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LUCC Events in 2021

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

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Friday 26 November 2021

PhD Seminar Series

The Media Representation of Stay-at-Home Fathers in China

Speaker: Fei Huang, University of Westminster

Time: 1-2pm (UK time)

Place: Online via Teams, https://tinyurl.com/LUCC-FeiHuang

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Tuesday 23 November 2021

Research Seminar Series

Dispute Inflation

Speaker: Todd Hall, Oxford University

Time: 11am-12.30pm (UK time), Tuesday 23 November 2021

Place: Online via Teams, register here.

Much work has examined the phenomenon of dispute escalation, whereby the concrete measures state actors take edge them closer to war. Less attention has been devoted to the ways in which state actors’ perceptions of what is at stake in a dispute can also change, with important consequences for the likelihood of conflict. This paper examines the phenomenon of dispute inflation— wherein a contest over an object or issue assumes ever greater stakes and significance for its protagonists—and identifies three different mechanisms that can generate increasing non-material stakes. The upshot is that theoretically even a minor dispute can grow into a major conflict due to swelling stakes, especially when dispute inflation spirals. To illustrate these dynamics at work, this paper looks to recent developments in the dispute between the People’s Republic of China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

Speaker Bio: Todd Hall is Director of the Oxford University China Centre, and Professor of International Relations at St. Anne's College, Oxford. Todd's research interests cover international relations theory; the intersection of emotion, affect, and foreign policy; and Chinese foreign policy. Recent and forthcoming publications include articles in Asian Security, International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Political Science Quarterly, and Security Studies. Professor Hall has also published a book with Cornell University Press, titled Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage, which was recently named co-recipient of the International Studies Association's 2016 Diplomatic Studies Section Book Award.

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Friday 19 November 2021

PhD Seminar Series

"Everyday Ethnicity”: An Alternative Point of View on China’s Ethnic Minority Issues

Speaker: Alex Chelegeer, Leeds University

Time: 1-2pm (UK time)

Place: Online via Teams, https://tinyurl.com/LUCC-Chelegeer

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Tuesday 9 November 2021

Research Seminar Series

China’s Industrial Internet: Platform Capitalism in Manufacturing?

Speaker: Boy Luethje, South China University of Technology

Time: 11am-12pm (UK time), 9 November 2021

Place: Online via Teams, recording available on YouTube.

The talk will give a critical assessment of China’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Under the Made-in-China 2025 program digitalization of manufacturing initially followed Germany’s “Industry 4.0” as a strategic model. However, in China and globally, many of the promises have not been met and digitalization of production has proceeded much slower than expected. On the other hand, the industrial internet has developed rapidly and new models of platform-based manufacturing are emerging, especially in China. IIoT is one of the key responses to the U.S.-led trade and technology “wars” against China and rising protectionism in Europe. The speaker will examine some key problems and ask which lessons can be learned, especially for digitalization and upgrading of small and medium enterprises, the transformation of work, and the regulation of data platforms.

Speaker bio: Prof. Boy Lüthje is director of the Technology and Industry Research Center at the Institute of Public Policy (IPP) at South China University of Technology in Guangzhou. He held the Volkswagen Endowed Chair Industrial Relations and Social Development at Sun Yat-sen University School of Government from 2015 to 2019.

Lüthje is a noted expert on global production networks and the digitalization of manufacturing in the electronics, the automotive and other manufacturing industries. He is the author of numerous papers and books on these topics as well as on industrial relations in China.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in Germany in 1991, where he became an assistant professor. Since 1999, he has worked as a senior research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He held appointments as visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley, the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, Renmin University of China in Beijing and others.

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Wednesday 27 October 2021

Research Seminar Series

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

Speaker: Jing Y.

Time: 11am-1pm UK time (10am-12pm UTC), 27 October 2021

Place: Online via Teams: recording available on YouTube.

“Writing • Mothers” (WM) is an ongoing collaborative writing project initiated by Jing Y. in July 2017 and later joined by different publishers and curators. Focusing on writing as a driver for the meeting of minds and lives, understanding situations, and responsible action, the project seeks to discover narrative-based and critically focused alternatives to political quietism.

