India China Institute

The Promise of Making: Desiring Alternatives and Hacking Entrepreneurial Living in China
2018-04-23 16:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York)
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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

EMERGING PUBLIC SPACE INOF THE PEARL RIVER DELTA SYMPOSIUM
2017-09-22 00:00
The purpose of the symposium is to discuss variations of the concept of urban public space and multiplicities of public spatial practice that have emerged in the context of the Pearl River Delta’s rapid urban development in the last forty years. We are particularly interested in exploring characteristics that make the public space and socio-spatial practices in this region distinct from urban development in China and East Asia in general, as well as searching for research practices and points of view that are currently emerging or have been under-explored in this context.The symposium brings together fourteen participants who will present different perspectives on this expansive theme from the fields of urbanism, architecture, planning, sociology, and politics both academics and professional practitioners. The talks will be informative in reporting on findings from current research and practice, and are aimed at constituting a series of provocations about the innovative ways of framing and conceptualizing public space inof Pearl River Delta.

ORGANIZED IN COLLABORATION with the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and with the India China Institute, The New School

SPONSORED BY the School of Design Strategies, Parsons School of Design, Urban @Parsons, and The India China Institute, The New School

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
9:00 WELCOME / GENERAL INTRODUCTION:
Tim Marshall, Provost, The New School
Joel Towers, Executive Dean, Parsons School of Design
Ashok Gurung, Director, India China Institute
9:30 SESSION 1
Moderated by Miodrag Mitrasinovic, The New School
Adam Frampton, Columbia University
Georgeen Theodore, NJIT
Jonathan Bach, The New School
Adrian Blackwell, Uof Waterloo
Brian McGrath, The New School
11:30-12:00 PANEL DISCUSSION
moderated by Mark Frazier
12:00-1:00 LUNCH
1:00 SESSION 2
Moderated by Mark Frazier, The New School
David Grahame Shane, Columbia University
Yang Xiaochun and Gao Wenxiu, Shenzhen
University
Tim Simpson, University of Macau
Stefan Al, UPenn
Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
3:00-3:30 PANEL DISCUSSION
Moderated by Miodrag Mitrasinovic
3:30-4:00 COFFEE BREAK
4:00-5:00 ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Moderated by Tim Jachna, Hong Kong Polytechnic SD

What Would a UN-Country-City Partnership Look Like? w/ Aromar Revi
2017-09-20 17:30 - 19:00
Preparing the World to Implement the SDG’s:

What would a UN-Country-City Partnership Look Like?

Public talk with former ICI fellow Aromar Revi

Sept 20, 2017 | 5:30-7pm

Dorothy Hirshon Suite (#205), 66 W 12th St, The New School

Join us in welcoming Aromar Revi, a former ICI fellow, for a talk on preparing the world to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He is a global expert on Sustainable Development; Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), from where he helped lead a successful global campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) as part of the UN’s 2030 development agenda, which brought major global urban institutions and over 300 cities and organisations together. He has the distinction of addressing the UN General Assembly twice on the theme of sustainable cities, in 2014 and 2017.

About the Speaker

Aromar’s policy, practice and research work lie at the interface of sustainability and climate science; and the emerging discipline of ‘urban science’, that he is helping define internationally. He is a member of the UCL-Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on urban research and global sustainability. In 2016, UNSDSN & the SDG Academy launched the first 75-session global Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Sustainable Cities & SDG 11, curated by him featuring 30 of the world’s leading urbanists. 10,000 participants from 110 countries have registered for this.

