LUCC News, September 2024
The September 2024 edition of LUCC's newsletter is out.
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LUCC News: September 2024
Welcome to a new academic year with Lancaster University China Centre. Summer term closed out with a terrific PhD Seminar series (pictured above), featuring many new Doctoral Fellows Kaydence Sun on tomboy identity in Mainland China, Xiao Zhang on children's responses to others in distress, Lily Wu on imagined feminism, and Shu Zhang on rural land policy in China. Many of the participants in this lively series have recently joined as LUCC Doctoral Fellows, so look out for their profiles below and in forthcoming newsletters.
Looking forward, we're diving straight into an exciting lineup of research seminars in the coming term, starting with a lunch seminar next Monday, Sep 30, with Elena Ziliotti of Delft University of Technology, who will present her Confucian-inspired theory of Meritocratic Democracy. Lunch is served so please RSVP for catering purposes.
We have 4 more great talks in October:
- October 8 we'll welcome Linda Chelan Li for a talk on Strategic Roles of Hong Kong in a Globalising China (co-hosted with LU Confucius Institute, registration here).
- October 15, Pang Laikwan will join us from Hong Kong for an online talk on her new book One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty (co-hosted with the Centre for International Law and Human Rights, register here).
- October 17: Enze Han of Hong Kong University will joint us in-person for a talk on China’s Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (co-hosted with LU Confucius Institute, registration here).
- October 29: Dr. Yuan Wang of Duke Kunshan University will visit for a talk on Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Infrastructure Development, currently a critically important topic in world politics. Lunch is served so please RSVP.
- November 19, Prof. Susanne Choi of CUHK will share her latest research on Migration, Masculinity and The Elderly Care Gap in Rural China on Nov 19. That’s a lunch seminar too, so please RSVP if you're coming.
The other exciting news on the research front is that LUCC’s flagship Mapping China Research & Collaboration project is now officially live. Click the link in the top-right to explore this unique resource visualising the whole university’s research about, and in collaboration with, China and the Global Sinosphere. Thanks to everyone who gave valuable feedback on the beta version back in February.
Read on for all the latest research and engagement activity from LUCC's fellows, and we look forward to seeing you at this year's events.
Newly launched: LUCC’s Mapping China Research and Collaboration tool
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Research Seminars
30 Sep 2024
Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory
Dr. Elena Ziliotti (Delft University of Technology)
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Place: County South B59
Lunch provided.
Please register to: china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
8 October 2024
Strategic Roles of Hong Kong in a Globalising China: Challenges of Greater Bay Area as a Mechanism of Reform
Prof. Linda Chelan Li (City University Hong Kong)
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30 pm
Place: Welcome Centre A22 (Lecture Theatre 4)
Refreshments provided.
Please register at: https://shorturl.at/G8r7P
15 Oct 2024
One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty
Prof. Laikwan Pang (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Online Seminar
Please register at: https://rb.gy/mhzeg4
17 Oct 2024
The Ripple Effect: China’s Complex Presence in Southeast Asia
Dr Enze Han (The University of Hong Kong)
Time: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Place: Welcome Centre A34 (Lecture Theatre 1)
Refreshments provided.
Please register at: https://shorturl.at/nqDSQ
29 Oct 2024
The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Infrastructure Development
Dr Yuan Wang (Duke Kunshan University)
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Place: County South B89
Lunch provided.
Please register to: china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
19 Nov 2024
Migration, Masculinity and the Elderly Care Gap in Rural China
Prof Susanne Choi (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Place: County Main SR 6
Lunch provided.
Please register to: china.centre@lancaster.ac.uk
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People
LUCC is delighted to welcome Dr. Philippe Major join us as a new LUCC Fellow, and Emma Yin and Kaydence Sun join us as new Doctoral Fellows.
Dr Philippe Major
Philippe Major's work focuses on modern Chinese philosophy and adopts interdisciplinary resources (philosophy, sociology of philosophy, discourse analysis, intellectual history) to address issues related to epistemic hegemony, alternative epistemologies, alternative modernity, and the exclusion of Chinese traditions from the philosophy curriculum.
Emma (Yue) Yin
Emma (Yue) Yin is a PhD student in Linguistics, specializing in corpus-based discourse analysis and discourse-historical Analysis of social media text and explore topics about language, gender and video games.
Kaydence (Xiaoqi) Sun
Xiaoqi Kaydence Sun is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural studies at Lancaster University's Department of Sociology. Kaydence's research focuses on lesbianism and queer-female-masculinities in contemporary China through academic pathways of sociology and cultural studies.
