you can ignore.

Amartya Sen, Harvard University Interview in The Hindu, Feb. 28, 2019

According to the International Dalit Solidarity Network, “caste discrimination is one of the biggest human rights violations facing the international community today; both in terms of the numbers affected and the severity of the human rights violations caused by this form of discrimination.” The caste system is one of the most brutal forms of hierarchical social organization and caste-based discrimination affects over 250 million people in South Asia and across the globe. Dalits, that is, the “former Untouchables” are on the lowest rung of the Hindu social structure and South Asian society. Despite some increased legal protections in caste-affected countries within and without South Asia, the Dalit community continues to face indignities ranging from daily humiliations, to extreme poverty and servitude, to violence and murder. These indignities are still largely shaped by understandings and practices of religion and underlying notions of purity and impurity as determined by birth and exacerbated by gender relations. For the Dalit community, the entrenched caste system sanctions a massive denial of citizenship and fundamental rights which others enjoy under the constitutions of countries in South Asia.

During this conference, we aim to address issues or questions related to the theme of religion, caste, gender and social justice in or comparative to the South Asian context. These questions might include some of the following:

How can we rethink and reimagine established and emerging debates concerning these issues on methodologies, research, policies, and trans-boundary collaborations?

How have the hierarchies of gender and sexuality affected and been transformed by Dalit women and men?

What are the personal and political actions that Dalit women and men have taken to negotiate with patriarchy, both inside and outside the Dalit community?

How do we engage with Dalit women’s lives at the intersections of gender, caste, class, and religion?

How have Dalits used practice and faith to claim dignity and build solidarity? How have they expressed their experiences and aspirations in literary and other art forms to resist injustice and inhumanity?

In what ways have Dalit women (and men) carved out a new transnational political space to imagine a brighter future?

How can we analyze the intersections of caste and religion beyond Hinduism, for example in Islam, Christianity, Buddhism or Sikhism, specifically in South Asia?

For more information about Dalit issues, please visit:

International Dalit Solidarity Network

Indian Institute of Dalit Studies

SAMATA Foundation

Political Crises in Hong Kong and Jammu & Kashmir
2019-10-07 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011
Register Here

The current crises in Hong Kong and Jammu and Kashmir, though distinct in their historical and political contours, arose when central governments sought to increase sovereign power against the aspirations of many local residents for unrealized autonomy. Public authorities have laid claim to constitutional-legal provisions to support their stances, and have simultaneously resorted to coercion against local opposition. Such actions have prompted widespread international and some domestic condemnation. At the same time, large sections of mainstream media and publics in China and India have offered competing narratives that are generally supportive of the authorities. Please join us for this panel on the two crises and how they juxtapose the challenges of nationalism and liberal democratic norms. Panelists will explore the roots of the conflicts, constitutional questions, the strategies of state authorities and local resistance, the range of domestic and global responses, and prospects for the future.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. & Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning book The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World and Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty, both published by Columbia University Press. His articles have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Development and Change, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His analyses of the Chinese and global political economy and Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, among other publications.

Zha Jianying is a writer, journalist, and cultural commentator in both English and Chinese. She is the author of two books in English, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (named “One of the best books of 2011” by The Economist), and China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, and five books of non-fiction and fiction in Chinese. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Dushu, and Wanxiang. Tide Players was selected by The Economist as “One of the Best Books of 2011.” A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she also has been a regular commentator on current events on Chinese television, and works as the China Representative of the India China Institute at The New School in New York.

Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and conflict, militarization and impunity, popular protest, and law and memory in Kashmir. Her research has appeared in journals such as Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly. Her current book project is a legal ethnography of how cases relating to securitization and militarization have been contested and adjudicated in the courts of Kashmir. At Ohio University, Professor Duschinski teaches anthropology courses on violence, peace, human rights, and law.

Sandipto Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. His research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. His book manuscript, Legalizing the Revolution (under contract with Cambridge University Press), reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. He received his PhD in political theory from Columbia University. Before arriving at the New School this fall, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy, and taught at Ashoka and Columbia University.

Rashmi Sadana public talk - Urban Space, Public Spheres: The Delhi Metro in the Imagination and the Everyday
2019-09-25 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | New York
RSVP

India China Day 2019
2019-09-19 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | New York

"Kailash Yatra: A long Walk to mount Kailash Through Humla" with Kevin Bubriski
2019-05-02 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | New York

Worldly World Orders: Building on the Legacy of L.H.M. Ling
2019-04-26 12:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011

Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China
2019-04-18 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | New York
Diana Fu is an assistant professor of political science at The University of Toronto and an affiliate of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy Asian Institute. Her research examines popular contention, state power, civil society, and citizenship, with a focus on contemporary China. Her book “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (2018, Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics Series) theorizes a counter-intuitive form of mobilization under authoritarian rule. It won the 2018 American Political Science Association’s Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics and the 2019 International Studies Association’s International Political Sociological Section’s best book award.

Her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics (2019), The China Journal (2018), Governance (2017), Comparative Political Studies (2017, co-winner of the best article published in CPS), and Modern China (2009).

She holds a D.Phil. In Politics and an M.Phil. In Development Studies with distinction from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She was previously a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research has been supported by the Harold Hyram Wingate Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a Public Intellectuals Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research and media interviews have appeared in Boston Review, CBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, and The New York Times, among others. She enjoys Latin dance and creative writing.

When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Based on political ethnography inside both legal and illegal labor organizations in China, the book Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China authored by Professor Diana Fu reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention – mobilizing without the masses – that lowers the risk of activism under duress. This dynamic represents a third pathway of contention that challenges conventional understandings of mobilization in an illiberal state.

Roger T. Ames, "Deweyan and Confucian Ethics: A Challenge to the Ideology of Individualism"
2019-03-15 16:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | New York

The Politics of Performance: Contesting Caste, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Maharashtra, India
2019-03-06 11:30 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | New York
Prof. Paik’s event is cancelled due to The New School closed due to weather conditions today. We are now hosting her talk from 11:30-1:30 pm on Wednesday, March 6th at India China Institute located on the 9th floor of 66 Fifth Avenue(between 12th and 13th Streets). Lunch will be served. In order to plan properly, please email us at indiachina@newschool.edu and let us know you will still be attending. To RSVP, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/updated-venue-the-politics-of-performance-contesting-caste-sexuality-and-gender-in-contemporary-tickets-56670318448 Buy Tickets Buy Tickets on Eventbrite Buy Tickets on Eventbrite
