‌Ongoing series

• LUCC Research Seminar Series: LUCC's research seminar series, presenting new research on China across all fields, from LUCC fellows and outside presenters.
• LUCC Interdisciplinary Roundtable Lunches: bringing together academics across disciplines to discuss key issues facing China-engaged research at a time of rapid technological change and rising geopolitical tension.
• LUCC PhD Seminars: LUCC provides a PhD seminar series for postgraduate students working on, in, or with China to present and discuss their work over lunch at Lancaster University.

Recordings of many past events are available on LUCC's YouTube channel.

To stay informed of all our upcoming events, please sign up to our mailing list at: china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk.

For past issues of our Newsletter, see LUCC News.

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Upcoming Events

26 July 2024

Promoting the Free Flow of Land in China's Market : Zeng Jian Gua Gou Policy and Its Improvement

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Shu ZHANG, PhD researcher, Law, Lancaster University

Time: 1-2 pm, Friday 26 July 2024 - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Place: BLN - Bowland Nth SR 03

The land market in China has long been formed on the basis of the ownership system which segments the urban and rural land. The free circulation of Collective land for construction is in principle forbidden, which results in the structural shortage of construction land between urban and rural areas. To overcome the difficulties caused by the improper supply and demand of construction land, China began to explore the ways to adjust the land resource allocation by market means. Under this policy, Zeng Jian Gua Gou Policy has been created. It links newly added cropland quotas to the amount of land used for urban and rural construction, with the aim of achieving efficient use of land and integrated urban-rural development, the core is that if a region is approved to increase the urban construction land, another region must correspondingly increase the cultivated land area, and finally achieve a reasonable land use layout. Many areas in China have conducted practices under Zeng Jian Gua Gou Policy, but they are still in the exploratory stage and have not yet formed a model that can be used for reference and replication. It is urgent to improve the operation mode and legislate to protect it. Taking Chongqing, Chengdu and Yiwu as examples, this paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of these practices being implemented in China. By using Marxist theory of ground-rent, this paper argues that the practices in China have not fully met the requirements of market transactions so far, because the practices in China are still the exchange between lands led by the government rather than the transfer of rights dominated by the market with money as the medium. Accordingly, this paper puts forward some suggestions on the improvement of the operation mode of Zeng Jian Gua Gou in China. they are still in the exploratory stage and have not yet formed a model that can be used for reference and replication. It is urgent to improve the operation mode and legislate to protect it.

Speaker Bio: Shu Zhang is a PhD candidate in Law at the Lancaster University. Her research interests include land transaction market, rational distribution of natural resources and regulation of artificial intelligence in China. Her current research explores the role of Zeng Jian Gua Gou policy (the link between increase and decrease of land) in promoting the free flow of land in China's market and its improvement.

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Interdisciplinary Roundtable

Navigating the Security Minefield Amid Rising Geopolitical Tensions

Time: Michaelmas 2024

Places limited, please register interest at china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Rising geopolitical tensions are giving rise to security challenges as well as an increasingly broad scope of national security in the UK and elsewhere. Against this backdrop, this roundtable examines how researchers can proactively and responsibly ensure their work with China is secure, does not contribute to harm, and doesn’t fall foul of evolving government regulatory regimes.

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Recent Events

• LUCC events in 2023
• LUCC events in 2022
• LUCC events in 2021
• LUCC events in 2020
• LUCC events in 2019

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24 July 2024

Imagined Feminism: Popular Feminism in Chinese Media Culture

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Lily WU, PhD researcher of Sociology, Lancaster University

Time: 12-1 pm, Wednesday 24 July 2024 - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Place: BLN - Bowland Nth SR 03

Women’s voices and feminist expressions have become more and more audible in the popular culture in contemporary China. However, does it mean that the popularity of feminism in popular culture empowers Chinese women? This presentation attempts to map the presentation of gender issues in Chinese popular media against the relevant social backdrop since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), introduce the Western concept, ‘popular feminism’, as well as discuss the reasons and characteristics of the development and prosperity of ‘popular feminism’ in contemporary China. It, through case studies, focuses on the three popular programmes in the mainland of China: a reality TV show Sisters Who Make Waves (2020, 2021), online series Hear Her (2021), and an advertisement of PROYA for Women’s Day (2021). Through analysing both these programmes’ contents and the audience’s comments, the research explores how ‘popular feminism’ cooperates with the discourses of the state and the market, as well as how the co-operation legitimises feminist discourse, during which the term ‘feminist imagination’ is proposed. It shows that although such co-operation between the state and the market –– ‘a co-operation field’ in the ‘feminist imagination’ –– raises people’s general awareness of feminism, not only does it combine with popular misogyny and backlash against feminism, it also further exploits and excludes marginal groups.

