ANU China Seminar Series
The ANU China Seminar Series is the pre-eminent forum for discussion of China and the Sinophone world at the ANU. Speakers come from across the full range of disciplines. They include senior scholars, younger academics, and post-doctoral research fellows from in and outside the university. The Seminar Series is aimed at a broad audience: members of academic staff from many fields; undergraduate and graduate students; policy-makers; and interested members of the public are all welcome to attend. It acquaints people with a range of China-related research and offers a social setting for discussing matters of mutual interest.
The seminar usually runs between 4.00pm and 5.30pm on alternate Thursdays during the University’s teaching term. Exceptions will be noted on the Seminar Series’ website, which is regularly updated.
All attendees are invited to join us in the CIW Tea House from 3.30pm for informal discussion with the guest speaker before the seminar.
The Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University's College of Asia & the Pacific.
Latest Seminar Series Podcast
An International NGO’s 40 years in China
The Asia Foundation (TAF) has been programming in China since 1979. During this seminar, I will examine the Foundation’s experience in China over the past 40 years, including how our focus has evolved from overseas scholarships and sending English language science books to China in the early...
Although the ANU China Seminar Series runs by invitation only, the convenors welcome communication from those interested in presenting their research as part of its program.
Convenors
Benjamin Penny | Shuge Wei | Ivan Franceschini
Podcasts
With the consent of speakers, seminars are recorded and made publicly available through the Seminar Series’ website to build an archive of research on the Sinophone world. Listen to the podcasts
There are currently no upcoming events.
Proxy or Patriots?: Diasporic Politics and Performance of the Chinese in Indonesia
Chinese Indonesians are a culturally, socially, and politically diverse group. In the political sphere, and despite the resistance of many overseas Chinese to such characterisations, the overseas Chinese in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been seen as a resource or proxy for Beijing’s advancement of its interests abroad. In the cultural sphere, the Chinese-Indonesian contribution has spanned traditional and modern genres including opera, puppetry and spoken theatre as well as musical forms, thereby profoundly enriching Indonesia's cultural palette.
China’s Tech-Enhanced Authoritarianism
The Chinese Communist Party’s priority is to pre-empt all perceived threats to state security, which means the Party must not only protect its existing power, but also continuously expand its power outward. Information fuels the CCP’s power protection and enables the tools used to make it stick. Tools include “smart cities' technologies” and the “social credit system”. Both contribute to the generation and organization of data and are instruments for reaching the CCP’s desired political outcomes.
China’s Silent Land Reform: 1958-1962
In this seminar I examine the heated debates within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership between 1958 and 1962 over the issue of collective land. In their efforts to establish and sustain a planned economy across rural China, CCP leaders struggled to decide who should be allocated what land, and how much agricultural output they should be expected to provide to the state—their production quota.
Revolutionary Optimism in 1950s Chinese Culture
When Chinese revolutionary culture reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s, revolutionary optimism became a strongly encouraged emotional perspective, attitude, and expression. It was touted through literature, film, images, and virtually every aspect of daily life. Unhappiness, especially if publicly expressed, signaled personal and social dysfunction, which could easily become mental illness in need of a cure.
GIs and Jeep Girls: Sex and American Soldiers in Wartime China
This talk examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino-US alliance during the Second World War. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence. Chinese soldiers and interpreters seethed at the way American personnel treated them like second-class citizens in their own country. The civilians who had welcomed American soldiers as allied friends in 1942 now associated their presence with inflation, black marketeering, reckless driving, and alcohol-fueled violence.
Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency
This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes toward strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement.
Red Detachment — the politics of cultural engagement with the People’s Republic of China
Relations between Australia and China have never been closer, or more fraught. From the time of the Cold War, our alliance with the US has been a source of tension between Canberra and Beijing. Trump’s erratic and irresponsible leadership and prosecution of a trade war with China has put Australia today in a uniquely difficult spot. Chinese influence operations, meanwhile, threaten our sovereignty and the integrity of our political system, and its island-building in the South China Sea has raised tensions in the region.
Han Migrant Farmers and Qing Mongolian Policy
This talk will examine the migration and settlement of Han farmers in Inner Mongolia during the Qing period (1644–1911). The presence of Han settlements in great numbers was an outcome desired by none of the concerned parties: the Qing court, the Mongolian banners and the Han settlers themselves.
The impact of the Sino-U.S. “new Cold War” on domestic Chinese politics
President Xi Jinping, “the core leader,” “highest commander,” and “the people’s path-finder,” faces the worst political crisis of his career having been seen as unable to handle President Trump’s fusillades. While the “chairman of everything” remains in the media limelight, Xi faces internal opposition from different sections of the party. Criticism has come from princelings close to Deng Xiaoping who have blasted Xi for abandoning the Great Reformer’s liberalization dicta.
Regulating Chinese investments in Africa: Revisiting Host Country Agency in South–South Relations
Over the past two decades, China has emerged as a key investor in Africa, a shift that has prompted widespread debate over whether Chinese investment has positively impacted African countries, or weakened local regulations and economies. Yet scholars and commentators tend to consider African actors and agents as passive objects shaped by Chinese investments, and neglect the subtle ways in which local actors and institutions interact with, resist, and shape the various outcomes created by Chinese investment.
