Author: yhe93

Nov 1 – Ching Kwan Lee – Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier

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The Transnational China Research Hub at UCSC kicked off our Fall programming with a lecture by Prof. Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at UCLA. Her talk drew upon her prior work on Chinese investment in Africa and ongoing research on Hong Kong, to shed light on contemporary political, economic and social transformations in Hong Kong– Global China’s Restive Frontier.

LECTURE ABSTRACT:

How did Hong Kong transform itself from a “shoppers’ and capitalists’ paradise” into a “city of protests” at the frontline of an anti-China global backlash in 2019? Most analysts interpret the recent turmoil in Hong Kong as a political and ideological struggle between a liberal, capitalist democratizing city and its Communist authoritarian sovereign. This talk broadens the plane of analysis to argue that the Hong Kong saga is part of a larger phenomenon called “global China,” conceptualized as a double movement. On the one hand, Beijing deploys a bundle of power mechanisms — economic statecraft, patron-clientelism and symbolic domination – around the world, including Hong Kong. On the other, this Chinese power project triggers a variety of countermovements from Asia to Africa, ranging from acquiescence and adaptation to appropriation and resistance.

SPEAKER BIO:

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China’s turn to capitalism: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt  (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her latest publication is Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (2022), an open access book from Cambridge University Press. She is working on an ethnographic and historical monograph about Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle, with a particular focus on the 2019 uprising.

 

May 24 – Joseph W. Ho – The Movie Camera and the Mission: Vernacular Filmmaking, American Missionaries, and Modern China in Transpacific Perspective

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Prof. Ho

Date: Tuesday May 24, 2022

Time:3:20-5:20 pm

Location:  Communications 139

Abstract: This talk explores the ways in which vernacular films and film technologies created transnational visual cultures within the American Protestant and Catholic missionary enterprise in twentieth century China. Mobile filmmaking by missionaries gave rise to unique visual narratives that built upon prior image-making practices, captured ground-level perceptions, and represented modern visualities that crossed geographic and ideological boundaries. Circulated through international religious networks, missionary films reached audiences in East Asia as well as the United States, moving between private and public contexts in ways that commercial films could not. Technological agency was central to these engagements, with the performativity of 16mm cameras, projectors, and filmmaking processes shaping experiences on the ground.

The films’ creative contexts and contents, however, were not limited to the promotion of religious beliefs or one-dimensional impositions of foreign culture. The experiences of filmmakers, subjects, and viewers overlapped with medical and educational activities, indigenous and global developments in Christian community, and nation-building projects across peace and war. Some films captured representations of new cross-cultural identities, while others framed humanitarian efforts and antiwar negotiations of trauma during periods of military violence and regime change. Over time, the fragmentary ways in which these films were made and viewed (and later, forgotten and rediscovered) came to represent mutable legacies of missionary visions in modern China’s historical evolution.

Bio: Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and a Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. His research concerns transnational visual culture in Sino-US encounters, histories of photography and filmmaking, and modern East Asian history. Ho is the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017), and author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021).