Speaker Bio: Lily Wu is a feminist researcher who has recently passed her PhD viva. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘Becoming Chinese Digital Feminists: The Rural/Urban Divide and the Value of Kinship Capital’. Her research interests encompass gender studies, media and cultural studies, with a particular focus on Chinese feminism, digital feminism, and popular feminism. She is particularly intrigued by the intertwined gender discourse and other social conflicts within the Chinese context. She completed her BA at China Women’s University and earned her MA with Distinction from the University of Leicester. This presentation is based on a recently published book chapter.

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19 July 2024

Children’s ‘Magic Bag’: Varieties of Children’s Caring Performances as They Encounter Others Who Are in Distress

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Xiao ZHANG, PhD researcher, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University

Time: 12-1 pm, Friday 19 July 2024 - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Place: BLN - Bowland Nth SR 13

There are increasingly concerns regarding the crisis of care that impact the child’s social bonds. Although current studies advocate a claim that the child has abilities to make relations with others, few spotlights are given to the child’s caring performances. My study seeks to obtain data which will help to address this research gap. I borrow a lens of ethic of care, exploring children’s caring performances as they encounter peers and adults who are in distress. I conducted multiple research methods, that are verbal, visual, and art-based, with 19 early childhood practitioners as well as 77 children in public-run early years settings in China. The forms of the data I collected involves narrative transcriptions, photos, and children’s paintings. As revealed in the data, children show willingness and abilities to make caring connections with others. They proactively conduct various caring skills, both verbal and tangible, as they encounter their peers or adults in sufferings or at risks. Children also present their ethical obligations of caring who are suffering from starving. They express worry and subsequently take actions within their capabilities. Last but not least, Children show their abilities of responding to peer’s needs. They not merely voluntarily offer their privileges to satisfy other’s needs, but also engage in balancing expressed and inferred needs. The findings contribute to a claim of the child as the agent of caring. I will make a discussion on empathy that possibly plays a role in helping summon the child’s caring performances.

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26 June 2024

Discussing Tomboy in Mainland China: A Critical Review on the Lesbian Masculinities and Tomboy Gender in Contemporary China

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Kaydence SUN, PhD researcher in Sociology, Lancaster University

Time: 12-1 pm, Wednesday, 26 June 2024 - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk

Place: BLN - Bowland Nth SR 03

In Chinese queer culture, ‘tomboy’, also presented as ‘T’ in mainland China/Taiwan or ‘TB’ in Hong Kong, is a collective metaphor that generally refers to masculine lesbians or lesbian masculinity. Since this term has been introduced to mainland China in the 2000s, there were found out with noteworthy cultural phenomenon surrounding tomboys. In the past two decades, ‘tomboy’ has not only been regarded as a lesbian gender role continually being modified and reconstructed by local subjects but also as queer sensibilities composed of female masculinity aesthetics intertwining with tomboy-alike representations in popular culture. However, since 2010, a series of anti-tomboy discourses has emerged within the lesbian community in mainland China. Tomboy was either pathologically trivialised as ‘gender inverted’ by pathological discourse, or criticized as a sloppy imitation of heteronormative masculinity by the appropriation of parts of western discursive queer knowledge and feminist theories seen in the Chinese queer community.