The participants of WM projects range from artists to amateurs with no experience in practicing art and writing. WM embodies Jing’s vision of using art and documentary approaches to create "self-made citizenship” in a period of political difficulty. Among the various programming and forms of engagement WM has developed, one output has remained steadily visible to the public: the publishing of one episode/book per year. Each episode has its own thread, its own organizing process, and the resulting texts therefore have distinct styles. To date, WM has co-produced five episodes/books, and its form ranges from letters, memoirs, reflections and debates, to statements and drawings.

The lecture will start by introducing the making of each of these five episodes. It will then go on to discuss the context: how ordinary Chinese people read and write have been changed in the course of five years at large and how the WM project has responded. Ultimately, the project hopes to 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 bio: Jing Y. received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) in 2005 and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Since then she 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.

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Friday 22 October 2021

PhD Seminar Series

"Feminist" as a problematic tag

Speaker: Taoyuan Luo, Leeds University

Time: 1pm-2pm (UK time)

Place: Online via Teams.

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Tuesday 19 October 2021

Research Seminar Series

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

Speaker: Peter Martin, Bloomberg

Time: 1pm-2pm UK time (12-1pm UTC), 19 October 2021

Place: Online, recording available on YouTube.

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 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 its far-western region of Xinjiang. He previously worked for the consultancy APCO Worldwide in Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington, where he analyzed 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.

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7 July 2021

Research Seminar Series

Collective memory narratives and national identity construction of contemporary China

Speaker: Jing Cheng, Xidian University

Time: 11am (UK time), 7 July 2021

Place: Online, recording available on YouTube, co-hosted with the Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Collective memory, the widely shared perceptions of the past, plays a vital role in the construction of national identity. It shapes the story that groups of people tell about their past, present and future in simplified narratives. The dominant approach to the study of Chinese memory and identity politics largely focuses on the Chinese state’s strategic use of war memories for legitimising the CCP’s leadership and promoting political purposes. While it emphasises the state’s role and capacity, it may have underestimated the complexity of state-society relations and overlooked historical and cultural elements that could generate resonance among the wider population. By analysing the Chinese victim and victor narratives, it shows that along with the rise of China there has been a notable shift in emphasis onto the victor identity in the stories China is trying to tell and in the way China engages with the world. This shift should be contextualised in the Chinese state-society dynamics. This paper highlights that the memory narratives China makes out of its past provide a window to the changes to Chinese national identity today.

Speaker bio: Dr. Jing Cheng is a lecturer in School of Foreign Studies at Xidian University, Xi’an, China. Supported by Tomlinson Award of the Asia Research Institute, she did her doctoral research and received PhD in International Relations from the University of Nottingham in 2018. She was a visiting scholar at Imperial College London (2005) and Tsinghua University (2015). Her research lies in the field of national identity, intercultural studies and international communication. She has published in Journal of Asian and African Studies, Political Studies Review, and The Conversation. She is also an associate fellow at Global Governance Institution.

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25 May 2021

Research Seminar Series

Toward a non-essentialist paradigm of culture: A study of Chinese and Japanese management culture

Speaker: Yu Fu and Zoe Zhu, Lancaster University Management School

Place: Online, recording available on Youtube, co-hosted with the Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Time: May 25, 2021 11am-12pm (UK time)

This study reviews and compares the Chinese and Japanese national culture values and norms discussed in the management studies to illustrate the importance of non-essentialist paradigm of culture facing the key cross-cultural issues faced by organisations when designing and implementing management policies and practices in East Asia. This paper addresses Nathan’s (2010) call of non-essentialist approach on culture studies by acknowledging the importance of exploring and respecting local culture when developing organisation strategies. A comparative review on the notions in the Confucianism shows the limitation of essentialist scholars who used the functionalist approach on culture. The simplification of culture based on functional and essentialist perspective and the lack of interpretive and non-essentialist analysis on the core of its management culture will result in confusing the corporate ideology (what the company say they do) with the reality (what they actually do). Only through an analysis of the continuity, change, and context of a company, we can better understand the culture behind the mask. Thus, the authors contend that the development of national cultural values and norms and their impact of management policies and practices in Japan and China, needs to be investigated in a dynamic context through a long-term view.

