[SYMPOSIUM EVENT]: Seeing Like an Empire: Chinese Political Thought and Practice in Changing Times
The Centre for Chinese Research would like to introduce our symposium for this academic year titled “Seeing Like an Empire: Chinese Political Thought and Practice in Changing Times.” This symposium will cover a wide range of periods and topics from the Late Imperial Period to Xi Jinping. We will be looking at Chinese political thought through the lens of New Sinology, by taking thought and experience from the last 1,000 years seriously in its own right and putting it in conversation with 20th century political thought and practice in China.
On Wednesday November 17, 2021, from 10AM to 12:00PM (PST), join the online symposium event hosted by UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research. Our first guest for this symposium will be Dr. Timothy Brook, the author of Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (2018), Great State: China and the World (2020), and Completing the Map of the World: Cartographic Interaction between China and Europe (全圖: 中國與歐洲之間的地圖學互動) (2020).
Dr. Brook will give a lecture that takes a comparative approach to Qu Jun’s writings in the Ming Dynasty, and the use of it in the Qing Dynasty, with Hu Shi. He will be joined by discussant Dr. Leigh Jenco, Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics.
Please see below a title and an abstract of the lecture that Dr. Brook will be giving on November 17:
What was Lost: From Ming Statecraft to Republican Reform to Party Dictatorship
Abstract: What determines the lawfulness of a state when that state is Chinese? The answer has to take account of the legal foundations of state governance before the 20th century as well as the 20th-century efforts to craft a Chinese version of republicanism before that experiment was taken hostage by the party dictatorship of first the Nationalists and then the Communists. Once that history is understood, we see how much has been lost, and when we do, the excuses we fall back on to overlook the unlawful actions of the contemporary state must fall away.
Please stay tuned for our other events in the new year featuring Dr. Vivienne Shue (Oxford University) and Yuhua Wang (Harvard University).
Date & Time
November 17, 2021, from 10AM to 12:00PM (PST)
November 17, 2021, from 5:00PM to 7:00PM (GMT)
“Location”
The event will be hosted via Zoom. Participants will receive a link to access the event 24 hours prior to the event via email. Registration is required.
*If you do not receive the event link 24 hours prior to the event, please email Lisa Ren at lisaren@mail.ubc.ca
Registration Required on Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50ld-quqTgtGdbYRAbJBrpnnd1kWGdEoANH or https://tinyurl.com/3xzz5h33.
Featured speaker bio:
Dr. Timothy Brook: Dr. Timothy Brook is a historian of China whose work has focused on the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but extends to issues that span the period from the Mongol occupation of China in the 13th century to the Japanese occupation of China in the 20th. In addition to serving as the general editor of Harvard University Press’ History of Imperial China, he has published extensively on China in the world. A co-edited volume on the inter-polity relations of Inner and East Asia, Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His most recent book, Great State: China and the World, appeared in Britain and France (the French edition under the title of Le Léopard de Kubilai Khan) in September 2019 and on this side of the Atlantic by HarperCollins in March 2020. The French edition was awarded the Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in October 2020.
Moderator bio:
Dr. Timothy Cheek: 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. His most recent book The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives, which was edited with Klaus Mühlhahn and Hans J. van de Ven investigates the histories of ten engaging and personal stories that document the living in and with the most powerful political machine ever created—the Chinese Communist Party. He is also part of the Xinjiang Documentation Project (https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca/), co-directed with Dr. Guldana Salimjan at SFU, which collects, preserves, assess and makes available materials on the extrajudicial detentions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang.
Discussant bio:
Dr. Leigh Jenco: Dr. Leigh Jenco is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government, at the London School of Economics. Her research interests span Chinese thought, the colonial history of Taiwan, political philosophy, and global intellectual history. Her current research explores the relationship between late Ming neo-Confucian ideas, particularly of the Taizhou school of Yangming learning, to the articulation of otherness and equality in thinkers such as Jiao Hong and Chen Di. Her recent publications include the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford UP, 2020) and Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015).
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