Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Studying 'global' China is challenging. For researchers trained in sinology, studying China's global entanglements demands new methodological approaches. For those coming from social science backgrounds, language barriers and limited historical and cultural knowledge present problems in researching China's global influence. In addition, scholars face both tightening restrictions in the PRC as well as heated discussions on the risks and benefits of cooperation in Western countries. The 'Studying Global China' workshop provides a platform to explore these issues, discuss research approaches, share challenges when conducting fieldwork, and learn about new tools for data analysis.

Are you about to finish your post-doc project or just started your PhD? An early stage China studies researcher or an up-and-coming social scientist engaged with some dimension of 'global' China? Meet other scholars over snacks and coffee, listen to inspiring lectures on contemporary issues, and learn from & about each other: Who is working on what? What are your experiences with fieldwork? How can you translate your academic research into policy advice? Join us at the HU Berlin for two days of debates and networking!

Please find the full program here.

Participation is open to all PhD students, post-docs, and other interested scholars. M.A./M.Sc. students may also participate (depending on capacity). Registration is possible until Oct 18, 2024. The workshop takes place at Humboldt University of Berlin (Auditorium, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum).

We would like to invite all PhD students to briefly present their experiences with fieldwork and/or present their research in informal group sessions. If you would like to participate in those sessions, please submit the relevant info in the registration platform.

In this event, historical sociologist Yueran Zhang will be joined in conversation by Joel Andreas and Rebecca Karl to discuss his dissertation and ongoing book project *, tentatively titled "Whither Socialism? Workers' Democracy and the Class Politics of China's Post-Mao Transition to Capitalism". Zhang's manuscript provides a distinct class-based explanation of China's transition from socialism to capitalism. Its overarching argument is that the way in which urban industrial workers – ideologically and rhetorically celebrated as the "leading class" of Chinese socialism – interacted with the Party-state in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s was a crucial causal ingredient in the making of China's transition to capitalism. Tracing a series of political contestations centered on the issue of workplace democracy, Zhang argues that the patterns and modes of interaction between workers and the Party-state during China's "long 1980s" shaped and derailed the Party leaders' efforts to pursue incipient marketization within the parameters of socialism, thereby making a full-blown transition to capitalism appear appealing to the ruling elite as the 1980s came to an end.

Yueran Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political economy, class analysis, theories of democracy and the state, and comparative studies of socialism(s), capitalism(s) and transitions in between. His previous research has been published in journals such as Theory and Society, Social Forces and New Labor Forum, as well as in the edited volume Proletarian China.

Discussants:

Joel Andreas (Johns Hopkins University)

Rebecca Karl (New York University)

Moderation:

Daniel Fuchs (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Ralf Ruckus

Please register here: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5cqce-qpjoiGdWWhiK-S1GMoYok0ySojxqg#/registration

* Those who are interested in reading Zhang's work in its dissertation
form can access it here.

State capacity is easily one of the most protean concepts in Chinese environmental governance, embodying a seemingly unequivocal virtue while harboring diverse interpretations. In this presentation, Yifei Li first proposes a typology of environmental state capacity and then draws from his empirical observations of nearly two dozen environmental or climate capacity-building programs from 2012 to 2023 in China. Finally, the presentation concludes with a discussion of the mismatch between the supply of capacity-building offerings and the demand for specific capacities from low-level officials. The supply-demand mismatch has significant implications for environmental governance in China.

Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. His research concerns various groups of people under China’s brand of state-led environmentalism. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Rachel Carson Center, and many other extramural sources. He is the lead author (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity, 2020). His recent work appears in Current Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, Sociology of Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, and other scholarly outlets. His work has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde, and other media.

The event will take place at: Humboldt University Berlin, Institute for Asian and African Studies, room 315, Invalidenstraße 118, Berlin

Online attendance is possible via Zoom.

Registration: https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/u5IrdOqhrz4rG9f79OJZtj-ZkZcrSYBSMbCu

What is enabled by reading problems in political economy of early-20th century China through Roberto Schwarz' concept of "misplacement" or "misplaced ideas"? My ongoing work on Wang Yanan, whose writings in the 1930s-1950s were central to a certain (non-Communist) Marxist specification of political economics in China, will engage this question as a theoretical-historical problematic. Wang's imminent critique of "capitalism in China/ Chinese capitalism" proceeded by problematizing the rampant reifications of the categories of capitalism in academic economics and social scientific work in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading Wang's critique through and with Schwarz can benefit from theoretical engagements with the latter's concerns over colonized knowledges, production of incommensurate temporalities through narrativity, and the ideological embodiments of capital in the commodity form of labor. As much an historical-theoretical excavation, this essay will also function as a critique of the present.

Rebecca E. Karl teaches history at New York University-NY. Her most recent book is China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020) and she is the author of a number of other books and articles about China's modern and contemporary history. She is a founding co-editor of the positionspolitics.org website, and a member of the Critical China Scholars collective.

The event will take place at: Humboldt University Berlin, Institute for Asian and African Studies, room 315, Invalidenstraße 118, Berlin.

Online attendance is possible via Zoom.

Registration:
hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/u5YscuGtqj0jH9E8MW5A3Twwm0Bd-0TIv7rE