These conflicts reminded a necessity to scrutinize the ambivalent interplay between problematised gender practices of tomboys and Chinese lesbianism that have not yet been evaluated by previous queer studies in China. In contrary to the studies that characterised tomboy as merely a label for gendered personalities which based on a stable lesbian/female identity, the main argumentation of this research shows that, firstly, studying tomboys provides with an analysis of the interrelation between gender and sexuality through gendered bodies, that enlarged the methodological and epistemological spaces in lesbian studies rather than cooperating different bodies and desires into a stable identity category assuming a unified and homogeneous lesbianism. Secondly, closely analysing the characterisation and conceptualisation of tomboys within Chinese lesbian community provides innovative perspectives to explore how lesbianism in mainland China has been constructed within the entanglement of transnational knowledge and local-customised adaptions. Lastly, building on the previous points, studying tomboy subjects and its surrounding discourses mutually affecting by the factors of states, class, and other social constructions, showing potentialities to develop a intersectional research angle that diversifies gender and sexuality studies in China.

Speaker bio: Kaydence Sun is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. Her research interests lie on lesbianism, queer culture, especially the queer female masculinity in Contemporary mainland China. She’s currently working on her PhD project regarding the ‘tomboy’ subjects in mainland China.

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4 June 2024

Literature revolutionizing Confucianism: the birth of modern Chinese literature

Research seminar

Speaker: Xiaodan Qiu, Visiting Scholar, LUCC

Time: 12pm-130pm, Tuesday, 4 June 2024

Place: County South B89

This talk aims to answer how modern Chinese literature came into being. Doing so will illustrate the key role Chinese literature has played in the modern transformation of Chinese thought. The article depicts a paradigm shift in which a new literary paradigm replaced the Confucian paradigm during the transformation of Chinese thought from tradition to modernity. In traditional society, Confucianism had the highest discourse power on almost every aspect of the society including the universe’s formation, the politics and the people's life. Literature was reduced to its appendage, mainly carrying the teachings of Confucianism in terms of expression of thought. After the wane of Confucianism in modern times, literature showed an independent character in expressing thought. The May Fourth Movement provided a new literary paradigm that attempted to substitute the Confucian paradigm. The literary paradigm took "science" as the source of truth, legitimacy and authority of thought, replacing the status of heaven (Tian, 天) in the Confucian paradigm, and used "literature" as the provider of thoughts on people’s life and politics, trying to take over the intellectual role played by Confucianism in traditional society. Although this takeover was not truly completed, it still gave literature a clear intellectual role attribute, completed its own transformation from tradition to modernity, and more importantly, enabled literature to play a key role in the history of the modern transformation of Chinese thought.

Speaker bio: Dr Xiaodan Qiu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Language & Literature at Zhejiang University of Technology, China. As a LUCC Visiting Scholar from 2024 to 2025, Xiaodan is examining Confucianism and the transformation of modern Chinese literature, with a focus on consanguinity.

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28 May 2024

"I have not finished!" Understanding perceived Western media's bias against China through interruption in BBC HARDtalk interviews

Research Seminar

Speaker: Yingnian Tao, Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

Time: 12-130pm, Tuesday, 28 May 2024 - refreshments provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk by 22 May

Place: County South B59

What explains interruptions in TV interviews? This paper compares interruptions in two interviews on BBC HARDtalk with prominent Hong Kong political figures: Ronny Tong and Nathan Law. Using conversational analysis, interruptions are analysed in relation to their position and composition. Findings reveal that interviewer and interviewee interrupt each other at similar frequency, while the interviewees' responses to being interrupted vary significantly. Tong's responses feature argumentation and resistance (e.g., claims of speaking rights violation, personal attacks on the interviewer), whereas Law's responses exhibit deference to interview norms. The interviewees’ differential responses contribute to social media perceptions of media bias, further exacerbated by interviewer’s pursuit of adversarial questioning.

Speaker bio: Senior Research Associate with the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion (PPR), Yingnian is interested in corpus-based social media discourse analysis. Her work has explored interruptions (overlapping speech) in everyday and institutional settings in Chinese, and apologies on social media in China.

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17 April 2024

Japanese Nature and Sovereignty Conservation in the East China Sea

Research Seminar

Speaker: Paul Kreitman, Columbia University

Time: 12pm-1.30pm, Wednesday, 17 April 2024 - refreshments provded, please register at: https://www.trybooking.com/uk/events/landing/55175

Place: Furness Lecture Theatre 3

The Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands have been the focus of a long-running sovereignty dispute between China and Japan. Since the 1960s they have also emerged as a site of nature conservation, as Japanese scientists, government officials and local activists have campaigned to research and protect endangered species endemic to the island such as Steller's Albatross and the Senkaku Mole. This talk explores the history of these campaigns and the ways in which they have intersected with efforts to assert Japanese sovereignty over the islands themselves.

