[Symposium Event] How to overcome diversity and create homogeneity- the CCP’s current minority policies in historical and international perspectives

Join us on March 18th for the final session of our 2021-2022 Symposium, Seeing Like an Empire: Chinese Political Thought and Practice in Changing Times.

Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik will discuss what we observe in Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia as current minority policies of the CCP by relating to on-going academic debates in the PRC and the repertoires of historical as well as international experiences they draw onto. She argues that the experience of the dissolution of the Soviet Union provoked a re-assessment of minority policies pursued since 1978 under Deng Xiaoping. While Xi Jinping propagates the idea that economic development is not enough to prevent minorities from going against the Han majority academics are still discussing intensively to which degree the creation of a homogeneous nation state is feasible and possible in a multi-ethnic setting. This discussion can be traced back to the Qing dynasty and went through several rounds of re-defining minority policies during the period between 1911 and 1949. However, never before in history have rulers in China dared to impose homogeneity by coercion. Xi Jinping is the first ruler to allow for this to happen.

Joining Dr. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik will be commentator Dr. Guldana Salimjan of Simon Fraser University and moderator Dr. Timothy Cheek of UBC.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik is professor emeritus at the Department for East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, and programme director for China at CSA (Center for Strategic Analysis, Austria). She is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science Austria and a member of its Academy Council. She is best known internationally for her research on Chinese and CCP historiography, as well as on politics and memory in the PRC (with a special focus on the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution). Recently, she has been finalizing a book on the history of East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries and has been quite active in public discussions on the changing role of the PRC in the current international order. She teaches at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna School of International Studies.

Commentator Bio

Dr. Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department. She completed her PhD at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC in 2018. She conducts interdisciplinary research with a focus on ethnicity, nationalism, gender, place, memory, and belonging in Chinese Central Asia, drawing particularly on ethnographic analysis of Northern Xinjiang. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on ethnic and gender politics in China, history and memories in Global Asia, and feminist research methods. She is director of the Xinjiang Documentation Project.

Moderator Bio

Dr. Timothy Cheek is a Professor with the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Department of History, and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research and Department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party
Date, Time and Location
This talk will be held on March 18th at 9:30 am PST/12:30 pm EST/6:30 pm CET via Zoom. Register here