China Centre Newsletter Archive - Hilary Term 2012

China Centre Newsletter - Hilary 2012

Welcome to the China Centre Newsletter Hilary 2012 Edition. 

 

NEWS UPDATE

  • We are pleased to welcome Dr Jane Hayward who has been appointed as a Post-doctoral Research Officer starting in Hilary Term.  Please see Jane’s profile at the end of this newsletter.
  • We are delighted to announce that Prof. Christine Wong has been made a Professor of Chinese Public Finance by the University, and Prof. Winnie Yip has been made Professor of Health Policy and Economics under the recent Recognition of Distinction exercise. 
  • Dr Xiaolan Fu has won a £550,000 project from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to investigate how technological innovation is diffused and adopted in Low-Income Countries (LICs). The award is part of a new joint programme between the ESRC and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) on economic growth in developing countries. One of the components of this project will examine the effect of external knowledge diffusion to LICs, in particular the productivity impact of South-South trade and FDI with a special focus on Chinese trade and FDI in Africa.
  • Dr Xiaolan Fu has won the Oxford University Teaching Excellence Award for Fieldwork in Hotplaces course together with colleagues in ODID and the Education Department. The course will be open to doctoral and MPhil students across the Social Sciences Division. The course was developed by Dr Xiaolan Fu and Professors Jocelyn Alexander, Stefan Dercon, Valpy FitzGerald and Ingrid Lunt. The award was presented to Dr Fu by Vice-Chancellor Andrew Hamilton at a ceremony at Convocation House.

NEW ACADEMIC VISITORS

  • Wang Chunchao, Associate Professor of the College of Economics at Jinan University, will be an academic visitor at the China Centre until July 2012.

Please contact the China Centre administrator if you are interested in getting in contact with any of these visitors. 

 

PAST EVENTS

  • Dr Xiaolan Fu co-organised a Distinguished Visitor Public Lecture given by Professor Jeffrey Sachs on The Price of Civilization on Wednesday 7 December 2011. The lecture was followed by a panel discussion with Professors Sir Adam Roberts (President of British Academy), Adrian Wood (former Chief Economist of DFID), Valpy FitzGerald (Head of ODID) and Peter Tufano (Dean of the Said Business School) and chaired by Professor Ian Goldin (President of Oxford Martin School). The lecture is jointly organized by the Programme for Technology and Management for Development, the Oxford Martin School and Green Templeton College.
  • Dr Paul Irwin Crookes was interviewed by the BBC News channel on the 2nd November, on the eve of the G20 Summit in Cannes. The interview was aimed at exploring EU China relations in the context of the Eurozone's financial crisis, and the potential of a role for China to get involved. The interview examined China's growing global significance and the importance of EU trade in China's economy, as well as exploring possible motives behind China contributing to some form of financial assistance package.
  • Prof. Yang Long, of Nankai University, gave a lecture at St Antony’s College on the 31st January on "Governing China’s Regions: Mutual Conflicts or Cooperation?" This event was co-hosted by the Contemporary Chinese Studies Programme and St Antony’s College Asian Studies Centre.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

internal events

  • The Department of Economics and the China Centre will hold weekly seminars every Wednesday in the Manor Road Building.  For more details see http://www.chinacentre.ox.ac.uk/events/seminars
  • The Institute for Chinese Studies and the Contemporary China Studies Programme will be co-hosting weekly seminars every Thursday.  These will be held in the ICS Room 207.
  • The Argo-EMR research group will be running a seminar series on the theme of "Managing Malaria and other Epidemics in pre-modern China" this term. See http://www.chinacentre.ox.ac.uk/events/seminars for more information.
  • March 29th & 30th, 2012 – The 2nd Oxford Interdisciplinary Desert Conference will take place at the School of Geography. For more conference details, registration and abstract submittal please visit the conference website: http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/news/events/deserts/

The conference features a special program on ‘TE Lawrence’s Oxford’ on March 28th in the afternoon. This event is co-sponsored by the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library and will include a private tour of their Lawrence-related collection.

  • On the 30 March – 1 April 2012 the Contemporary Chinese Studies Programme (CCSP) is hosting a conference on “Power in the Making: Governing and Being Governed in Contemporary China” at Balliol College.