Speaker bio: Paul Kreitman is Associate Professor of Japanese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.

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5 March 2024

Laughing, Lost in the Mountains: Towards a New Modality of Seeing Organizations

Research Seminar

Speaker: Dr Ant Hesketh, LUMS

Time: March 5, 2024, 12pm-1.30pm

Place: George Fox Lecture Theatre 2 – lunch provided with RSVP - please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk by 29 Feb 2024.

Researchers have long asserted the distorting elements of the calculative practices deployed by managers to underpin the financialization of large swathes of organizational processes, yet the quantum form stubbornly remains the undisputed currency of business value. At the heart of this superiority lies a delicious irony: even the dominant – or “Big Four” – accounting firms formally recognise that, at best, only half of the total enterprise value of our largest organizations can be formally calculated using conventional and formally recognised accounting methodologies. If the way in which wider society values “value” is changing, and existing accounting practices are not evolving to keep pace through a combination of overly prescriptive normalisation and lack of innovation, might it be time to consider augmenting, if not replacing, the quantum form with alternative modalities of value? Why not replace the science of calculation with the imagination of art? Might the depiction – or art-iculation – through art be a more effective way to visually convey a firm’s assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity, as opposed to relying on the calculative imaginaries of speculative future projections used to discount today’s prices?

In this session we will explore possible insights offered by the semiotic disruptions and dialectics between different historical epochs, geographical regions and their genres of depiction and explore possible departure points for art-iculation offered by different ocular, temporal and spatial dimensions. In this seminar, my focus will be on exploring how the expression of art in Chinese shanshui painting (literally mountain and water) offers alternative modalities of art-iculation to the hylomorphism and geometric art which (re)emerged in, and has dominated Western philosophy and art since, the Renaissance.

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February 14 2024

Research Seminar

Who defends the Liberal International Order and why? The case of contestation in digital standard-setting

Speaker: Prof Sarah Eaton, Humboldt University Berlin

Time: 1.30-3pm Weds February 14, 2024

Place: Online, registration link at https://www.trybooking.com/uk/DCVT

Recent scholarship has illuminated growing threats to the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO), emanating from both rising and established powers. Circumstances of power transition lead China and other rising powers to demand increased voice within existing multilateral institutions. Rising powers dissatisfied with their degree of influence may attempt to revise rule-making more fundamentally by “regime shifting” or “competitive regime creation” (Morse and Keohane 2014). Yet, as recent literature shows, rising powers are not the only ones seeking to revise the international system. Challenges to LIO institutions emanate increasingly from established powers, principally the US (Morse and Keohane 2014; Zürn 2018; Chan 2021; Kruck and Zangl 2020; Kruck et al. 2022)

This paper looks at the other side of the coin, by analyzing the politics of institutional defence. Amid rising contestation across global governance arenas, who stands up to defend multilateral institutions? And why are they loyal to the old order? How do they go about trying to save it? We develop a theoretical framework to identify the structural attributes of LIO defenders and the alternatives. We also conceptualize the how of instititutional defense. We then carry out a plausibility probe of the framework through case study analysis of current contestation in the arena of digital standardization, shaped largely by China’s emergence as a central player in this issue area.

Speaker bio: Sarah Eaton is Professor of Transregional China Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and co-founder of the Berlin Contemporary China Network. She is interested in the study of contemporary Chinese politics and political economy from comparative and transregional perspectives. Her current research focuses on the dynamics of rising power in the field of technical standard-setting, for which she has received funding from both the European Research Council (Consolidator Grant) and the German Research Foundation.

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February 13 2024

Research Seminar

Confucian Iconoclasm Textual Authority, Modern Confucianism, and the Politics of Antitradition in Republican China

Speaker: Dr Philippe Major, PPR, Lancaster University

Time: 12.30-1.45pm February 13, 2024

Place: County South C89 - lunch provided with RSVP, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk by 6 February 2024.

Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth. More information on the book is available at: https://sunypress.edu/Books/C/Confucian-Iconoclasm

Speaker bio: Philippe Major is Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Dr Major works on the history of Chinese Philosophy, with a focus on the 20^th century. His work adopts interdisciplinary resources (sociology of philosophy, discourse analysis, and intellectual history) to address issues related to epistemic hegemony, alternative epistemologies, alternative modernity and exclusion of Chinese traditions from the philosophy curriculum. He is the author of Confucian Iconoclasm and coeditor, with Thierry Meynard, of Dao Companion to Liang Shuming's Philosophy.

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February 8, 2024

Research Seminar

Living with Digital Surveillance in China: Citizens’ Narratives on Technology, Privacy, and Governance

Speaker: Dr Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, University of Quebec

Time: 2-3pm, Thursday, February 8, 2024

Place: Online via Teams, registration link here.

Digital surveillance is a daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China. This book explores how Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it. It investigates their imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system. Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and surveillance literature. She shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives on the government and technology as civilising forces. Although many participants cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure. The book is intended for academics and students in internet, surveillance, and Chinese studies, and those working on China in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, social psychology, psychology, communication, computer sciences, contemporary history, and political sciences. The lay public interested in the implications of technology in daily life or in contemporary China will find it accessible as it synthesises the work of sinologists and offers many interview excerpts.

Speaker bio: Dr. Ariane Ollier-Malaterre is a Management Professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the Director of the International Network on Technology, Work and Family.

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February 7 2024

Research Seminar

Balancing the western narrative on China - reflections on 33 years straddling the border

Speaker: Prof Howard Davies, Hong Kong Polytechnic

Time: 10am, February 7, 2024

Place: Online via Teams – register at https://lancaster-uk.libcal.com/event/4118119

Having lived in Hong Kong since 1990, Prof. Howard Davies has watched Western commentators descriptions of and predictions about China with some perplexity. There seem to be three sources of misguided analysis. The first is just bias, which can come from both positive and negative perspectives. Writers pick the facts that fit their chosen narrative of “Coming Collapse” or “China Rules the World”. Second, there is just plain sloppy thinking. Third, there is the failure to take institutional and cultural differences into account. This talk reflects on his 33 years of working and living in Hong Kong and China to construct a plea for a more balanced and nuanced approach.

Speaker bio: Howard Davies served as Dean, Associate Dean and Professor in the Faculty of Business at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Howard did research in Business Strategy, China Business and Education. His most recent publication is "Understanding a Changing China", co-authored with Matevz Raskovic.

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1 February 2024

Film Screening

Beijing Winter Swimmers, with director He Xiaopei

Speaker: He Xiaopei

Time: 4pm-530pm, 1 February 2024 - co-organised with the Department of Languages and Cultures and Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Place: Fylde C34 **please note date and venue change**

By a river in central Beijing, retirees break the rules and break the ice to swim in winter, dance Swan Lake in drag, and celebrate Communist and traditional Chinese holidays. This 30-minute documentary gives an intimate portrayal of a contemporary Beijing community.

Speaker bio: Previously an economist working for China's State Council, Dr. Xiaopei He, filmmaker, has devoted herself to the feminist and lesbian movement in China since the 1990s. She took part in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. After completing a PhD on sexuality and cultural studies in the UK, she returned to China to set up Pink Space, a Beijing-based gender and sexuality rights organisation, using films to represent invisible lives and desires.

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30 January 2024

Research Seminar

The Political Thought of Xi Jinping

Speaker: Dr Olivia Cheung, SOAS

Time: 1pm-230pm, 30 January 2024

Place: County South B59 (Politics, Philosophy and Religion Department) - lunch provided with RSVP - please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk by 23 January 2024.

The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, co-authored by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, draws from Xi Jinping's own words and writings issued in his name to explain his ideas and plans. By contextualizing and checking Xi's words against policy implemented, the book offers the first comprehensive and critical analysis of what "Xi Jinping Thought" is and is not, whether it should be treated as China's state ideology, and what it means to China and the world. The book is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, for more information see: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-political-thought-of-xi-jinping-9780197689363?cc=gb&lang=en&#

Speaker bio: Olivia Cheung is Research Fellow of the China Institute at SOAS University of London. She was educated at Oxford where she was a Swire Scholar and a Rhodes Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Warwick, where she was Course Director for the MA in International Politics and East Asia. She is the author of Factional-ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right? (2023).