China Centre Newsletter Archive - Michaelmas Term 2012

China Centre Newsletter - Michaelmas 2012

NEWS UPDATE
• Contemporary Chinese Studies are delighted to welcome Dr Anthony Garnaut, Dr Sam Geall and Dr Reza Hasmath.

• The Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre Building ground breaking ceremony took place on Monday 8th October.

 

NEW ACADEMIC VISITORS

• Nick Smith, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University, has joined us for a year. His areas of specialization include human settlement transition, Chinese urbanization and urban planning, urban-rural integrated planning, periurbanism, international planning education and development politics.

• Choon Piew Pow, Assistant Professor based in the Geography Department at the National University of Singapore will be with us until September 2013. His field of research is "The Planning of “eco-cities” and environmental governance in China”.

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

 

PAST EVENTS

• Professor Wong organized a workshop on The Challenge of Reforming China’s Municipal Finance – What Are the Next Steps?  The workshop was held on September 29 – Oct 1, and brought together some of the top young scholars in China working on issues related to municipal finance.  Among the participants were the Dean and two faculty members of the School of Government, Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou); the Vice Dean from the School of Public Administration, Zhejiang University (Hangzhou); and a professor of economics from Renmin University (Beijing).

• Prof Andrew Goudie and Dr Xiaolan Fu have co-organised the 2012 Oxford Forum on China and the World Economy. Distinguished speakers at the Forum include: Yongding Yu, David Vines, Angang Hu, Alan Winters, Stephen Perry, John Farnell, Shujie Yao and Kerry Brown. For details of the program please see http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/pdf/pdf-research/ocf-2012-programme.

• The Technology and Management for Development Centre (TMD) has signed an agreement to pursue joint research and teaching with the Centre for Innovation and Development (CID) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in a ceremony in Beijing early this year. The event was attended by Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton and Professor Fang Xin, Vice Secretary and member of the Presidium of CAS. The TMD centre and CASCID have already collaborated on several joint research activities

• Dr Xiaolan Fu has been interviewed by several media organisations including China Daily, BBC News, Evening Standard and Caixin Magazine on China's outward direct investment. She also gave a lecture on Open Innovation in China at the Haas Business School, UC Berkeley in early October.

• The Argo-EMR workshop 2012 on "Icons and innovation in the reading and interpreting of ritual texts" was held on 12-13 Sept. For more information click here.
http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/research/medical-and-ecological-anthropology/eastern-medicines-and-religions/argo-emr/seminars-and-events/upcoming-workshop-icons-and-innovation/

• The Final Leverhulme Conference, 'Understanding Contemporary China: Glancing Back and Looking Forward', took place at Merton College on the 7-8th July. This event marked the end of the Leverhulme Trust's 10 year grant in support of research at Oxford on contemporary China and was an opportunity to celebrate and reflect upon the work carried out under the grant. Speakers were invited to look back at past projects, and look forward to consider questions of China’s future, and of the future of China studies at Oxford, and beyond. This event was organised by Prof Jessica Rawson, Prof Vivivienne Shue and Dr Jane Hayward.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

internal events
• The Mok Hing Yiu Lecture on "Hong Kong's Destiny: China's Metropolis, Asia's World City" will take place on the 16th October, 6pm to 7pm in the Maplethorpe Building at St Hugh's College. The lecture will be delivered by Mr Stephen Lam, OBE, GBM, GBS, JP, and Former Chief Secretary of the Hong Kong Government. For further information please contact St Hugh's College Development Office development.office@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk

• The CEO of Huawei Technologies (UK) will give the Technology & Management for Development Centre (TMD) Distinguished Guest Lecture on Innovation and Internationalisation of Chinese firms in the afternoon of Nov 8th at ODID, Mansfield Road. Please contact Mafalda Picarra at mafalda.picarra@qeh.ox.ac.uk for further details.

