The Forum for the Academy and the Public

A Series of Gatherings and Events on Narrative, Politics, Science, Culture, & Law

Using Fiction to Shed Light on the PRC: A China Book Slam Event

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Thursday, December 2, 2021; 2PM – 3:30PM PST

RSVP HERE

Location: Zoom and Humanities Gateway 1030

Join the Forum for the Academy and the Public for the final Book Slam event of the fall quarter on December 2nd at 2:00 p.m. Unlike previous events, which have focused largely on non-fiction journalism and scholarship of China, this event will highlight how fiction can illuminate China’s past and present. Though the stories and characters in these works are invented, the themes they elucidate are still profoundly relevant to understanding the modern PRC.

The event will feature two new novels set in China, My Old Home: A Novel of Exile by Orville Schell and Shanghai Redemption, an Inspector Chen novel by Qiu Xiaolong. The event will also feature commentary from three esteemed guests who have all written both fiction and non-fiction works on China, Lijia Zhang, a writer, journalist and public speaker, Sigrid Schmalzer, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Adam Brookes, journalist and author.

The format for this event will mimic previous events, beginning with short introductions on each novel followed by discussion between the authors and commentators. This discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, moderating.

This event will be hybrid, held live at UCI and streamed online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend.

 

This event is sponsored by the UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public and the Long U.S.-China Institute.

 

 

Adam Brookes, journalist and author

Adam Brookes is the author of the Night Heron trilogy of spy novels. His forthcoming non-fiction book, Fragile Cargo: The Wartime Operation to Save China’s Greatest Works of Art, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September 2022. Adam grew up in the UK, and was a foreign correspondent for BBC News for many years. He lives in Washington DC.

 

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center of U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and was former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.  He was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University 60s and earned a PhD (abd) at the UC, Berkeley, in Chinese History. He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist and traveled widely in China since the mid-70s and authored sixteen books, twelve about China. His most recent books are: My Old Home: A Novel of Exile; Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism and a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a senior fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at the USC. He also is currently Co-chair of the Task Force on US China Policy.

 

Sigrid Schmalzer, Professor of History at UMass Amherst

Sigrid Schmalzer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches modern Chinese history and the history of science. Her book Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (2016) won the Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She adapted Chapter Two of that academic book to create a picture book for children, Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean, which won the Freeman Book Award among other distinctions. She is a founding member of the Critical China Scholars and the revitalized Science for the People and a vice president of her faculty union.

 

Qiu Xiaolong, novelist and poet

Qiu Xiaolong is the author of fourteen novels in the award-winning Inspector Chen series. He has also published collections of short stories, poetry, and poetry translations.  His books have sold millions of copies, and have been translated into more than twenty languages.  And most of his Inspector Chen novels have been made into BBC radio dramatization. 

Born in Shanghai, China, Qiu Xiaolong published poetry, translation and criticism in Chinese before he went to the United States as a Ford Foundation Fellow.  He obtained his Ph. D. in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.

 

Lijia Zhang, writer, journalist, and public speaker

Lijia Zhang is a factory-worker-turned writer, social commentator and public speaker. Her articles have appeared in the South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and The New York Times. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir “Socialism Is Great!” about her rocket factory experience and her debut novel Lotus is on prostitution in contemporary China, which has been featured by BBC’s World Book Club program. Lijia has lectured at many conferences, institutions and universities, including NYU, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. She is a regular speaker on the BBC, Channel 4, and CNN. She divides her time between Beijing and London.

A China Book Slam: New Small Works on a Big Country

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Tuesday, November 9, 2021; 2PM – 3:30PM PST

Location: Zoom and Humanities Gateway 1030

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On November 9th, the Forum for the Academy and the Public will host the second “Book Slam” event of the Fall. This event features an eclectic range of topics in the China field, from surveillance in Xinjiang to transcultural sci-fi, united by a rather counterintuitive thread: despite China’s vast size and long history, these books are all delightfully short.

 

New Small Works on a Big Country will feature four exciting book launches, The Shortest History of China: From the Ancient Dynasties to a Modern Superpower—A Retelling of Our Times by Linda Jaivin, For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir from my City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis, Found in Translation: New People in 20th Century Chinese Science Fiction by Jing Jiang, and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler.

 

The event will begin with book introductions by the featured authors Linda Jaivin, author, translator, and essayist, Hana Meihan Davis, journalist, Jing Jiang, Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reeds College, and Darren Byler, anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Guest commentary will be provided by Sabina Knight, Rana Mitter, Thomas Mullaney, and Xiaowei Wang.

 

Introductions by authors and commentators will be short, as the event will emphasize discussion and dialogue between participants as well as audience Q&A, with Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, moderating discussion.

 

This event will be a hybrid, held live at UCI and streamed online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend.

 

This event is sponsored by the UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public and the Long U.S.-China Institute.

 

Darren Byler, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC

Anthropologist Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. His current research is focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia. 

 

Linda Jaivin, Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and specialist writer on China

Linda Jaivin is the author of twelve books, including The Shortest History of China, Beijing,The Monkey and the Dragon, and the longform essay Found in Translation, as well as seven novels. She is also translates Chinese film subtitles and co-edits The China Story Yearbook published by the Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. She lives in Sydney, Australia.