 

external events

  • In March-April 2012 Craig Clunas, Professor of the History of Art and a member of the China Centre, will deliver the Sixty-First A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington DC.  The lecture series will be entitled ‘Chinese Painting and Its Audiences’, and will provide a new account of the ways in which the category of ‘Chinese painting’ has been constructed by different types of viewers, both inside and outside China, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century.  The dates and titles of the individual lectures, which are open to the public and generally attract a large audience, are:

 

11 March:       Beginning and Ending in Chinese Painting

18 March:       The Gentleman

25 March:       The Emperor

1 April:            The Merchant

15 April:          The Nation

22 April:          The People

           

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established in 1949 ‘to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the fine arts’; previous Mellon lecturers with Oxford connections include Sir Kenneth Clark, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lord David Cecil and Sir John Boardman.  This will be only the second time the Mellon Lectures will deal with a Chinese topic; in 1998 Lothar Ledderose lectured on ‘Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art’.  The lectures are published in the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press, and podcasts of recent series are available at http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

  • Dr Dirk Meyer, University Lecturer in Chinese Philosophy, will be involved as an editor of a new Dictionary project for Classical Chinese: Brill's Dictionary of Classical Chinese. Leiden: Brill. The dictionary will be published as an online service and in print, and Dirk will be the managing editor of the first volume A Student Dictionary of the Early Period with the publication date 2014.
  • Oxford University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton, will be travelling to Asia in May 2012. His trip will include meetings and events in Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo and Kyoto and is aimed at deepening connections between the University and the region, meeting alumni in the various locations, connecting with institutional partners and highlighting Oxford University’s strong research links with institutions, and presence in, Hong Kong, Beijing and Japan.

In Hong Kong, the VC will be meeting with alumni and other key partners. In Beijing, he will meet with representatives of the Chinese government and institutional partners based in Beijing, visit the recently opened Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Beijing Office and attend an event organised for one of Oxford’s fastest growing alumni communities.

In Japan, Professor Hamilton will be attending the Uehiro Foundation Conference and meeting with alumni and other partners.

  • Congratulations to Elizabeth Hsu who has recently been promoted to Professor of Anthropology.
  • Call for papers – “International Conference on Macau Narratives”.

The Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the New University of Lisbon are organising this conference on the 8-10 May 2013 to mark the 500-year anniversary of the arrival of Jorge Alvares in China and of Sino-Portuguese relations. Please see the attachment for more details.

Call for papers – “Global media and public diplomacy in Sino-Western relations”. The Asia Institute and the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne, and Radio Australia of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, are co-organising the 2012 Melbourne Conference on China on the 30-31 May 2012. Please see the attachment for more details.

 

  • China Centre Graduate Research and Travel Grant - Au Ping Reyes Award

The China Centre is a very fortunate recipient of a generous fund from Thomas Au and Anselmo Reyes.  The fund is in honour of Mr Au Ping Hang and Dr Angelita Trinidad-Reyes.  It will be able to disperse grants up to £500 for travel-related expenses incurred in conducting research in China, and grants up to £1,500 for larger research projects. The deadline for application is 12.00 noon, 1st March 2012. For more details please see the attachment.

  • In MT2011 the post-docotral anthropology research group at Oxford on Eastern medicines and religions ArgO-EMR, which in 2006 was founded with John Fell seed monies, has become quite vibrant and lively. Apart from the AHRC senior researcher Dr Katherine Swancutt working on icons and innovation in the shamanic practices of the Nuosu in Southwest China and the Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow Dr Gabriel Lefevre working on plant-words in medical practices of Highland Madagascar, Dr Mingji Cuomu has joined us for three years as a Wellcome Trust post-doctoral fellow, in order to document one of the three modes of traditional Tibetan medical education, so-called "textual initiation", which involves apart from memorising texts a blessing of the lineage holder of the text. 

Furthermore, ArgO-EMR is hosting three visiting scholars from East Asia: Prof Yousang Baik, associate professor in Chinese medical literature, from Kyunghee University in Seoul, who will spend six months of his sabbatical with us, while preparing future fieldwork-based research among rural traditional Korean medical doctors; Prof Wu Zhongping, associate professor at the Shanghai TCM University, who together with Profs Wu Dunxu and Elisabeth Hsu is collating a Handbook on the usages of qinghao in different genres of the pre-modern Chinese medical literature (bencao, fangji, yi'an, etc.); and Ms Xu Fei, a research student of Prof Guo Wu at the University of Sichuan and with affiliation at the Institute of Chinese Studies, who is currently documenting and analysing the 307 Yao manuscripts on Daoist and other texts for maintaining wellbeing in the domestic sphere in the Bodleian library. 