Reflections on the Belt and Road Forum
2017-06-20 17:30 - 19:00
Reflections on the Belt and Road Forum

June 20, 2017 | 5:30 – 7:00 pmTheresa Lang Center (55 W. 13th St, 2nd floor, The New School) * Updated Event Venue

Featured Speakers: Liang Huijiang, Wang Wen, Zha Daojiong, and Zhai Kun

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About the Talk:

Last month China held a major international forum on its Belt and Road Initiative, the first of its kind since Beijing announced the project in 2013. Drawing official delegations, scholars, entrepreneurs, as well as representatives from financial institutions and media organizations from 130 nations, the forum was an important step in China’s drive to develop infrastructure and connectivity along the “Belt and Road Corridors” from China to Africa, Europe, South and Southeast Asia. Though many important details about the initiative remain unclear, foreign businesses are already vying for opportunities to join the project, and their excitement was primed by President’s Xi Jinping’s promise at the Forum to raise tens of billions of dollars in new financing. The event generated some concern about whether actual profits and benefits will match expectations. From the perspectives both of recipient countries and investors, the Belt and Road Initiative represents huge potential and significant risk. Amid the enthusiasm and apprehension surrounding the project, a robust dialogue and accurate information are critical. In support of this, the National Committee and the India China Institute of The New School are pleased to welcome a delegation of financial and economic scholars led by the director general of the International Finance Department of the China Development Bank, Mr. Liang Huijiang, to discuss the May 2017 Belt and Road Forum on June 20, 2017.

About the Speakers:

Mr. Liang Huijiang is director general of the International Finance Department of the China Development Bank (CDB). He oversees strategy and policy making of the bank’s international business operations as well as cooperation with national and multilateral development banks. He also manages an overseas loan portfolio of over USD 300 billion, and is instrumental in expanding the bank’s global network.

From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Liang was deputy director general of the bank’s Treasury Department, playing a key role in building a professional team for the bank’s liquidity and investment portfolios as it reached several milestones in overseas bond offerings and underwritings. Between 1998 and 2003 Mr. Liang was special assistant to Mr. Chen Yuan, then president of the CDB. In that capacity, he was in charge of developing strategies as the CDB transformed itself from a semi-government agency into a market-oriented bank. Before joining CDB, Mr. Liang worked in the International Department of the People’s Bank of China, where he was involved in annual consultations between China and the IMF and reform of China’s exchange rate regime.

Mr. Liang holds a master’s degree in finance from the London Business School (2004), a master’s in economics from the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University (1996), and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hangzhou University (1993).

Dr. Wang Wen is a professor and executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. He also serves as a consultant fellow at the Counselors’ Office of the State Council of China, secretary general of the Green Finance Association of China, and standing director of World Socialism Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. As a leading think tank professional since 2013, Dr. Wang was named a “2014 Top Ten Figures of Chinese Think Tanks,” and a “2015 China Reform and Development Pioneer.”

Dr. Wang worked as chief op-ed editor and editorial writer at Global Times before 2012, and won a China News Awards in 2011. He has written and edited over 20 books including Think as a Tank; Anxiety of the U.S.; Visions of the Great Powers; 2016: G20 and China; Theories of World Governance: A Study in the History of Ideas; and The G20 and Global Governance.

Dr. Zha Daojiong is a professor of international political economy at the School of International Studies, Peking University, where he holds concurrent appointments in the University’s Institute of South-South Cooperation and International Development and Institute of Ocean Research. He specializes in studying non-traditional security issues in China’s foreign relations, including energy, food, public health, and transboundary water management. His recent research interests have expanded to political risk management for Chinese investments overseas.

Professor Zha has served as Arthur Ross Fellow at the Center on US-China Relations of the Asia Society in New York, as the inaugural Rio Tinto China Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, and as senior research fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is also a member of the China chapter of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, and a senior advisor to the Chinese Association for International Understanding. He is an active participant in the National Committee’s longstanding track II economic dialogue.

Professor Zha has written and edited seven academic books, in addition to dozens of journal articles. He taught in Japan for six years and holds a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the East-West Center.

Dr. Zhai Kun is a professor at the School of International Studies, Peking University, and director of the Center for Global Interconnectivity Studies, Peking University.

