LUCC News, October 2021

6 October 2021 21:10

The October 2021 edition of LUCC's newsletter is out.

You can read the newsletter via our mailing list - just send an email to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk.

LUCC News

October, 2021, Vol.3, Issue 1. Edited by Zeng Jiru

Welcome to a new year of updates from Lancaster University China Centre, the platform for Lancaster’s research on, in, and with, China.

LUCC has an exciting programme of events scheduled for 2021-2022, and with luck, some may even take place in person. Meanwhile, the summer break has brought a steady stream of new China-related research from LUCC’s Fellows.

This term, LUCC’s series of online research seminars will move through diplomacy, to art and activism, technology, politics and business. It starts on 19 October, with Bloomberg’s Peter Martin discussing his new book on "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, followed on 27 October by artist Jing Y on her "Writing · Mothers" project in China.

Our fellows have had a productive summer, with a series of new publications, too, and we have an exciting new YouTube channel providing recordings of all the seminars. Please see below for all the details.

时间再次步入了新的一年，研究中心欢迎您在新的一轮更新中与我们保持联系。作为一个中国研究平台，我们和学者、同事在这一年中将继续研究中国议题，与中国携手共进。

研究中心在2021-2022期间安排了一系列激动人心的活动。十分幸运的是，部分活动得以在线下举行。同时，在这个夏天，我们也持续稳定地收到了来自研究中心同事关于中国研究的成果更新。

接下来，研究中心将于10月19日和27日继续开展研讨会活动。我们将会迎来彭博社Peter Martin关于“战狼外交”的主题讨论；以及Jing Y带来的“写母亲”主题研讨会。同时，本期通讯将提供其他一些您可能感兴趣的活动信息，并介绍研究中心同事的优秀发表成果，详情请见下文。

More LUCC news

LUCC ONLINE

云上研究中心

Lancaster University China Centre has launched a YouTube channel, showcasing our China research events. And the latest video contains a recording of our research seminar with Dr. Jing Cheng on 7 July, jointly hosted by the LU Confucius Institute (LUCI) on the topic of historical memories in China today.

Some of our earlier seminars are also now available on LUCI’s channel, including Dr. Didier Soopramanien's May seminar on Chinese consumers environment behaviour and Yu Fu & Zoe Zhu's fascinating comparative study of Chinese and Japanese management culture. Please click here for the full list of videos of our seminars.

UPCOMING EVENTS

活动预告

19 Oct.: China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy

10月19日：中国的文装解放军与“战狼外交”的形成

Speaker: Peter Martin, Bloomberg
Place: online via Team - Click here for registration
Time: 13:00 - 14:30, UK Time

China's Civilian Army charts China's transformation from an isolated and impoverished communist state to a global superpower from the perspective of those on the front line: China's diplomats. They give a rare perspective on the greatest geopolitical drama of the last half century. In the early days of the People's Republic, diplomats were highly-disciplined, committed communists who feared revealing any weakness to the threatening capitalist world. Remarkably, the model that revolutionary leader Zhou Enlai established continues to this day despite the massive changes the country has undergone in recent decades. China's Diplomats embody the PRC's battle between insecurity and self-confidence, internally and externally. They're often dubbed China's "wolf warriors" for their combative approach to asserting Chinese interests. Drawing for the first time on the memoirs of more than a hundred retired diplomats as well as author Peter Martin's first-hand reporting as a journalist in Beijing, this groundbreaking book blends history with current events to tease out enduring lessons about the kind of power China is set to become. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand China's quest for global power, as seen from the inside.

Speaker's bio: Peter Martin is a political reporter for Bloomberg News. He has written extensively on escalating tensions in the US-China relationship and reported from China's border with North Korea and China's far-western region of Xinjiang. He previously worked for the consultancy APCO Worldwide in Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington, where he analysed politics for multinational companies. In Washington, he served as chief of staff to the company's global CEO. His writing has been published by outlets including Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, the Guardian, the Jamestown China Brief, the Diplomat and the Christian Science Monitor. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, Peking University and the London School of Economics.

27 Oct.: The Right to Write: 5 Years of “Writing • Mothers"

10月27日：写母亲：五年回顾

Speaker: Jing Y.
Place: online via Teams - Click here for registration
Time: 11:00 - 13:00, UK Time

Working closely with Chinese citizens who usually are not professional writers, Jing founded “Writing • Mothers” project, and has since co-produced several books of their memoirs, reflections, debates, and statements. Her films, publications, and installations embody her method of “using art and documentary approaches to create self-made citizenship” in a period of political difficulty. They add up to a unique profile of a major dynamic between the Party and the people in Chinese society today: while the Party maintains power by surrendering the dream of a communist future to capitalism in the present, the people are asked to exchange socialism for a chance at becoming rich right now.

Speaker's bio: Jing Y has exhibited and lectured frequently in various countries, under different circumstances, with and against the given framework, to examine the contradictions and disconnections within Chinese society and between China and the wider world. Apart from exhibiting at the Guangdong Times Museum, Para-site, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, many of her other thematic projects/process can be found in various artist-run/alternative spaces in a more intangible way.