• The Institute for Chinese Studies and the Contemporary China Studies Programme will be co-hosting weekly seminars every Thursday.  Please check the Events section of the website for further details.

• The Asian Studies Centre and Taiwan Studies Michaelmas term seminar series has been announced. Please see this link for further details.

• The four Argo-EMR seminars in Michaelmas Term 2012, held on Wednesdays in weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, in the Pauling Centre, 58a Banbury Road, will all be given by the AHRC researcher Dr. Katherine Swancutt: "On Ethnographic Dreams, Anthropological Ethics and Contingency in Southwest China". The seminar is open to all members of the University. http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/research/medical-and-ecological-anthropology/eastern-medicines-and-religions/argo-emr/seminars-and-events/

 

external events
• In August, Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright spoke at a conference on Legal Empowerment in China (hosted in Beijing), on "Citizens' responses to pollution: patterns of social and political embeddedness in two Chinese villages". This Autumn, she will deliver several talks. In October, she will speak at an international conference on eco-health in Kunming and at Xiamen University (China), on "The challenges of applied anthropology and environmental health research in rural China", in a conference on "Creating a Culture of Health: Applying Medical Anthropology and Medical Ethnomusicology". In November she will speak at the yearly FORHEAD conference (Forum for Environment Health and Development) in Beijing, and on "Collective illness experiences and individual uncertainty: rural industrial pollution and lay epidemiology in China" at an interdisciplinary disciplinary workshop on "Asian Environments: Governing Nature Negotiation Knowledge, Constructing Subjectivities" hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany.

• Prof Rosemary Foot will be giving papers at the following - Vrije Universiteit Brussels on October 4th; Beijing, China Institute for International Studies-Foresight/China Symposium, November 2-4th; University of Sydney's China Centre, December 6-7th

• Professor Christine Wong has been invited to give a lecture in November to the Scottish Parliament's Parliamentary Cross-Party Group on China.

• Call for Papers - "Cross-Strait Relations in an Era of technological Change: Security, Economic and Cultural Dimensions".  Dr Paul Irwin Crookes and Dr Jan Knoerich are organising this conference at St Antony's College on Tuesday 5th March 2013.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Prof Christine Wong has been invited to join the OECD Advisory Panel on Budgeting and Public Expenditures.

• With support from a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, a British Academy Small Grant and a John Fell grant, Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright is carrying out extended fieldwork in the Summer and Autumn on pollution, illness and rural activism in Hunan, Yunnan and Guangdong. She is also continuing fieldwork on urbanization and land disputes in Sichuan.

• Within Argo-EMR, Prof. Wu Zhongping, who is in the course of translating qinghao as recommended in all extant recipes (fangji) he could locate in China's libraries (at present ca 202) has after one year of collaboration with Prof. Elisabeth Hsu returned to the Shanghai TCM University, where he will finalise what has now turned into a three-year project. This translation project has newly attracted further funding from MMV (medicines for malaria venture), a nonprofit foundation created to discover, develop and deliver new, affordable antimalarial drugs through effective public-private partnerships. http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/research/medical-and-ecological-anthropology/eastern-medicines-and-religions/the-herbal-anti-malarial-qinghao/

• Ms Xu Fei, who has successfully completed her task of establishing an electronic resource of the ca 300 Yao manuscripts on Daoist rituals in the Bodleian library, by photographing them page by page during the past year, will return in early October to Sichuan University where she will finalise her doctoral studies with Prof Guo Wu. http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/research/medical-and-ecological-anthropology/eastern-medicines-and-religions/analysing-manuscripts-of-yao-nationality-daoism/

• Prof. Zhang Jianjun, from the University of Shanghai has newly joined the group. He is an art historian, a specialist on the Shijing, who is interested in exploring the extent to which a medical anthropological perspective may proof useful to the interpretation of poems involving health-related body techniques and medical issues.  http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/research/medical-and-ecological-anthropology/eastern-medicines-and-religions/the-body-and-medicine-in-the-shijing-book-of-odes/

• In August, Sir Richard Peto was awarded the "Friendship Award" from the State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs in Beijing.