Dr. Zhai was formerly director of the Institute of World Political Studies (2011-2014) and director of South and Southeast Asian and Oceania Studies (2007-2011) at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). He is a council member of China People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, a China expert and eminent person of the ASEAN Regional Forum, and deputy president of the China Association of Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Zhai has published extensively on China’s diplomacy and strategic thinking. He frequently writes for the People’s Daily, China Daily, World Knowledge, and Oriental Morning Post.

Dr. Zhai received his Ph.D. in international relations from CICIR, and his M.A. in international relations and B.A. in international journalism from the University of International Relations.

This event is organized by the National Committee on U.S. – China Relations, and co-sponsored by the India China Institute.

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India China: Rethinking Borders and Security - Book Launch
2017-05-22 16:00 - 18:00
India China: Rethinking Borders and Security

Book launch with authors: L.H.M. Ling, Adriana Abdenur, Payal Banerjee, Nimmi Kurian, Mahendra P. Lama, Li Bo

Monday, May 22, 4:00-6:oo pmOrozco Room (712), 66 West 12th St

Remarks by:Mary Watson, Executive Dean, NSPETansen Sen, Professor, CUNYAshok Gurung, Senior Director, ICI

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University of Michigan Press (2016)

About the Book

Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.

Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.

Ling and her collaborators have ambitions that are not merely explanatory but also transformative: they seek not merely to make sense of an existing conflict, but by diagnosing it in terms of blocked flows and interrupted balances, they seek to envision ways to resolve (or, better, to dis-solve) it. If the more typical IR explanatory social-scientific question would be ‘why is this India-China conflict as virulent as it is?,’ their question is instead ‘what does the present state of the conflict reveal about how to change things?’ The transformative question encompasses the explanatory question and presses it onto novel terrain; call the results ‘explanation-plus.’ —Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Editor, Configurations Series, University of Michigan Press and Professor, School of International Service, American University

About the Authors

L. H. M. Ling is Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York, USA.

Adriana Abdenur is a Fellow with the Igarapé Institute, in Rio de Janeiro, and a Productivity Scholar with the Brazilian National Council for Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq).

Payal Banerjee is an Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

Nimmi Kurian is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, India, and India Representative, India China Institute, The New School, New York.

Mahendra P. Lama is a Professor in the School of International Studies at Jawarhalal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India.

Li Bo is a part-time consultant for environmental grant-making in China and chief editor of the Green Cover Book: Annual Review of China’s Environment, a Chinese publication. At the same time, he runs a small organic farm by Lake Huron in Canada.

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The Global Democracy Recession: Can it be Reversed?
2017-05-03 18:00 - 19:30
The Global Democracy Recession: Can it be Reversed?

A TALK WITH CARL GERSHMAN

Wed, May 3, 2017 – 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Johnson/Kaplan Lecture Hall (#404), 66 West 12th St, NY

Three decades after the historic “third wave” of democratization, global democracy is in retreat and authoritarianism has made alarming gains. Can the momentum of global democratization be revived?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Carl Gershman is the president of the Washington DC-based National Endowment for Democracy, an institution with the mission to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through non-governmental efforts. The World Movement for Democracy, which was founded under his leadership in India in 1999, held its fifth global assembly in Kyiv in 2008. Prior to assuming the position with the Endowment, Mr. Gershman was Senior Counselor to the United States Representative to the United Nation. Mr. Gershman has lectured extensively and written articles and reviews on foreign policy issues for leading international publications, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His work in advancing democracy has been recognized worldwide and on behalf of NED, he has accepted awards from the governments of Poland, Romania, Korea, Lithuania and from numerous NGOs internationally. A frequent visitor to Ukraine, he most recently traveled there in April 2015. Born in New York City in 1943, he received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1965 and M.Ed. from Harvard University in 1968.