Profiles of all LUCC’s fellows are available at our People page.
New Research
LUCC’s flagship Mapping China Research & Collaboration project is now officially live. Click to explore this unique resource visualising the whole university’s research about, and in collaboration with, China and the Global Sinosphere. We hope the tool’s six dashboards will help researchers identify relevant China expertise and collaboration partners.
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- Ou Lin
Drawing on a series of interviews with on-demand food delivery riders, who are rural migrant workers, this paper seeks to explain the workers’ decision to give up stable jobs in factories in favour of largely unregulated and precarious on-demand work. Focusing on those aspects of the legal framework which shape workers’ decisions, it presents the explanation under the dual banners of ‘income’ and ‘freedom and flexibility’. In terms of income, Chinese law often enables low factory wages and a reliance on overtime; migrant workers view social insurance contributions as a loss; issues with payroll and wage arrears are significant. In terms of freedom and flexibility, insufficient rest rights lead to inadequate breaks for assembly line workers and, compounded by unspecified ‘special working time’ permit physically unbearable shifts without extra compensation. Age and gender discrimination are prevalent both in factories and various sectors. In contrast, on-demand delivery work has relatively low barriers to entry.
Carbon emissions from urban takeaway delivery in China
- Lingxuan Liu (co-author)
Online food delivery has become a popular mode of urban food consumption in China as its underlying business mechanism, Online To Offline (O2O), gaining popularity. However, the environmental impacts of a rapidly expanding online food delivery industry and its potential to mitigate environmental burdens remained unexplored in China. Our research found that Chinese cities generated 1.67 MtCO2-equivalent (CO2e) from 13.07 billion times of deliveries in 2019, including transport and packaging. The transportation-related GHG emissions were 745 KtCO2e in 2019, with an average of 0.057 kg CO2e per order and an average of 0.011 kg CO2e per capita. These emissions have surged from 0.31 MtCO2e in 2014 to 2.74 MtCO2e in 2021. We predict that this figure will increase further to 5.94 MtCO2e by 2035. However, with a range of policies such as replacing motorcycles with electric bikes and optimizing traffic routes, it is possible to mitigate such GHG emissions by 4.39–10.97 MtCO2e between 2023 and 2035. These findings highlight the need for further research into the environmental impact of online food delivery and the potential for mitigating it.
China and Sustainable Transition – Chairman Coal vs. Green Cyber-Dragon
China’s contribution to global expedited, deep decarbonisation is absolutely crucial, as the largest absolute emitter of any nation-state, while on many counts, such as regarding renewable energy or electric vehicle industries, it also leads the world. Yet its path to sustainable transition remains extremely challenging, not least due to the exceptional dependence if its economy on coal. This chapter examines these challenges over three steps, unfolding a comprehensive overview of the strategically plausible medium-term futures regarding China’s route beyond coal. First, it considers the deeply entrenched, even constitutive, dependence of the current political economy of the PRC on coal, illuminating just how difficult it will be to effect a rapid change of this status quo. Secondly, it then turns to a parallel but usually neglected concern that will prove crucial in determining how successfully, smoothly and quickly China moves beyond coal; namely, the dynamics of the construction of an entirely new energy system that successfully combines three key dimensions of innovation, in all of which China displays considerable dynamism: digitalization, renewable energy and storage/batteries (hence ‘DRS’). Finally, we consider how well China will be able to maintain this innovation dynamism, especially since innovation – and in these spheres specifically – is irreducibly and increasingly connected to issues of political tension, both domestically and internationally. Altogether, the chapter illuminates how China’s ‘innovation-as-politics’ towards sustainable transition currently sits uncertainly between a locked-in system of coal-dependent authoritarianism and an as-yet-unborn new system of world-leading ‘cleantech’, the realization of which will also need political reform.
Platformisation Practice for Emancipation or Subordination?
A Multimodal Critical Discourse Study of Self-presentations of African-Chinese Families on Douyin
- Run Li
In China, the rise in popularity of African-Chinese families is largely driven by the influence of new media, with many African women turning to Chinese social media platforms to document their daily lives and explore economic opportunities through increased online visibility. However, scholarly attention to the self-presentations of African-Chinese families on these platforms remains minimal. Addressing this gap, this study, through analysing 26 selected short videos posted on Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), employs multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate how African women in African-Chinese families conduct self-presentations on social media. The study found that African women in African-Chinese families, when engaging in digital practices, employ certain discursive strategies to conduct self-presentations in alignment with the Chinese context and national conditions. In videos, they identify with and construct patriarchal norms within heteronormative families, align with China’s political agenda, as well as perform ambiguous feminism. It is argued that African women’s digital practices represent an acceptance and response to the platformisation of Chinese social media. This study sheds light on the complex ways in which marginalised groups navigate digital platforms to gain visibility, while also revealing the potential of such practices to reinforce gender inequalities in the Chinese context. By highlighting these factors, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersection between digital media, cultural integration, and gender politics in the context of contemporary China.