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

Dr Xiaolan Fu has published the following journal papers:
Fu, X., Kaplinsky, R. and Zhang, J. 'The impact of China on low and middle income countries' export prices in industrial-country markets'. World Development, 2012, v40 (8), 1483-96 (lead paper).
Heffernan, S., Fu, X. and Fu, M. 'Determinants of financial innovation in the UK', Applied Economics, 45 (24), 3399-3410, DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2012.711942.

Prof Christine Wong has recently published two papers with the World Bank:
"Toward Building Performance-Oriented Management in China:  the Critical Role of M&E and the Long Road Ahead," ECD Working Paper Series, No. 27.  The World Bank, Independent Evaluation Group, September 2012. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTEVACAPDEV/Resources/wp_27_china_me.pdf.
°Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation in China", The World Bank PREM Notes, Special Series on the Nuts and Bolts of M&E Systems, No. 21, September 2012.

Prof Rosemary Foot recently published a new book ¡°US-China Interactions in Global Governance and International Organizations" in David Shambaugh (ed.) Tangled Titans: the United States and China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).

Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright has recently published the following journal articles:

Rural China in ruins: The rush to urbanize China's countryside is opening a moral battleground Anthropology Today 28(4), pages 8¨C13, August 2012 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2012.00884.x

Learning to Live with Pollution: The Making of Environmental Subjects in a Chinese Industrialized Village The China Journal No. 68 (July 2012), pp. 106-124 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666582

Dr Karl Gerth's "beautiful balance between academics and athleticism" was the subject of the following story in Shanghai's Wenhui bao. http://whb.news365.com.cn/tp/201208/t20120807_600302.html

 

NEW CHINA ACADEMICS

Mr Sam Geall
Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography of China

I started at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies in September 2012, jointly appointed with the School of Geography and the Environment. My teaching in both schools focuses on China's responses - civic and governmental - to environmental challenges, including those posed by climate change. My academic interests include media reporting and the public sphere in contemporary China, the politics and framing of climate change, public participation in environmental decision-making and citizen science.

I am also Executive Editor of chinadialogue.net, a bilingual online journal dedicated to open discussion of all environmental issues, with a special focus on China, an editor of Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability 7/10:China, India, and East and Southeast Asia: Assessing Sustainability and Associate Editor of thethirdpole.net, a website focused on Asia's water crisis. My writing on China and the environment has also appeared in international publications including The Guardian, Index on Censorship, China Rights Forum, openDemocracy, Green Futures, Far Eastern Economic Review, New Humanist and Foreign Policy.

I have BA in Modern Chinese Studies from Leeds University and an MA in Anthropological Research from University of Manchester, where I am a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology (expected completion 2012). I have also studied at Harvard University, Peking University, Taipei Normal University and Tianjin Normal University, and have received scholarships from the Kennedy Memorial Trust, the British Inter-university China Centre and the British Association of Chinese Studies. I am a Fellow of the RSA.

 

Dr Anthony Garnaut

Post Doctoral Research Officer

Anthony Garnaut joined the China Centre in October 2012 as a Post-doctoral Research Officer. Anthony received his PhD in history from the Australian National University in 2011.  His dissertation, titled ‘The Shaykh of the Great Northwest: The Religious and Political Life of Ma Yuanzhang (1853-1920)’, documented the life of the leader of a prominent Chinese Muslim religious order (menhuan/tariqat) who gained considerable political influence in northwest China in the early Republican period. 

In 2008, Anthony joined a collaborative study of famine in modern history, with a focus on the Great Leap famine and its relationship to the Soviet model of forced industrialisation. 

His current research examines the status of Chinese Muslims in the political economy of China’s western borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and various aspects of forced economic development in China, including the history of mass mobilisation, urban-rural relations and rural marketing systems.