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.
Beyond the Great Wall: China Secures for Buffers
State behaviour will change according to variances of polarity in the international system. This assumption that state behaviour and the change of the polarity is responsive appeared in many seminal works in the field of international relations. However, China’s long-held policy goals toward Taiwan, North Korea, and Mongolia present an obvious abnormality for this theoretic logic.
Mobilizing Chinese cultural workers in the service of Japanese occupation, 1939-1945
In this paper, I will examine the ways in which the "collaborationist" Re-organised National Government (RNG) of Wang Jingwei — which administered parts of south and east China from March 1940 through until the end of the war — sought to achieve some degree of autonomy in terms of its propaganda activities. I will examine such questions by looking at visual and performative propaganda manufactured in the name of the RNG.
What's Wrong with Corruption? Messages from Confessions in China
Primarily based on contextualized discourse analysis of confessions from 119 convicted party cadres on corruption charges in China, this presentation will make two arguments. First, these confession texts are propaganda that signals the government’s strength to punish outliers. Second, using such a warning to deter corruption is subject to an escalating scale of corruption given social pressure for success and peer learning among grafters.
Environmental Dispossession and Degradation in China and Beyond
The effects of serious air and water pollution on China’s industrialised centres is now well known. But environmental degradation has moved from the centre to the periphery and beyond as the Chinese state relocates polluting industries to the country’s western provinces, and as it pursues major infrastructure construction and development projects in China’s regions and neighbouring countries.
New perspectives on Neolithic cloth production in the Yangzi Valley, 7000 BP
The site of Tianluoshan 田螺山, near present-day Yuyao, Zhejiang, is significant in archaeology for producing the earliest evidence for rice cultivation in the Yangzi Valley. It demonstrates that Early Neolithic groups belonging to the Hemudu 河姆渡 culture were transitioning from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture about 7,000 years ago. No less significant from a technological perspective was the discovery of large numbers of cloth production tools among the pile dwellings.
