India China Institute

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

Worldly World Orders: Building on the Legacy of L.H.M. Ling
2019-04-26 12:30 - 19:00 | 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
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

The Politics of Performance: Contesting Caste, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Maharashtra, India
2019-03-06 11:30 - 13:30
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

Dalit Film and Cultural Festival
2019-02-24 10:00 - 18:00
NOTE: The timeline of the event has been updated, please refer to the schedule down below. 9:15 am – 7:00 pm

SCHEDULE: FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT SHOWINGS PLEASE REFER TO DALITFILMFEST.COM

Unimagining Communities
2019-02-21 18:00 - 19:30
India China Institute in Partnership with Historical Studies of The New School for Social Research, delivers the annual Carol Breckenridge memorial lecture in south Asian history. The lecture, titled “Unimagining Communities- Suspicion and the Writing of History in Post-Colonial Societies” will be presented by Prof. Dilip Menon, the Mellon Chair of Indian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Africa. Prof. Menon was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge. His research for the past decade has engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. Currently, he is working on issues of cultural and intellectual history and is engaged in a project on the writing of history in India between 1850 and 1960. The work inaugurated at the Centre is interdisciplinary and transnational in approach and looks afresh at issues of colonialism, modernity and migration in the Global South.Carol Breckenridge (1942-2009), a historian and scholar of global culture, brought along with her to different cities and campuses not only her erudition and insight into intellectual debates on global and transnational issues, but also her formidable gift of inspiring others through a rare combination of charm, generosity of spirit, hospitality and hard work.The journal Public Culture which she founded in 1988 with her husband and soulmate Arjun Appadurai, the later Sister Cities Project, and the articles and books she wrote and co-edited with colleagues, have brought new perceptions to the field and remain as evidence on her unstinting efforts against the stultifying effects of academic parochialism on the world at large. At The New School for Social Research and at other universities where Carol and Arjun have lived and taught, Breckenridge will be remembered for the way she personified these very commitments by her concern and care for her junior colleagues and students.

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From Commune to Capitalism: How China's Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty
2018-12-05 17:30 - 19:00 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
The India China Institute welcomes Howard University Professor Zhun Xu to speak about his recent book, From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty.

“In the early 1980s, China undertook a massive reform that dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Known as the decollectivization campaign, it is one of the most significant reforms in China’s transition to a market economy. This mainstream history argues that the rural communes, suffering from inefficiency, greatly improved agricultural productivity under the decollectivization reform. It also describes how the peasants, due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, spontaneously organized and collectively dismantled the collective system.

A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story. Zhun Xu argues that the decollectivization campaign was neither a bottom-up, spontaneous peasant movement, nor necessarily efficiency-improving. Decollectivization, by depoliticizing the peasantry and freeing rural labor to compete with the urban workers, served as both the political and economic basis for consequent Chinese neoliberal reforms and a massive increase in all forms of economic, political, and social inequality.”

Zhun Xu is Assistant Professor of Economics at Howard University. His research interests include political economy, social development, and the Chinese economy. His recent publications appear in American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Agrarian Change, World Development, and Review of Radical Political Economics. His book From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty, was recently published by Monthly Review Press.

A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.
2018-11-28 17:30 - 19:30
The India China Institute is proud to present “A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic”, a talk with author, lawyer, and Yale professor Rohit De on his book, A People’s Constitution.

“What difference did the enactment of the the Indian constitution make on everyday lives of its citizens? It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture.

The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution.”

The Author:

Rohit De is lawyer and an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Prior to Yale, he was a Mellon Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has worked with Chief Justice K.G Balakrishnan of the Supreme Court of India and worked on constitutional reform projects in Sri Lanka and Nepal. He is currently working on a history of civil liberties arising out of Asia and Africa post WW2 and mediated through Indian diasporic lawyers.

A Fantastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan - David Zurick
2018-11-15 17:30 - 19:30
A Fantastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan

Book Launch and Photo Lecture w/ David Zurick

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018, 5:30-7:30 pm

Orozco Room (#712), 66 W. 12th St., The New School

RSVP NOW

In this illustrated lecture, geographer and photographer David Zurick explores the connections between visual culture, landscape change, and the loss of cultural memory in small-town India.