Speaker bios: Yu Fu is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Management School, Lancaster University. She delivers lectures in the areas of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. Her research interest lies in international HRM, particularly national cultural factors in employment. The main focus of her research is to investigate the impact of Chinese cultural values on the Western Transnational Corporations’ HR policies and practices in their Chinese subsidiaries.

Zoe Zhu is an International Teaching Fellow in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Management School, Lancaster University. She teaches management and marketing in the China campus as well as the Bailrigg campus. As an ethnographer, she is interested in corporate culture in the era of globalization, in particular in the formation, dissemination and interpretation of corporate ideology at Japanese company in East Asia.

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Research Seminar Series

May 18, 2021

Chinese Consumers Environment Behaviour: the roles of place attachment, responsibility, and norms

Speaker: Didier Soopramanien, Loughborough University

Place: Online - recording available on YouTube, co-hosted with the Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Time: May 18, 2021 11am-12pm (UK time)

Environment Laws and regulations in China are becoming stricter. One notable/interesting example is the compulsory sorting and recycling of household rubbish and, when this started in Shanghai in 2019, apps had to be developed to help consumers recycle. But pro-environment behaviour can also be framed as an ethical/moral decision which one ought to be doing rather than being forced to or be rewarded for complying. With my colleagues based in China (Beijing) Dr Song Zenning (Beijing Foreign Studies University) and Lancaster (Dr Ahmad Daryanto) respectively, we have studied and are studying the role of place attachment in promoting pro-environmental behaviour. Place attachment refers to peoples’ affection and relationship with a place. The more attached people are to a place, they are more likely to take care of that place and thus engage in environmentally friendly behaviours that will benefit that place. This presentation will discuss research that we have conducted in China about that relationship and, importantly, we focus on some other intervening factors that may influence how place attachment positively influences pro-environment behaviour of Chinese consumers. More attention will be devoted to on-going work using data collected in Beijing where we specifically study the roles of two factors that can influence how place attachment affects pro-environment behaviour. These two factors are: environmental responsibility and social norms. We find, firstly, that attachment to a place activates a personal sense of responsibility which may counteract the well-known constraining effect of social dilemma to engage in environmental behaviour. Secondly, the place attachment effect on responsibility that promotes residents’ environment behaviour is stronger when individuals perceive that others are also engaging in similar behaviours (i.e., the effect of norms). But the characteristic of the groups of individuals performing these behaviours is important: what neighbours (local norms) are doing or ought to doing matters less than colleagues, friends, and relatives/parents (subjective norms).

Speaker bio: Dr Didier Soopramanien is currently a Reader in Marketing at the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University. Didier holds a PhD from Lancaster University and was also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Science from 2002 to 2011. Prior to moving back to the UK in 2018, Didier worked as an Associate Professor at the International Business School of Beijing Foreign Studies from 2012 to 2018.

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27 April 2021

Research Seminar Series

From eSport industry to players: understanding the platformalization of infrastrucutre and digital culture in China

Recording link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhEi4D3Px6w

Speaker: Yupei Zhao, Zhejiang University

Place: Online via Teams, co-hosted with the Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Time: April 27, 2021 11am-12pm (UK time)

China has embarked on a radical transformation of its online and mobile games industry since its government announced its ambition to be a global sporting power. This study investigates Chinese electronic sports (eSports) in the context of platform governance and platform capitalism, through a case study of the platformization of Tencent, one of China’s largest media conglomerates. examine the interactivity and flow of power arising from direct state control and the processes of commercialization and professionalization. To support our proposal that the state and corporations, while genetically different, are mutually constitutive, we explore concepts of the platformization of infrastructures and infrastructuralization of platforms. This study proposes that the Chinese eSports industry has an umbrella-like structure and challenges the assumption that China is an authoritarian system with a one-size-fits-all policy. Moreover, We find eSports is perceived as non-secure, casual, and irregular by the Chinese public and that the mental changes experienced by eSports professionals throughout their careers have been significantly influenced by a more sophisticated form of state power and social norms, including cultural cognitive beliefs, economic stimulation, and authority attributions.

