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.
Past Speaker Series
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,…
Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
Lynette Ong, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing…
China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion
Ketian Zhang, Assistant Professor of International Security, George Mason University
Professor Ketian Zhang discusses her new book, China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion (Cambridge University…
Hostage Diplomacy and U.S.-China Relations: The Legacy of The Peking Express
James Zimmerman, Partner, Perkins Coie LLP
Co-organized by Center for East Asian Studies
We are pleased to announce a book talk by Beijing-based author and lawyer James Zimmerman about his book, The…
‘Love Happens for a Reason in This World. So Does Hatred’: Affective Spaces as an Analytical Framework for the Study of Contemporary China
Shih-Diing Liu, Professor of Communication, University of Macau
In this presentation, I will elucidate how and why emotions and affect open up new avenues for understanding contemporary Chinese society, politics, and media. This discussion focuses on the analytical foundation for…
Viewing History from the Inside: Key Episodes and Crises in US-China Relation, 1985-2020
John Culver, Former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, retired CIA analyst, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow
John K. Culver is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) senior intelligence officer with thirty-five years of experience as a leading…
