Each year, the CSCC invites leading experts to Penn to present their research and share their knowledge about contemporary China. Typically scheduled for Wednesday afternoons 4:30-6 pm, speakers will deliver their remarks and then entertain questions from the audience. Attendance is open to the entire Penn community. Announcements about upcoming talks will be posted on the CSCC website and disseminated via the Center’s listserv. To be added to the listserv, please visit our signup page https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/cscc-announce.
Upcoming Speaker Series
WeChat, Diaspora, and a New Chinese Transnationalism
Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Cultural Anthropology, University of Technology, Sydney
Co-sponsored by Center on Digital Culture and Society, Annenberg School for Communication…
Planning Healthy Cities in China
Wang Lan, Chair Professor of Healthy City Science and Planning, Tongji University
Co-sponsored by Penn Institute of Urban Research
Professor Lan Wang’s research focuses on the mechanisms of urban built environment affecting…
Coding Elites in China
Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
This talk explores the pivotal role of software engineers within China’s techno-developmental regime. As China’s internet-related sectors expand, software engineers have emerged as critical players, building the…
Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre
Yang Su, Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine
Professor Su discussed his recent book Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression and the 1989…
The War for Chinese Talent in America: The Politics of Technology and Knowledge in Sino-U.S. Relations
David Zweig, Professor Emeritus, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Professor Zweig discusses his new book The War for Chinese Talent in America: The Politics of Technology and Knowledge…
Whither the U.S. One China Policy? Perceptions, Interests, and Tensions over the Taiwan Strait
Dalei Jie, Associate Professor of International Studies, Peking University
In recent years, China has accused the U.S. of “hollowing out” its own one China policy, while the Biden administration has insisted that its one China policy has not changed. The talk establishes an analytical…
How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control: Agency, Cognition, and the Politics of Information
Dali Yang, William Claude Reavis Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
In this book talk, Dali Yang, author of Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control(…
TBA
Courtney J. Fung, Associate Professor of Security Studies & Criminology, Macquarie University, Australia
Adversarial Comparativism: The Role of Emotion in US-China Comparative Law Projects
Matthew Erie, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, Oxford University
Theodore Roosevelt once wrote “comparison is the thief of joy.” Nowhere may this be more apparent than in the US-China relationship. Whether it’s the size of economies or navies, Olympic gold medal count, box office…
TBA
Valerie Karplus, Professor of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
Past Speaker Series
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State
Yingyao Wang, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
Professor Wang will discuss her new book titled Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats…
High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy
Angela Zhang, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong
Co-sponsored by Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition, Penn Carey Law.
China has long been recognized as a powerhouse in cultivating Big Tech firms, emerging as a formidable rival to…
The Rise of Foreign Relations Law in China: Conceiving Law and the World
Chen Yifeng, Associate Professor, Peking University Law School
China’s enactment of a Foreign Relations Law in 2023 is an important move towards legalization of China’s conduct of foreign relations. The law is a milestone in its consolidating several earlier law-making endeavors…
Political Centralization under Xi Jinping: Strategic Adaptation by Local Cadres
Jessica Teets, Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College
Xi Jinping has been centralizing policymaking and supervision of local cadres beginning in 2016. Using survey data of 1,500 cadres in 28 provinces, we analyze the impact of these institutional changes on local cadres…
China’s Role in the World in the Year of Elections
Kishore Mahbubani, Perry World House Visiting Fellow, Former President of the United Nations Security Council
As people around the world go to the polls and elect new government officials, leaders in Beijing may need to navigate new political landscapes around the world. Candidates in elections from Taiwan to the United…
The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class
Teemu Ruskola, Professor of Law, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
This talk draws on a book project by the same title. It seeks to offer a structural account of the remarkable political and economic transformation of the Chinese working class since 1949. My title is a deliberate…
China's State-Owned Enterprises: Leadership, Reform, and Internationalization
Wendy Leutert, Assistant Professor of International Studies, Indiana University
Why do Chinese state-owned enterprises routinely respond to central-level goals and policies in different ways, and why do their reform trajectories vary across firms and over time? This talk introduces a leadership…
The 20th Party Congress: Toward Personalistic Autarky?
Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University
The Twentieth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held in October 2022, will go down as the congress at which Xi Jinping secured a third term, perhaps opening the way for the restoration of life-long tenure.…
Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong
Michael Davis, Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
A lot has been written about the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the aggressive police crackdown offered in response. Much less has been written about the more severe assault on liberal values and institutions that…
The Domestic Sources of the Deterioration in US-China Relations
DA Wei, Professor of International Relations, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy, Tsinghua University
Domestic conditions have changed in dramatic fashion in both the US and China over the past two decades, leading to major shifts in domestic outlook and strategies. This talk will examine these shifts, respectively,…