Opening and Welcome:

David Van Zandt
President of The New School

Discussants:

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Michael E. Gellert Professor
Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research

Sukhadeo Thorat
Chairman
Indian Council of Social Science Research Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Sanjay Ruparelia
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Politics, New School for Social Research

China: End of the Reform Era w/ Carl Minzner
2017-05-01 16:00 - 18:00
China: End of the Reform Era

A Public Talk by Professor Carl Minzner

Monday, May 1st, 20174:00-6:00 pmOrozco Room (712), 66 West 12th St, New York

Join ICI for an exciting talk by University of Fordham law professor Carl Minzner as he discusses the core factors that have characterized China’s ending reform era. Professor Minzner’s recent publications include “China After the Reform Era” and “The Rise and Fall of Chinese Legal Education”.

About the Talk:

China’s reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it – political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth – are unraveling. Since the early 1990s, Beijing’s leaders have set their face against fundamental political reform of China’s one-Party system. On the surface, this has been a success. The past three decades have seen political turmoil topple former Communist East bloc regimes, internal unrest overtake Mideast nations, and populist movements rise to challenge established Western democracies. China, in contrast, has appeared a relative haven of stability and growth. But a closer look at China’s reform era reveals a different truth. Over the past three decades a frozen political system has fueled both the rise of entrenched interests within the Communist Party itself, and the systematic underdevelopment of institutions of governance among state and society at large. Economic cleavages have widened, social unrest worsened, and ideological polarization deepened. Now, to address these looming problems, China’s leaders are progressively cannibalizing institutional norms and practices that have formed the bedrock of the regime’s stability in the reform era. Uncertainty hangs in the air as a new future slouches towards Beijing to be born.

About the Speaker:

Carl Minzner is an expert in Chinese law and governance. He has written extensively on these topics in both academic journals and the popular press, including op-eds appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. Prior to joining Fordham, he was an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, he has served as Senior Counsel for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, International Affairs Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, and Yale-China Legal Education Fellow at the Xibei Institute of Politics and Law in Xi’an, China. He has also worked as an Associate at McCutchen & Doyle (Palo Alto, CA) and as a Law Clerk for Hon. Raymond Clevenger of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Book Launch w/ Jonathan Bach
2017-04-26 18:00 - 20:00
LEARNING FROM SHENZEN: CHINA’S POST-MAO EXPERIMENT FROM SPECIAL ZONE TO MODEL CITY

Please join us on Wednesday evening, April 26th, for a reception celebrating the publication of Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, edited by Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, & Jonathan Bach (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

This multidisciplinary volume presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. From an experimental site as the first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is now a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy, a UNESCO City of Design, and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. A city of contradictions, it embodies the spatial and temporal intricacies of the contemporary urban experience. The book explores especially how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation. Through cases of labor, architecture, gender, public health, politics, education, and more, this urban case study serves to explore critical problems for modern-day China and beyond.

The book just received prominent mention in the latest Economist magazine special feature on the Pearl River Delta.

Remarks by co-editor and author, Jonathan Bach, chair of the Global Studies Program (New School), Mark Frazier, Professor of Politics (New School), and special guest Na Fu, Luce Visiting Scholar in Urban Studies at Trinity College and head of the research department at the Shenzhen Center for Design.

Refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase at a discount.

Sponsored by the interdisciplinary programs in Global Studies, Urban Studies, and Environmental Studies, the India China Institute, the Department of Anthropology, and the Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Mountains and Sacred Landscapes Conference
2017-04-20 17:45 - 2017-04-23 14:00
The India China Institute (ICI) at The New School, the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC), American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) are excited to announce an international conference on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes at The New School in New York City from Thursday, April 20th to Sunday, April 23rd, 2017. The conference will include the latest research on the intersections of religion, nature and culture and will also feature a special presentation from the India China Institute’s three-year research project on Sacred Landscapes and Sustainable Futures in the Himalaya (Sacred Himalaya Initiative).