More LUCC events

PERSONNEL NEWS

人事变动

Professor Astrid Nordin, Founding Director of LUCC, has been appointed Lau Chair of Chinese International Relations at King's College London. Professor Nordin is an expert on how China’s relations with the world are negotiated through Chinese foreign and domestic policy, academia, propaganda, online dissidence, and artistic expression.

At KCL, Professor Nordin will continue to build her exciting research, which develops conceptual tools that draw on Chinese and other global traditions of thought, and uses these to understand global challenges as they relate to China’s growing global role - from the Belt and Road Initiative, through sustainable cities, to practices of censorship and resistance.

As Founding Director, Professor Nordin supported LUCC’s overall operations, strategy, and leadership, and we are looking forward to continuing and expanding our work with Professor Nordin and KCL's Lau China Institute.

Please click here for more.

NEW PUBLICATIONS

最新发表

PRC Overseas Political Activities: Risk, Reaction and the Case of Australia

中国的海外政治活动：风险与反动在澳大利亚

Andrew Chubb's new monograph discusses China's overseas political activities, and the lessons that can be learned from Australia's policy reactions to such issues since 2017. Political elites in the UK and elsewhere are showing heightened concern about threats from the PRC — a trend that could severely impact cooperation with China across sectors, including universities and research. The monograph argues that an effective liberal democratic policy response requires careful disaggregation of distinct sets of risks: to national security; civil liberties; and academic freedom. Although widely cited as a model to follow, Australia’s response to these issues illustrates how aggregation of these diverse risks into a singular national security threat – commonly labelled ‘Chinese influence’ – can produce alarmist public policy discourse, legislative overreach and mismatched institutional responsibilities. The monograph, published by the Royal United Services Institute as part of its Whitehall Papers series, suggests a set of measures for liberal-democratic governments, institutions and universities to manage their engagement with China’s powerful and increasingly authoritarian party-state.

READ MORE HERE:

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003243038

Conflicting masculinities in Ha Jin’s Waiting:Talented scholars and ruthless men of action in China’s Mao and post-Mao eras

哈金《等待》中矛盾的男（阳）性特质：毛泽东和后毛泽东时代中国的天才学者和冷酷行动者

LUCC fellow Derek Hird published an article discussing Ha Jin's novel on Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China with his colleagues, which focuses on Ha Jin’s critique of two historically prominent Chinese male character types: the intellectually oriented man of book learning and the physically oriented man of action. It shows how Waiting illuminates the conditions underlying a pervasive social and psychological paralysis of male intellectuals and the contrasting empowerment of a predatory class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs.

Constructional Priming in Mandarin and American English Interaction

普通话与美式英语互动中的建构性促发

Cross-cultural linguistics dream team Vittorio Tantucci and Aiqing Wang published another important new piece in Applied Linguistics. "Resonance" occurs when interlocutors creatively coconstruct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance of a prior speaker. Tantucci and Wang's latest study argues that such similarity can inform the machine learning prediction of linguistic and cross-cultural diversity. By analysing two sets of 1,000 exchanges involving (dis)-agreement from two corpora of naturalistic interactions in Mandarin Chinese and American English, they showed that resonance occurs formally and functionally in different ways from one language to another. The applied results could inform innovation in AI research of conversational interfaces, as they reveal the fundamental role played cross-linguistically by resonance as a form of engagement of human-to-human interaction and the importance to address this mechanism in machine-to-human communication.

Temporally-resolved sectoral and regional contributions to air pollution in Beijing: informing short-term emission controls

北京空气污染临时解决的产业与区域之贡献：短期控排的影响

LUCC fellow Oliver Wild published an article discussing air pullution and short-term emission controls in Beijing on Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics with his colleagues, which investigate the contributions of local and regional emission sources to air pollution in Beijing to inform the design of short-term emission control strategies for mitigating major pollution episodes, highlighting the regional nature of PM pollution and the challenges of tackling it during major pollution episodes.

A Corpus-Based Comparison between Disaster Reports on COVID-19 Epidemic in China and U.S. by Third Party Media: Taking the Guardian Reports During First Year after Wuhan Lockdown as an Example

基于语料库的第三国媒体对中美新冠疫情灾难报道之对比分析：以《卫报》在武汉封城一周年中的报道为例

With his fellow students in Beijing Foreign Studies University, LUCC student affiliate Jiru Zeng has an article released on International Association of Media and Communication Research 2021 Conference. The article compared the disaster reports about the U.S. and China by the Guardian during the first year after the Wuhan lockdown, and mapped the main reports issues about COVID-19, showing that the news outlet is playing a role of critique to both two countries though a statistically difference indicated that the Guardian may take a more critical attitude towards U.S. rather than China.

READ MORE HERE:

https://iamcr.org/node/16268

ALUMI RELATIONS HUB

校友中心

INTRODUCTION

Alumni Relations Hub at the Lancaster University China Centre (LUCC) provides support for research, teaching and public engagement for members of staff across the University. The Hub now offers an In-depth and Breadth Database for Research through cooperation with Lancaster Alumni Centre, where data of 148,000 graduates in more than 180 countries is stored. The Hub nurtures a personal touch for engagement, which is particularly important in China, and supports efforts at pedagogic development by learning from our Chinese alumni’s experience.

For any inquiry, please contactrebecca.liu@lancaster.ac.uk.

Our mailing address is:

China.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Back to News