The March 2022 edition of LUCC's newsletter is out.

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LUCC News

March, 2022, Vol.3, Issue 4. Edited by Zeng Jiru

LUCC is delighted to announce that we are finally returning to in-person events - with FREE LUNCHES provided! It's been more than two year since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we're proud of the online transitions we've made, but nothing can substitute for face-to-face contact in research collaboration, learning and knowledge exchange.

That's why we're so excited to welcome Dr. Tao Wang of Manchester University for a lunch seminar on 22 March, 1pm-2.30pm, for a talk titled, Weddings, Funerals, and Banquets: The Impact of Guanxi on Political Representation in Taiwan, and Prof. Lee Jones of QMUL on 4 April to present his new book Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise. Lunch will be provided for all attendees, so please be sure to RSVP by emails if you're coming - and for those who can't join in person, there is also the option to join online. For all the details please see below.

In this month's online seminar, new colleague Jocelin Lingxia Zhou delivered a fascinating presentation on the politics of dialects in China, with a terrific audience across and outside the UK. In case you missed any of last year's seminars, and most recently, Boy Lüthje's presentation on Platform Capitalism in China, all are now available for streaming on LUCC's YouTube Channel.

我们很高兴地宣布，研究中心的活动最终重新回到线下开展——并将在活动中提供免费午餐茶歇！新冠疫情爆发已有两年，这两年中，我们虽然对自身线上转型运营的卓著成效倍感骄傲，但也认识到，在研究社区建设、学习和知识共享当中，面对面交流的意义仍是无可替代的。

籍此机会，我们也满怀激动地迎来了曼彻斯特大学Tao Wang博士为我们带来的午饭研讨会。本次活动将在3月22日下午1:00 - 2:30举行，题为婚礼、丧葬和宴会：“关系”对于台湾政治代表的影响。4月4日QMUL的Lee Jones教授会讨论其新书《条条快快中国：国家转变是如何影响中国的崛起》。活动将会为每位参会者提供午餐。如您意欲参加该活动，请尽快发送邮件进行注册。对于无法到场的同仁，我们仍将提供线上参会的选项。更多详情请见下文。

在本月的线上研讨会中，我们的新同事周灵霞带来了关于中国方言政治的精彩展示。这一活动获得了全英内外人士的参与和支持。如果您希望回看去年的任何一场研讨会，以及最近Boy Lüthje关于中国平台资本主义的分享内容，请点击YouTube云上研究中心地址进行查看。

More LUCC news

UPCOMING EVENTS

活动预告

22 March: Weddings, Funerals, and Banquets: The Impact of Guanxi on Political Representation in Taiwan

3月22日：婚礼、丧葬和宴会：“关系”对于台湾政治代表的影响

• Speaker: Dr. Tao Wang, University of Manchester
• Time: 13:00 - 14:30, 22 March, 2022 (London Time）
• Place: FASS A008 Meeting Room 1 (next to Margaret Fell Lecture Theatre) - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk.
• Online Access: Online via Teams, to join please register here.

Introduction: “The funeral home was like his second office.” On average, a MP in Taiwan receives 31 requests a week from constituents to attend funerals. Why are voters interested in having MPs present at private funerals? Drawing on evidence from in-depth interviews and observation, this study focuses on the role of guanxi, the Chinese term for particularistic ties. Voters in a guanxi society are inclined to show off their particularistic ties with Very Important People. Since national lawmakers are figures of power, this tendency among voters keeps Taiwanese legislators exceptionally busy attending private weddings, funerals, and banquets, often at the expense of attentiveness to national policy. The study concludes that guanxi culture brings constituency focus to the fore of Taiwan’s political representation, shedding some light on the ramification of political culture on democratic consolidation.

Speaker bio: Tao Wang (PhD, University of Manchester, 2021) is Research Associate at the Manchester China Institute. His research interests lie in the fields of political culture, democratisation, and nationalism, with a focus on East Asia. His research was recently published in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Contemporary China, and World Affairs.

4 April: Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise

4月4日：断裂中国：国家转型如何塑造中国的崛起

• Speaker: Lee Jones, Queen Mary University of London
• Time: 1-2:30pm
• Place: Charles Carter A19 (Executive Suite) - lunch provided, please RSVP to china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
• Online Access: Available online via Teams, to join please register here.

Introduction: Is China's rise a threat to international order? In Fractured China, Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri show that it depends on what one means by 'China', for China is not the monolithic, unitary actor that many assume. Forty years of state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses – have profoundly changed how its foreign policy is made and implemented. Today, Chinese behaviour abroad is often not the product of a coherent grand strategy, but results from a sometimes-chaotic struggle for power and resources among contending politico-business interests, within a surprisingly permissive Chinese-style regulatory state. Presenting a path-breaking new analytical framework, Jones and Hameiri transform the central debate in International Relations and provides new tools for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and respond to twenty-first century rising powers. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China and Southeast Asia, Fractured China includes three major case studies – the South China Sea, non-traditional security cooperation, and development financing–to demonstrate the framework's explanatory power.

Speaker bio: Lee Jones is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China.

More LUCC events\

NEW LUCC FELLOWS

研究中心新同事

Dr. Emre Tarim

LUCC warmly welcomes the addition of our newest fellow, Dr. Emre Tarim, of LUMS. Dr. Tarim is a lecturer in behavioural sciences with an interest in China's financial system and investor behaviours, as well as China's political economy of energy transitions. More broadly, Emre is interested in understanding the nexus between individual cognition and behaviour and social and economic institutions, with ongoing work focusing on cognition and decision making in the context of retail and institutional financial services, energy transitions and climate change, and migrants' saving and investment behaviour. Read more about Emre’s research on his profile page.

NEW PUBLICATIONS

最新发表

Energy firms' responses to institutional ambiguity and complexity in long energy transitions: The case of the UK and China

能源企业对长期能源转型中的制度化模糊与复杂之回应：基于英国与中国的案例研究

Emre Tarim, in collaboration with LUCC's Lingxuan Liu and LU Management School's Tobias Finke, compared and contrasted the UK and China as maximum variation cases for understanding long energy transitions from the state and the firm perspectives. The authors present case histories and corpus-based computer-assisted textual analyses on the long energy transitions in both countries. The findings demonstrate that a centrally coordinated and imposed approach by the state can generate institutional clarity in long energy transitions, which is quickly seized on by firms striving to preserve and increase their resources and influence. Such clarity and transition processes lose momentum owing to the perennial trilemma of energy affordability, security and sustainability. Market-based mechanisms to trigger and sustain long energy transitions, complemented with focused and continuous state interventions (e.g. incentives, taxation), provide a more effective and accountable institutional framework for the state and energy firms to deal with the energy trilemma. Irrespective of the logic of the type of economy that manifests the backdrop for any long energy transition process, institutional ambiguity and complexity never disappear completely, owing to both the energy trilemma and the institutional multiplicities.

READ MORE HERE:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8551.12354

Rights Defence: How the UK Should Respond to the PRC's Overseas Political Influence

权利之捍卫：英国应如何回应中国的海外政治影响力

Andrew Chubb's new policy report, Rights Defence: How the UK Should Respond to the PRC's Political Influence, will be published by the KCL Lau China Institute later this month. The report outlines concrete policy proposals for protecting the rights of UK residents, and academic freedom in UK higher education institutions, while avoiding the pitfalls of over-securitisation that Chubb has detailed in his other research.

ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT

学术参与

• LUCC's Andrew Chubb joined five other panellists for a discussion of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, organised by the LU Centre for International Law and Human Rights, on Friday, 4 March. More than 100 staff and students attended the event.

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.

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