For several years, Zurick has been making photographs in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, among little-known settlements that owe their origins to the trade caravans that once crossed the Thar Desert. In the 1800s, prosperous merchants financed the construction of ornate buildings in the towns and commissioned artists to decorate them with exquisite murals depicting local life and society. For generations, these painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Eventually, the trading families left Shekhawati for India’s burgeoning cities and abandoned their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins – a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life in rural India. As the mural-clad buildings of the painted towns disappear, the opportunity for local residents to engage with their cultural heritage declines, and the beauty of our lived-world is further diminished. In this presentation, Zurick discovers the unique richness of this remote vernacular architecture and highlights ongoing efforts to designate the region a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

About David Zurick

David Zurick is an academically trained geographer (PhD, University of Hawaii and East-West Center, Honolulu) and a self-taught photographer. He writes and photographs extensively about Asia and the Pacific region, with a special focus on the cultural landscapes of South Asia and the Himalaya. His books and photography have won numerous awards and acclaimed reviews, including the National Outdoor Book Award, Banff International Mountain Book Award Finalist (twice), and Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Visual Artist Fellowship Award (twice). His geographical studies and photography have been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation, American Geographical Society, Banff Centre, and other major funding organizations. In 2009 he received the “Mt Everest Award” for his lifetime achievement in Himalaya studies. David is a Fellow of The Explorers Club. He lectures and exhibits at academic and film arts organizations worldwide. His photography books include Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya, Southern Crossings, and Land of Pure Vision.

You can learn more about David’s work at his website www.davidzurick.com and blog www.medium.com/@david.zurick.

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform - Julie Chu
2018-11-02 16:00 - 18:00
The India China Institute (ICI) at The New School is pleased to announce another event as part of our ongoing Colloquium on the Economies and Societies of India and China (CESIC).

Airing Grievances and the Atmospherics of Chinese Legal Reform

Professor Julie Chu, University of Chicago

Friday, Nov 2, 2018 (4:00-6:00 pm) | Orozco Room (#712), 66 W. 12th St.

RSVP Now

About the Talk

This talk considers the ways in which legal reform unfolds as a palpable, if vague, “change in the air” in new zones of urban revitalization and port development in contemporary China. Drawing from various examples of air’s tactile circulation through the rezoned areas of coastal Fuzhou (e.g., the free trade port area, the touristic city center), I show how redevelopment as filtered through “the rule of law” still politically and literally stinks for those caught up in its environs. But against instrumental readings of the dysfunctions and failures of China’s recent legal reforms, my aim is to explore how “the law” actually works through its very malfunctions and spread of bad airs to shape a distinctive atmospherics of protest in citizen-state encounters; this includes gathering unlikely allies together under a shared cloud of political disaffection and procedural noise to ponder the revolutionary and everyday possibilities of social change beyond the governing logics of “reform.”

About the Speaker

Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States. A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing a new ethnographic focus on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”).

Selected Publications

n.d.
The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge (book manuscript in progress).

n.d.
Leaving Longyan, ethnographic film in production.

n.d.
Debt, Theft and the Calculus of Fortune (in preparation for publication).

n.d.
Schlock Value: Or, How Some Chinese Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Politics of Fiasco (in preparation for journal submission).

2017
Risk, Fate, Fortune: The Lives and Times of Customs Inspectors in Southern China. Cambridge University Press.

2016
Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Dis/comforts of Moving Strangers. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society.

2014
When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in China. American Ethnologist 14 (2): 351-367.

2011
The Noise of Data: Comments on Ewald’s “After Risk.” Carceral Notebooks 7 (2011): 109-118.

2010
Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press.

2010
The Attraction of Numbers: Accounting for Ritual Expenditures in Fuzhou, China. Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): 132-142.

2009
Departing China: Identification Papers and the Pursuit of Burial Rights in Fuzhou. In Sabine Berking and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Between Life and Death; Governing Populations in the Era of Human Rights. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

2007
Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in Foreign Exchange. In A. Truitt & S. Senders, eds., Money: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

2006
To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 13(3): 395-425.

2001
When Alan Turning Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies. Connect: art.politics.theory.practice 1(2).