Diverse mountain communities from the Himalayas to the Andes to the Appalachians face growing pressures linked to social and ecological changes. Melting glaciers, shifting agricultural patterns, conflicts over mining and resource extraction, and risks to livelihoods, the consequences of increasingly erratic global climate change, pose unknown future challenges to many sacred landscapes, including mountain communities and ecosystems and those beings, human and nonhuman alike, who rely on these habitats. Scholars have even suggested we have entered a fundamentally new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene.

The conference seeks to critically explore how the idea of sacred landscapes is entangled with these communities, with a particular interest in topics related to mountain landscapes. Some of the issues we hope to explore include: major challenges and opportunities facing communities in the 21st century; religious conceptualizations of place and landscape; relationships between mountain spiritualities and peoples adapting to climate change; traditional ecological knowledge held by communities that can help address issues of social and ecological justice; the future of mountain and forest peoples; and the fate of more than human worlds inhabiting these diverse landscapes. What kinds of meanings shape and are shaped by the effects of climate change, mass extinction, human population growth, and the ecological degradation of mountains, forests, rivers, and other sacred landscapes? How do ritual activities linked to sacred landscapes respond to environmental challenges, or not? How do mountains—as highly biodiverse ecosystems, as critical sources of water, energy, and materials, as repositories of tradition, and as sacred beings—remain vital components in ongoing processes of religious change? How do understandings of the sacred manifest within and across different landscapes, such as deserts, rivers, or forests?

You can view and download the pdf version of the Conference Program.

The Myth and Dilemma of Public (公共 gōng gòng) Design
2017-03-31 18:30 - 20:30
PUBLIC LIVING ENVIRONMENTS: The Myth and Dilemma of Public (公共 gōng gòng) Design

A Lecture by Kin Wai Michael SIU

6:30-8:30 pm | Kellen Auditorium (#101), 66 Fifth Ave., The New School

Kin Wai Michael SIU will discuss the term “public” from the perspective of its more complex Chinese language equivalent—公共 (gōng gòng), examining how the interpretation of these constituent terms influences the design of public spaces. He will suggest that, for design researchers and practitioners, a re-thinking of the relationship between gōng and gòng can result in better public living environments.

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About the Speaker

Kin Wai Michael SIU is Chair Professor of Public Design and Leader of the Public Design Lab at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research areas include public design, user reception, inclusive design, and social innovation. In addition to publishing widely, he holds over 50 US and international patents and design registrations, and has received numerous invention and design awards.

Presented by School of Design Strategies, Parsons. The Stephan Weiss Lecture Series is made possible by an endowment established by The Karan-Weiss Foundation, Donna Karan, Gabrielle Karan, Corey Weiss, and Lisa Weiss. The spring 2017 Stephan Weiss Lecture is co-sponsored by India China Institute.

Kailash Cartographies | Closing Reception & Faculty Talk
2017-03-30 17:00 - 19:30
Sacred Landscapes Talk

Come listen as New School faculty members and ICI staff share their insights from fieldwork in India, Nepal and Tibet as part of a three-year Sacred Himalaya Initiative focused on religion, ecology and culture in the Himalayas. Faculty involved with ICI’s research project–Rafi Youatt (NSSR), Mark Larrimore (Lang), Nitin Sawhney (Media Studies) and Sreshta Rit Premnath (Parsons)–will talk about their experiences traveling in these sacred landscapes and how this work has influenced their own artistic and academic practices as well as their teaching. A photo presentation highlighting some of the key areas from the field research will be featured.

5:00-6:00 pm – Gallery Tour and Reception6:00-7:00 pm – Faculty Talk and Presentation

The opening reception and gallery tour will take place in the Aronson Gallery, 66 Fifth Ave. The talk will take place next door in the Kellen Auditorium.

Drinks and refreshments will be served. The event is free and will be Live streamed on the official New School channel. Watch it there.

This event is the final event for the Kailash Cartographies exhibition. Learn more about the month-long exhibit here.

A press release about the exhibit can be found here.