Speaker bio: Dr Yupei Zhao (PhD in University of Leicester, UK) is an “Hundred Talent Program Young Professor” and doctorial tutor in college of Media and International Culture in Zhejiang University. She is currently vice chair-elected of International Communication Association Popular Media and Culture Division, co-founder of UK-China Media and Communication Association. Meanwhile, Yupei Zhao has been invited as senior researcher in Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, China Policy institute at University of Nottingham (UK), and the Eurasian Sport Industry at Emlyon's Shanghai Campus, visiting professor in Xi’an-Liverpool University and Beijing Institute of Technology. Her research interests broadly include use of mixed-methods to examine digital culture and politics, political communication, neo-globalization communication, intracultural communication, cultural diplomacy and social media.

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On the culture-specific aspects of formulating opinions in Chinese: A multidimensional and comparative approach

Research Seminar Series

Speaker: Vittorio Tantucci, Lancaster University

Place: Online via Teams (recording available on YouTube) - co-hosted with Lancaster University Confucius Institute

Time: Thursday, 18 March, 3pm-5pm

How do we say what we think? Is the way we formulate evaluations and opinions culture-specific? In this paper we adopted a corpus-based approach to analyse pragmatic and textual mismatches that exist from Mandarin Chinese to American English Interaction. We fitted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al., 2006; Tantucci & Wang 2018) that simulates large-scale interactional choices in the two languages, based on the two balanced corpora of spontaneous telephone conversation (CallHome). Our results indicate that while American English evaluations are distinctively subjective and markedly speaker-oriented, Chinese opinions are conventionally formulated as a joint project (cf. Clark 1996) and are pre-emptively aimed at intersubjective agreement among interlocutors (Tantucci 2020). This is pragmatically achieved via specific markers of epistemic cooperation and ad hoc strategies of harmonious rapport-maintenance (Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008). Large-scale analysis of naturalistic interaction as such has the potential to inform research in intercultural communication and the study of interactional behaviour in social sciences in general. The culture-specific modality in which we state what we think is a fundamental area of research for advancing cross-cultural awareness and (im-)politeness research.

Vittorio Tantucci is Lecturer of Chinese and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. His publications focus on usage-based intersections of pragmatics and cognition. These issues are addressed typologically and cross-culturally, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. His recent major publications include Language and Social Minds: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Intersubjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2021); “Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction” ” (Journal of Pragmatics 2021, authored with Aiqing Wang); “Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin” (Discourse Studies 2020; authored with Aiqing Wang), “From co-actionality to extended intersubjectivity: Drawing on language change and ontogenetic development” (Applied Linguistics 2020).

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Confrontation or Misperception ——Evaluating Trump’s ‘New Path’ in North Korea Policy

Speaker: Yiqin Huang, Lau China Institute, KCL

Place: Online via Zoom (Meeting ID: 779 173 0389 Passcode: LUCCPHD)

Time: Tuesday, 16 March, 12pm-1pm

After the 2020 US presidential election, it is necessary to review the US's North Korea policy. Yiqin’s research adopts the asymmetric bargaining and misconception theory. It tries to explain why the 'Maximum Pressure and Engagement' policy did not solve the nuclear crisis, nor did it normalize the US-DPRK relations in a treaty-based framework. From 2017 to 2020, the US-DPRK relations have gone through three stages under Donald Trump's administration, from 'confrontation', 'détente' to 'stalemate'. Throughout these four years, the US government had strengthened coercive measures from military, economic and diplomatic perspectives, which did not result in Pyongyang's abandonment of its nuclear capabilities. The engagement policy culminated in three Trump-Kim meetings, which has been unprecedented since the North Korean nuclear crisis started in the 1990s. The advanced engagement policy has also become a partisan tool for Trump's administration against the Democratic party. Deterrence and Engagement, as traditional tactics of the US's bargaining with North Korea. This talk will discuss the possible reasons contributing to Trump's North Korea policy's failure and its legacy to Biden's administration. The asymmetric structure of relationships, embedded hostility and distrust, partisan conflicts in the US, and great power competition in Northeast Asia will be discussed.