2000 Meet Halo Halo, a 28-minute video documentary produced and directed.

India China Day 2018
2018-09-20 17:30 - 19:30 | Lang Cafe, 65 West 11th Street First Fl., New York, NY, 10011, USA
Come check out the India China Institute’s India China Day!

High-Speed Urbanization and the “Over-sized Cities” in Contemporary China
2018-05-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Wolff Conference Room, 6 East 16th Street, New York, NY, 10003, USA
High-Speed Urbanization and the “Over-sized Cities” in Contemporary China

May 4, 2018 | 4:00-6:00 pmStarr Foundation Hall | 63 Fifth Ave, NY, The New School

A Public Talk with Zhe Sun, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics(S.U.F.E)

About the Talk

The urbanization rate in China has passed 50% since 2011 and will reach 60% by the year 2020. However, the image of “rural China” stays as a stereotype for a long time.

This talk is aimed to help understand China in urban condition. It will start from the process of high-speed urbanization in the first decade of 21st century. Then it will demonstrate the high- density situation in three megacities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Finally, it will emphasize the current u-turn of urban policy from social inclusion to social exclusion in the so-called “over-sized” cities and point out the latest inequality issues in the case of Shanghai.

About the Speaker

Dr. Zhe SUN is an assistant researcher in the department of economic sociology at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics(S.U.F.E). He achieved his PhD in E.N.S Paris-Saclay with a French dissertation on the housing market and homeowner society in Shanghai. Now he is studying the rental housing market, tenants groups as well as other relevant urban issues such as the informal economy, gentrification and gated-community etc.

This event is organized by the India China Institute and co-sponsored by The New School’s Global Studies Program and Environmental Studies Program.

LIMITED SEATING

The Promise of Making: Desiring Alternatives and Hacking Entrepreneurial Living in China
2018-04-23 16:00 - 18:00
Since 2014, a series of Western media outlets from the Wired UK over the Economist to Forbes has begun to celebrate the city of Shenzhen in the South of China as a rising hub of innovation, a so-called “Hollywood for Makers” and “Silicon Valley of Hardware.” These media stories took up an idea that open source hardware advocates had been promoting for several years: that the city of Shenzhen had become crucial for the realization of one of the key promises of the maker movement, i.e. to prototype concrete alternatives to the pitfalls of the information society and contemporary capitalism. Just a couple years earlier, Shenzhen was largely known as a place of copycats and fakes that lacked creativity where ideas created elsewhere were simply executed and mass produced. What happened within the timespan of only a few years that changed Shenzhen’s image from demonstrating China’s continuous lag in technology innovation towards a place where alternatives to neoliberal capitalism could be prototyped?In this talk, Silvia Lindtner presents excerpts from her forthcoming book “The Promise of Making”, unpacking the historical contingencies of this transformation of Shenzhen, and with it China, in the global tech imaginary. Drawing from more than seven years of ethnographic research, she shows how the displacement of techno-optimistic onto Shenzhen unfolded through and alongside the emergence of “making” as a mode of intervention in the status-quo by hacking not only machines but also markets and work itself. Shenzhen, as the speaker shows, was rendered by open source hardware advocates, venture capitalists, avant-garde designers, and Chinese politicians and state actors alike as a laboratory to prototype what she calls “entrepreneurial living,” i.e. a naturalization of experimentation as a mode of “living on” amidst a pervasive economization of life. While making reformulated a key neoliberal logic of self-economization as a story of empowerment by promising to include ever more people in its call for self-transformation into human capital, Shenzhen came to be seen as the place to accomplish this upgrade of the self and to regain a sense of control amidst anxieties over the economic and environmental crisis.

Silvia Lindtner is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, with a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Lindtner’s research and teaching interests include innovation and technology entrepreneurship, making and hacking cultures, shifts in digital work, labor, industry, policy, and governance. This work unfolds through a deep engagement with issues of gender, inequality, and enactments of masculinity in engineering and computer science fields, politics and transnational imaginaries of design, contemporary political economy, and processes of economization. Lindtner draws from more than eight years of multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China’s shifting role in transnational and global tech production alongside research alongside research in the United States, Taiwan, and Africa.