 

Jing Jiang, Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities, Reed College

Jing Jiang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College (Portland Oregon). She teaches courses on Chinese language and culture, with particular focus on modern Chinese literature, film, and comparative literature. Aside from her book on twentieth century Chinese science fiction, she also authored articles that appeared in Asian Cinema, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Cultural Critique, and positions. She won the ACLS Pauline Yu Fellowship in 2020, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled The World Embedded in Modern Chinese Literary Imagination.

 

Sabina Knight 桑稟華, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Program in World Literatures, Smith College

Sabina Knight 桑稟華 is author of The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (2006), Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012, translated into three languages), and essays in The National Interest, 翻译家的对话 [Translators’ Dialogues], and journals of literature, Chinese studies, and medical humanities. Since 1998 Knight has taught Chinese and comparative literature at Smith College. She is also a translator, a speaker on Chinese-English literary and cultural translation, and a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

 

Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at St Cross College

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Guardian.

 

Tom Mullaney, Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University

Tom Mullaney is a professor of Chinese history of Stanford University, a Guggenheim fellow, and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author or lead editor of six books, including The Chinese Typewriter, Your Computer is on Fire, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.

 

Hana Meihan Davis, journalist and architect

Hana Meihan Davis is the author of ‘For the Love of Hong Kong: Memoir from My City Under Siege’. She is a journalist and aspiring architect whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, South China Morning Post and the Yale Daily News. Born and raised in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, Hana comes from a long line of democracy activists in Hong Kong — many of whom are in exile or facing arrest. She is a class of 2020 graduate from Yale University.

 

Xiaowei R. Wang, artist, writer, organizer and coder

Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers.

China in Global Times: A Double Book Launch Event

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Tuesday, November 2, 2021; 2PM – 3:30PM PST

Location: Zoom and Humanities Gateway 1030

RSVP HERE

The Forum for the Academy and the Public will be hosting the first “Book Slam” event of the Fall on November 2nd at 2pm. The hybrid event will take place live at UC Irvine in room HG1030 and will be available via streaming on Zoom. All are welcome to attend.

 

This event will focus on China’s emergence into a new world and ascendance into a new world order. The event will feature the launch of two new books on China in global times, China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu and How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate by Isabella M. Weber.

 

Joanna Chiu, senior journalist at the Toronto Star, and Isabella M. Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, will introduce their books with commentary and discussion from Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, professor of Asian American Studies and director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine and Gregory Shaffer, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science and Director of the Center on Globalization, Law and Society (GLAS) at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, will moderate discussion.

 

The event will begin with two 10-minute presentations by the featured authors followed by discussion from the commentators. A live Q&A session will follow.

 

This event is sponsored by UCI’s Forum for the Academy and the Public, UCI’s Humanities

Center, the Long U.S.-China Institute, and UCI’s Center on Globalization, Law, and Society.

 

Joanna Chiu, Journalist, Toronto Star

Joanna Chiu is a senior journalist for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, and has previously served as bureau chief of the Star Vancouver. As a globally-recognized authority on China, the author of China Unbound regularly provides nuanced and deeply-informed analysis for international broadcast media including CBC, BBC World, Al Jazeera and NPR. 

Chiu was previously based for seven years in Beijing and in Hong Kong as a foreign correspondent, including for Agence France Presse (AFP) specializing in coverage of Chinese politics, economy and legal affairs for one of the world’s biggest news operations. She was the lead author of multiple research reports on China’s social media and online censorship systems, such as Forbidden Feeds. 

She has also served as China and Mongolia correspondent for the top German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and in Hong Kong, she reported for the South China Morning Post, The Economist magazine and The Associated Press. 

As a leader and connector within the global China experts’ community, she is the founder and chair of the NüVoices editorial collective, which celebrates the creative and academic work of women working on the subject of China.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Director of the Humanities Center, Professor of Asian American Studies, Chancellor’s Fellow

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the director of the Humanities Center.  She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University and previously taught at Ohio State University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her forthcoming book, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York University Press, 2022), is a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink. Wu is currently working on a book that focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference. She co-edited Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 8th Edition (Oxford 2015), Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill 2017), and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2012-2017). Currently, she is a co-editor of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Alexander Street Press) and editor for Amerasia Journal. She also serves as chair of the editorial committee for the University of California Press and as a series editor for the U.S. in the World Series with Cornell University Press. She is the co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Gregory Shaffer, Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, Irvine School of Law

Professor Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science and Director of the Center on Globalization, Law and Society (GLAS) at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He is President-Elect of the American Society of International Law, and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of International Economic Law, among others. He received his JD from Stanford Law School, his BA from Dartmouth College, and practiced law with Coudert Brothers and Bredin Prat in Paris. His publications include nine books and over one hundred articles and book chapters. The books include Emerging Powers and the World Trade System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law (CUP, 2021); Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice (with Aaronson, 2020); Constitution-Making as a Transnational Legal Order (with Ginsburg and Halliday, 2019); Transnational Legal Orders (with Halliday, 2015); Transnational Legal Ordering and State Change (2013); Dispute Settlement at the WTO: The Developing Country Experience (with Melendez-Ortiz, 2011); When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods (with Pollack, 2008); Defending Interests: Public-Private Partnerships in WTO Litigation (2003), and Transatlantic Governance in the Global Economy (with Pollack, 2001).

Isabella M. Weber, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Isabella M. Weber is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China of the Asian Political Economy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021 and has been recommended by the Financial Times and Foreign Policy. For her work on the rise of economics in China’s recent history she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Previously she was a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University.  German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.