The 2011 Argo-EMR conference was on "Korea’s integrated healthcare". It was co-organised with the KMD and ISCA research student Seonsam NA and funded by Green Templeton College (small academic grant). It was the first of its kind in the UK, and, to our knowledge, in the academy of Western countries more generally. Three young scholars who had completed doctoral theses in English on Korean medical developments were flown in and their work was commented on by two senior colleagues from this University. 

 

PUBLICATIONS

Dr Xiaolan Fu, Director of the Programme for Technology and Management for Development and UL in Development Studies has several papers published or forthcoming in academic journals.

1.  Fu, X. ‘Managerial knowledge spillovers from FDI through the diffusion of management practices’, Journal of Management Studies, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01036.x.

2. Fu, ‘How does openness affect the importance of incentives for innovation?’ Research Policy, forthcoming.

3. Fu, Helmers and Zhang, ‘The two faces of foreign management capabilities’, Review of International Business, 2012, vol 21, no 1. 71-88.

4. Fu, Li and Johnson, ‘Internal and external sources of tacit knowledge: evidence from the optical fibre and cable industry in China’, Journal of Chinese Economics and Business Studies, 2011, v9, no 4, 383-400.

Dr Dirk Meyer, University Lecturer in Chinese Philosophy, has published his monograph: Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China. Leiden: Brill. Please see the following link: http://www.brill.nl/philosophy-bamboo

 

NEW CHINA ACADEMICS

Dr John Jenner

John Jenner and Vietnam Communist Party Central Committee Secretary and Chairman of the External Relations Commission (Bí thư Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam Trung ương và Chủ tịch Ủy ban Quan hệ đối ngoại) Hồng Hà, Hà Nội, 28/02/2008.

 

Dr John Jenner is Economic and Social Research Council Fellow at the China Centre. He received the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Studies from the University of Oxford. John previously held a fellowship at the University of Massachusetts. In addition to the above universities, he has taught at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, the New England Centre for Homeless Veterans, and the William Joiner Centre for the Study of War and Social Consequences.

John has pluralist scholarly interests in the Asia-Pacific. His three-year research project at the China Centre examines Sino-American relations via trends as well as discrete developments in the negotiated settlements of the Korean War, the Indochina Wars, and the sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea. ASEAN’s relations with China and the United States are a prime element of this work. John’s doctoral thesis is the first internationally researched, archive-based account of the complex evolution of United States-Vietnam relations from war to nascent strategic alliance; it is contracted for publication in 2012.

In addition to readying his doctoral thesis for publication and pursuing the project on Sino-American relations, John is preparing two journal articles: the first is co-written with a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and titled “History, Policy-making, and the South China Sea, 1945 – 2002;” the second is co-written with a Chinese military historian and titled “Ambiguous Legacy: China, Vietnam and the Indochina Wars.” He has a chapter forthcoming in an edited collection titled Diplomats at War (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers), and a review of recent monographs on Christianities in China contracted to The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. John’s study on the founding of the Anglo-American intelligence alliance was published in Diplomatic History. He is contributing to an international collaboration between selected scholars and practitioners that seeks to advance the peaceful settlement of sovereignty disputes in maritime commons via interdisciplinary researches.

 

Dr Jane Hayward

Jane Hayward joined the China Centre in January as a Post-doctoral Research Officer working with Professor Vivienne Shue. She holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from New York University. Her dissertation, "State of the Peasantry: The Agrarian Question in Contemporary China," examined the status and role of the peasantry in policy debates on the reforms since 1978. While carrying out her dissertation research in Beijing, Jane held a post as Senior Research Student at the Centre for Research on the Chinese Peasant Question, Beijing Normal University, and was a visiting scholar at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She was also affiliated to the China Research Centre for Comparative Politics and Economics. Recently, Jane taught on the International Politics course for the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS. At Oxford, she is teaching the Politics and Government of China option, and researching the issue of rural-urban relations.