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Urban Futures in the Indian Himalayas
2018-04-18 18:30 - 19:30
The expanded reproduction of rural livelihoods has led to an increasing number of households in the Indian Himalayas—especially in the state of Himachal Pradesh—route available surplus to nearby urban areas in search of speculative footholds. This talk is about the production of space and everyday lives concomitant to this process.Rohit Negi is with the School of Human Ecology at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He has a PhD in Geography (Ohio State) and masters degree in Urban Planning (UIUC). Rohit’s research lies at the intersections of urban geography and political ecology, and his ongoing projects concern Delhi’s toxic air, and Himachal’s construction boom.

LIMITED SEATING

Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to Historicize the Rohingya Crisis
2018-04-09 18:30 - 20:00 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
The horrors suffered by Rohingyas in Myanmar today – which now appear ever more frequently and graphically in the news — represent one brutal extremity of a kind of victimization that haunts countless people whose only crime is living in old spaces of human mobility that modern empires carved into national territories. Methodological nationalism justifies their precarity with histories that provide charters for national belonging, tying citizens firmly to specific places inside national borders. In a world covered by nations, human rights depend on that belonging. Old spaces of mobility can thus become perilous homelands where nations produce minorities as aliens eligible for marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion. Histories of mobile social space may implicitly disenfranchise their residents, but we need those histories to escape methodological nationalism and explore interactions of mobility and territoriality that generate globalization, at many levels of scale. All these post-colonial predicaments challenge any history of the Rohingya crisis, which I approach here through local histories of Global Asia around the Bay of Bengal.The “Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture Series in South Asian History” is an annual lecture by a distinguished scholar in the field of South Asian history and society, broadly defined. It was established with the generous support of Professor Arjun Appadurai, the former Provost of The New School. The lecture series has featured diverse vantage points on South Asian history and different generations of scholars, including Sir Christopher Bayly, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Faisal Devji, and Ritu Birla.

David Ludden is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, in 1978, and served on the Penn faculty from 1981 until 2007, when he came to NYU. He has directed South Asia programs at Penn, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program (CIES), and NYU. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2002-3. His research focuses on very long-term histories of globalization in Asia, particularly as they concern trajectories of capitalist economic development, spatial inequity, natural environments, and changing material conditions in everyday life.

LIMITED SEATING

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Prospects, Perceptions, and Potential Implications for India and the US
2018-04-05 17:30 - 19:00 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a $62 billion infrastructure project associated with Beijing’s broader Belt and Road Initiative. It entails new roads, power plants, and ports across Pakistan as part of China’s global effort to facilitate access to markets far and wide. CPEC has the potential to bring major benefits to Pakistan’s economy, but because of security and financial issues, it is also fraught with risk. This lecture will examine CPEC’s prospects; discuss how it is perceived in Pakistan, China, India, and the US; and consider its strategic implications for both New Delhi and Washington.

Michael Kugelman is the Asia Program Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he is responsible for research, programming, and publications on the region. His main speciality is Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan and U.S. relations with each of them. Kugelman writes monthly columns for Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel and monthly commentaries for War on the Rocks. He also contributes regular pieces to the Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank blog. He has published op-eds and commentaries in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN.com, Bloomberg View, The Diplomat, Al Jazeera, and The National Interest, among others.

LIMITED SEATING

Xi Jinping and China's Success Trap
2018-04-02 17:30 - 19:00
Drawing on Professor Mohanty’s more than three decades of research, this talk will focus on how China’s “reform and open door” policy evolved and helped achieve tremendous economic success. Professor Mohanty will also examine how this policy has generated serious social and environmental problems.

In his recent book, ‘China’s Transformation: The Success Story and the Success Trap’, Mohanty argues that the consequences of this story of success and growth are so strong that it has been difficult for China to change its main development path and to achieve a desirable level of equity and sustainability. Professor Mohanty describes this as the “success trap” that China is currently grappling with.