About the Exhibit

Kailash Cartographies is an exhibition of artists from India, China, Nepal, and the US exploring conceptions of sacred geography, particularly in the Himalayas. Devotees encounter the sacred through ritual, art, and acts of pilgrimage and circumambulation of mountains and temples. The artists in the exhibition pose questions about the nature of both the sacred and the secular by drawing on the points of connection with landscapes and lived worlds. The photographs, videos, works on paper and installations, deploy cartographic modes that are both personal and political.

The title of the exhibition refers to Mount Kailash, the symbolic center of the Buddhist and Bön cosmos and the seat of Shiva for Hindus. Although associated with a multiplicity of geographical sites and religious representations, its earthly manifestation is most often located in Tibet. “It is the simultaneously singular and plural aspect of this sacred geography that caught our imagination,” said Sreshta Rit Premnath, curator of the exhibition and participating artist. “Every gesture within such a geography is both specifically located yet can be powerfully invoked elsewhere.”

The exhibition emerges from a three-year research project of The New School’s India China Institute focused on Sacred Landscapes and Sustainable Futures in the Himalayas. In conjunction with this endeavor, a group of artists initiated creative explorations during 2015-2016. Many of the works in this exhibition were the direct result of a creative workshop convened in Kathmandu in March 2016. The exhibit is part of ICI’s ongoing Sacred Himalaya Initiative research project focused on Mount Kailash in Tibet.

Featured artists are Atul Bhalla, Kevin Bubriski, Vibha Galhotra, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Ashmina Ranjit, Nitin Sawhney, Radhika Subramaniam, Charwei Tsai & Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, Zheng Bo & Jiang Chao and Qiu Zhijie.

Presented by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the India China Institute.

Roundtable Discussion: Harvard-Yenching Institute Young Scholars
2017-03-29 16:00 - 18:00
The India China Institute is pleased to be hosting several emerging scholars from the Harvard-Yenching Institute. This is an exciting opportunity for New School members to learn about and provide feedback on the research being done by a new generation of scholars on the frontier of India-China scholarship.

Seating is limited, and an RSVP is required to attend.

Colloquium on the Economies and Societies of India and China - Ching Kwan Lee
2016-12-05 16:00 - 18:00
Colloquium on the Economies and Societies of India and China (CESIC)

“Authoritarian Precarization: Mapping the Labor Politics of Recognition, Regulation and Reproduction in China”

A Public Talk by Professor Ching Kwan Lee

Monday, December 5, 2016 | 4:00-6:00 pm Orozco Room (#712) 66 West 12th St., NY, NY

Professor Lee’s talk will analyze the making of precarity in China and identify the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. For each of the three periods of Chinese development since the Communist Revolution, viz. the Mao era of state socialism 1949-1979, the high-growth reform era 1980-2010, and the current period of crisis and restructuring since around 2010, she will discuss the changing forms and meanings of labor precarity, their political economic drivers, and the shifting and uneven capacity of popular struggling for the recognition, regulation and reproduction of labor.

About the Speaker:

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a Fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2013-14) and was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant (2010-2013). She was awarded the 2008 Sociology of Labor Book Award by the American Sociological Association (Labor and Labor Movement Section) for her book Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (UC Press, 2007). Her books include Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (Stanford University Press, 2007, edited with Guobin Yang) and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (Routledge 2007, edited).

FOOD, POWER AND POLITICS: A response to Roxy Paine’s Dinner of the Dictators, 1993-95
2016-11-29 18:00
One of The New School Art Collection’s most significant works will be installed on campus: Roxy Paine’s Dinner of the Dictators, 1993-95 from November 19, 2016 to January 4, 2017 in the Sheila Johnson Design Center’s Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery at 66 5th Avenue.This seminal work, recently restored by the artist, will act as a point of departure for a broader discussion of food, power, and politics, featuring Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University, Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, and moderated by Fabio Parasecoli, Associate Professor and Director of Food Studies Initiatives at The New School.

Sponsored by the University Art Collection, Parsons School of Design, the Food Studies Program, and the India China Institute at The New School.