Yiqin Huang is a PhD candidate at Lau China Institute, Department of Global Affairs, King's College London. Her research interest is asymmetric conflict, alliance literature and China's international relations.

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Querying/Queering Gender? The lived experience of heterosexual zhongxing (middle gender/sex) women in China and Hong Kong

Research Seminar Series

Speaker: Eva Cheuk-Yin Li, Lancaster University

Place: Online via Teams - link TBA.

Time: 11am, 10 February 2021.

Since the early 2000s, the mediated and gendered phenomenon of zhongxing (‘middle gender/sex’ or ‘neutral gender/sex’) has mainstreamed non-normative gender expressions among women in the Sinophone world and attracted considerable academic discussion. Scholarly works have either placed heavy emphasis on textual representation or assumed that zhongxing is exclusively relevant to masculine lesbians. In this talk, I would like to extend the current literature by exploring the everyday practice of zhongxing among heterosexual women in urban China and Hong Kong. By drawing from semi-structured interviews with 43 individuals, this paper explores how heterosexual women perform zhongxing to queer gender and construct alternative modes of selfhood. The findings suggest that heterosexual Chinese women engage in precarious boundary management by re-doing appearance and personality. They seek to express their individuality by distancing from hyper-femininity while simultaneously self-discipline gender expressions in order not to be (mis)recognised as lesbians or become ‘leftover women’, who ‘fail’ the heterosexual marriage market. Paradoxically, their everyday practice of zhongxing inevitably reinforces gender binderies and misogynistic values.

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Remapping Beijing: The Representation of City Spaces and Sensuous Geographies in Chinese Cinema

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Rui Qian (Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Art)

Place: Online via Zoom (meeting ID 779 173 0389, password LUCCPHD)

Time: 12-1pm, 2 February 2021

In China, the development of the urbanization process resulted in the changes of spaces in many cities; it also caused many social issues such as forced relocation, compulsory demolition, and the emergence of Chinese "migrant workers rush". Many Chinese directors paid attention to these social phenomena and became active since the 1990s. My PhD project concentrates on the Chinese sixth generation of directors and their films to research the representation, misrepresentation, anti-representation and anxiety of China's urbanization process and relevant issues in Chinese cinema.

"Space" is a dynamic force that generates changes, shapes experiences, and demands narratives; "space" is seen as produced by social, political and economic forces rather than as a natural given; and "space" engages with other terms such as place, globalization, and localization. The study of "space" in Chinese cinema helps us understand the representation of urbanization on screen. This talk will focus on three Chinese films, Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001), I Love Beijing (Ning Ying, 2000), and Get in and Go (Guan Hu, 2000) and discuss: How can audiences read city spaces through "sensuous geographies" in films? How did these films remap and shape the specific city spaces through different cinematic languages? What are the relationships between space, body and memory in Chinese cinema?

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China’s Political System: Responding to Giant Crises

Research Seminar Series

Speaker: Wang Zhangxu, Fudan University

Place: Online via Teams, view the video at: https://youtu.be/ZhnXdELPJSg

Time: 19 January 2021, 11am GMT / 7pm Beijing

In this talk I first propose a conceptual framework for understanding political systems – a political system should be understood on two levels, ideational and operational. With this framework, I explain how the Chinese political system is formed and structured, at both levels, while also comparing it to an ideal liberal democracy. I then examine how Chinese political system is supposed to respond to giant crises when such crises emerge, and use the Covid-19 epidemic of 2019-2020 as a case study. I conclude with some general discussion on the study of China and the study of political systems.

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