This event is organized by the India China Institute and co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program at The New School

LIMITED SEATING

Agrarian Elites in Urban Real Estate: Urban and Land Transformations along New Economic Corridors in Liberalizing India
2018-03-05 16:00 - 18:00
Professor Sai Balakrishnan will be exploring the narrative movements of urbanization in contemporary India from megacities to the contested geographies along new economic corridors. As policymakers search for new market-oriented means for the transfer of land from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban developers, the re-allocation of property control is erupting into volatile land-based social conflicts. Professor Balakrishnan puts forward the argument that some of India’s most decisive conflicts over its urban futures will unfold in these corridor regions where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes are coming into direct encounters with financially powerful incoming urban firms. She calls for new theories of land and urbanization that are capable of incorporating within them the agrarian political economy. Through focusing on the agrarian to urban land-use change along India’s first economic corridor, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, she articulates how diverse agrarian property regimes shape the trajectories of contemporary urbanization in liberalizing India.An India China Institute public event. RSVP here to register for the event.

Deadline to Apply - Faculty Research & Curriculum Development Grants
2018-03-01
The Faculty Research and Curriculum Development Grants will support new or continuing research, curriculum development and student engagement on India and China by faculty in any division of The New School. Six Faculty Research Awards (up to $10,000 each) and one of up to $15,000 for the express purpose of curriculum development and student engagement will be distributed, and grant recipients will have 24 months to carry out the proposed activities of the grant. Grant recipients are requested to give a presentation upon completion of the initiative, the form of which may be mutually determined at the time of funding.Applications must be submitted by March 1, 2018. Awards will be announced in early April 2018. Complete details about the grants can be found here.

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and the Futures of Chinese Politics
2017-12-04 16:00 - 18:00
The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and the Futures of Chinese Politics

December 4, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmOrozco Room (712) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

A Public Talk with Andrew Nathan Columbia University | Hua Ze China Rights in Action | L.H.M. Ling The New School | Mark Frazier The New School | Xu Youyu Chinese Academy of Social Sciences | Zha Jianying Writer

About the Talk

As the now undisputed, strong leader of modern China, Xi Jinping is uniquely positioned to determine China’s future. Through his emphasis on the ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative, (BRI), Xi demonstrates his intention for China to shape the contours of global affairs as well.

At the 19th Party Congress, Xi Jinping’s ideas on China’s development and role in global affairs were incorporated in the Party’s Constitution. With only five years in office, Xi has attained a level of personalized power and authority not seen in China in decades. But will Xi’s supremacy go unchallenged in the future? What are the prospects for political change in China under Xi’s self-stated “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. A panel of China experts will discuss these and related questions about China following the 19th Party Congress.

About the Book

This panel on China’s multiple political futures is being held in connection with the recent publication of To Build a Free China: A Citizen’s Journey (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2017) by Xu Zhiyong, a former ICI fellow, and translated by Joshua Rosenzweig and Yaxue Cao.

Dr. Xu is a prominent legal scholar, civil rights lawyer, activist, and founder of the New Citizens’ Movement. He was named one of Asia Weekly’s People of the Year in 2005 and one of the Southern People’s Weekly Top Ten Young Leaders of China in 2006. He was an ICI Fellow from 2008 to 2010. Professor Andrew Nathan, who wrote the introduction of the book, will share his thoughts and insights on the specific questions explored by Xu Zhiyong.

This event is organized in partnership with Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by The New School’s Global Studies Program and the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Summer Travel Research Grant 2018
2017-11-10

Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism
2017-11-03 16:00 - 18:00
Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism

A CESIC Talk with Maria Repnikova

November 3, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmKlein Conference Room (#501) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Who watches over the party-state? In her new book, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has definedthis volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.

About the Speaker

Dr. Maria Repnikova is a scholar of global communication, with a comparative focus on China and Russia. Her research examines the processes of political resistance and persuasion in illiberal political contexts, drawing on ethnographic research approaches and extensive time in the field. Maria holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

LIMITED SEATING

Religious Change and Disturbed Religious Ecosystems in Jiangsu, China w/ Robert Weller
2017-10-26 16:00 - 18:00
Religious Change and Disturbed Religious Ecosystems in Jiangsu, China

Talk by Professor Robert Weller

October 26, 2017 | 4:00-6:00 pmOrozco Room (#712) | 66 W. 12th St, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Rapid urban expansion in wealthy parts of China has led to the resettlement of many villagers into high-rise buildings, making earlier forms of material and cultural life impossible. At the same time, large-scale urban reconstruction has displaced many old city neighborhoods. One result is that the territorially-based religion described in much of the anthropological and historical literature has become increasingly untenable as the entire ecosystem surrounding it has grown unstable. This talk examines what appears to be an especially creative zone for religious innovation: the expanding urban edge. The cases come from various cities in southern Jiangsu and focus on ghost attacks, a spirit medium network, and innovations in the forms and objects of temple worship. Theoretically, the paper thinks about ecosystems in the broadest sense of complexly articulated systems, without assuming a divide between nature and culture.

About the Speaker

Robert Weller is Professor of Anthropology & Director of Graduate Studies at Boston University. Weller’s work concentrates on China and Taiwan in comparative perspective. His actual research topics, however, are eclectic—running from ghosts to politics, rebellions to landscape paintings. Perhaps what unites everything is an interest in finding the limits to authority in all its settings. His publications include Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (1987), Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (1994), Alternate Civilities: Chinese Culture and the Prospects for Democracy (1999), Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (2006), and Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008).

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Reimagining Youth and Politics in India w/Shehla Rashid
2017-10-23 18:30 - 20:00
Reimagining Youth and Politics in India

Talk by Shehla Rashid

October 23, 2017 | 6:30-8:00 pmKellen Auditorium (#101) | 66 Fifth Avenue, NY, The New School

About the Talk

Shehla Rashid represents one of the most important voices in the anti-fascist struggles in India. She was the Vice President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union and a member of the All India Student Association. She is currently finishing a MPhil in Law and Governance at JNU.

A 2016 interview with Rashid for The Wire.

A 2016 video of Rashid giving a speech on campus at JNU.

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Reversing Roles? Environmental Politics and Policy in China and the US in the Trump and Xi Jingping Era w/ Robert Gottlieb
2017-10-18 18:00 - 20:00
Reversing Roles?

Environmental Politics and Policy in China and the US in the Trump and Xi Jingping Era

A book talk by Professor Robert Gottlieb

October 18, 2017 | 6:00-8:00 pm

Orozco Room (712), 66 W. 12th St

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About the Talk

Has there been a role reversal between the US and China on the environment?

China has long been considered an environmental outlier — horrendous smog episodes, water unfit to drink and even to irrigate, huge increases in the number of cars on the road, a global leader in the use of pesticides, a major coal producer and importer, a reluctant participant in global climate negotiations until recently, and more. The US, until November 9, had been seen as at least modestly responsive to environmental concerns. Now with Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt ensconced in Washington seeking to systematically dismantle the environmental policy system in contrast to the passage of environmental legislation and a new role around climate change in China, the roles do seem to be reversing. Is that an accurate view?

The answer is yes and no. The talk will compare current US and China environmental approaches in such areas as air pollution, transportation, and food as well as climate change, and the interplay between national and local or regional government policies and their implementation. It will point to the role of social movements and popular protests to help us understand what has changed and why. And it will look at the structural barriers for change: the nature of China’s embrace of marketization, developmentalism, and urbanization on the one hand, and the continuing power of the fossil fuel industry and other environmentally problematic industry forces in the U.S. to shape or at least block policies.

About the Speaker

Robert Gottlieb is Emeritus Professor at Occidental College and founder and former executive director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books; his most recent book, co-authored with Simon Ng, is Global Cities: Urban Environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China (MIT Press).

Sponsored by The New School’s interdisciplinary programs in Global Studies, Urban Studies, and Environmental Studies, and the India China Institute.

Welfare, Work, And Poverty: Social Assistance in China W/ Qin Gao
2017-10-12 16:00 - 17:30
Welfare, Work, And Poverty

Talk by Professor Qin Gao

October 12, 2017 | 4:00-5:30 pmHirshon Suite | 55 W 13th St NY New York NY 10011

Welfare, Work, and Poverty, Professor Qin Gao’s new book, provides the first systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the impacts and effectiveness of China’s primary social assistance program — Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao — since its inception in 1993. Dibao serves the dual function of providing a basic safety net for the poor and maintaining social and political stability. Despite currently being the world’s largest welfare program in terms of population coverage, evidence on Dibao’s performance has been lacking. This book offers important new empirical evidence and draws policy lessons that are timely and useful for both China and beyond. Welfare, Work, and Poverty is essential reading for political scientists, economists, sociologists, public policy researchers, and social workers interested in learning about and understanding contemporary China.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Qin Gao is a professor at the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW), a faculty affiliate of the Columbia Population Research Center and of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the director of Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. She is also an Academic Board Member of the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University and a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Before joining the CSSW faculty, she was a professor and the Coordinator of International Initiatives at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service. Dr. Gao’s current research examines the following topics: 1) the Chinese welfare state in transition: size, structure, and redistributive effects; 2) effectiveness and impacts of dibao, China’s primary social assistance program, and other anti-poverty policies and programs; 3) gender inequality in time use in China and beyond; 4) social protection for rural-to-urban migrants in China and Asian American immigrants; and 5) cross-national comparative social policies and programs. Dr. Gao’s work has been supported by multiple national and international funding sources such as the National Social Science Fund of China, UNICEF, and the World Bank.

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Live Baccarat Calculations: Macau Machine Gaming and the Production of the Post-Socialist Subject
2017-10-05 17:30 - 19:30 | Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th Street 5th Floor, New York, NY, 10011, USA
Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the local government liberalized the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly concession and invited participation by select foreign gaming companies. Over the following decade these companies produced a phantasmagoric Macau cityscape comprised of enormous integrated casino resorts such as the Venetian, Parisian, Wynn, MGM, and City of Dreams. As a result, tiny Macau is now the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming, and is visited by more than 30 million tourists per year. The majority of Macau’s casino revenues are derived from Chinese high-rollers who gamble in private VIP rooms. However, due to a recent slowdown of China’s economy, as well as a central government crackdown on corruption and tightening of illicit cross-border financial flows, Macau’s VIP gambling revenues have decreased significantly. Therefore, Macau’s gaming operators are seeking to diversify the industry and to target Chinese ‘mass market’ tourists. This paper analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was specifically created for the Macau market and designed to appeal to ordinary Chinese gamblers. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the casino game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation. LIVE Baccarat may be understood as an apparatus, or dispositif, of subjection of a Chinese ‘mass market’ gambler – an individuated, speculating, calculating, and risk-taking subject, and a form of ‘human capital’ that Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self’. This nascent Chinese economic subject is not only important to Macau’s gaming industry, but to post-socialist market reforms in the PRC, and perhaps ultimately to the sustainability of global capitalism.This is an India China Institute event, co-sponsored by the School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design, and the Global Studies Program, The New School
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What Went Wrong With India-China Relations - A Historical Analysis w/ Tansen Sen
2017-10-02 18:30 - 20:00
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.Prof. Sen specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). He published numerous articles.

Rebel Retirement Through Informal Exit Networks: Evidence from India w/ Rumela Sen
2017-10-02 16:00 - 18:00
Rebel Retirement Through Informal Exit Networks: Evidence from India
A CESIC Seminar w/
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Rumela Sen
Oct 2, 20174-6 pm, Orozco Room

Under what conditions do insurgents give up arms and return to the same political processes that they had once sought to overthrow? A lot has been written on why men and women rebel. But we know very little about how rebels quit. In this paper I show that rebels quit through informal exit networks that thrive in the underbelly of grassroots associations of civic participation. They are made up of ordinary people in conflict zones who live their everyday lives one foot in democracy and one foot in insurgency.
The empirical puzzle for this study is drawn from the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India that has claimed 6,760 lives in the last ten years and has been acknowledged as the biggest internal security threat that the country has ever faced. Despite comparable conflict intensity (measured in terms of incidents and casualties) and unified command structure of the rebel organization, retirement is exceptionally high in the south and very low in the north. Further, both in the north and in the south, rebel retirement is concentrated in some districts and not others.
About the Speaker
Rumela Sen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She studied Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her current research focuses on rebel retirement and reintegration with empirical evidence drawn primarily from South Asia.