Writing of ’Three Icons of Dongbei Renaissance’
- Aiqing Wang
Literary works based on Dongbei (China’s Northeast) or composed by Dongbei-born writers have been playing a preponderant role in modern Chinese literature. There is a recent resurgence of Dongbei-born writers who are collectively referred to as ‘neo-Dongbei writers’, exemplified by ‘three icons of Dongbei Renaissance’, aka ‘three swordsmen in the Tiexi District’. Notwithstanding reality-oriented depictions pertaining to social issues such as redundancy and dipsomania, fiction composed by Ban Yu, Zheng Zhi and Shuang Xuetao bears resemblance to Cthulhu Mythos. To be more specific, the three leading neo-Dongbei writers portray preternatural creatures, and their narratives convey fear of the unknown and nameless approximations of form.
Chinese Nationalism, PRC Resolve, and Crisis Escalation:
Views from Indo-Pacific Experts
- Andrew Chubb
How do Indo-Pacific experts assess the role of Chinese public opinion during a crisis? Does Chinese nationalist pressure boost Beijing’s resolve in the eyes of analysts, former officials, and policy advisers around the region? What effect does Chinese nationalist outrage have on these strategic elites’ views of different policy approaches? Do China specialists differ from generalists in their interpretations of Chinese public opinion’s significance? This report offers insight into these questions using data from a survey conducted with 799 international affairs experts in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States in late 2023 and early 2024. Comparing respondents’ views of a crisis before and after Beijing goes public — issuing a public threat statement, leading a wave of online outrage, and permitting street demonstrations — indicates a large majority of experts regard Chinese public opinion as a significant factor in hypothetical crisis situations involving their country. However, its effects on observers’ policy preferences generally run counter to Beijing’s interests.
- Eva Li
Dr Eva Li gave a keynote, ‘Fandom of a Transgressive Woman: How Mainland Chinese Fans of a Censored Singer Negotiate Identities and Transborder Solidarity’, at the Transgressive Women in East Asian Screen Cultures Symposium, Cardiff University, UK. (23-24 May 2024).
Fans have consistently embraced transgressiveness, from celebrating unconventional interpretations of gender and sexuality to challenging moral and legal boundaries through transformative works. Research on fandom in North American and Western European contexts often assumes the media environment of liberal democracy and focuses on the cultural politics of fans navigating social and cultural norms as well as internal hierarchy and self-policing. This study aims to understand how fans react when confronted with potential conflicts between their national and fan identities within an authoritarian context. Denise Ho (HOCC), renowned as the first publicly-out lesbian singer-songwriter in the Sinophone world, a Canadian-Hongkonger performer, and a pro-democracy LGBTQ activist, had garnered a growing fanbase in mainland China before being banned from performing there due to her support of and participation in the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement (2014) and the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) protests (2019) in Hong Kong. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with 32 fans from mainland China, this paper explores how mainland Chinese fans of a transgressive star sustain their transgressive fannish engagement and negotiate civic and queer identities.
Outreach & Engagement
Eva Li's podcast on Denise Ho
Dr Eva Li did a podcast (in Mandarin) on Hong Kong popstar and activist Denise Ho, ‘‘Without a backbone, how can one don the armour of courage and march into battle?‘ Contemplating Denise Ho’s Journey over the years (‘沒有腰骨，怎麼披甲上陣－聊何韻詩的這些年來’), 詞與物 Les Mots et les choses. (14 May 2024)
For more information:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ydHox8PowxU9G1n6YVSrO
LUCC at the Joint East Asia Studies Conference in Preston
LUCC fellows Jinghan Zeng, David Tyfield and Andrew Chubb, together with Visiting Scholar Gulnara Zholzhova, presented a panel of four papers entitled "East (Eur-)Asian Infrastructures and Geostrategic Competition?" at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference in Preston on 27 June.
LUCC Doctoral Fellow Xue Bai also presented her work, "Voting for National Products? A case study of the buycott of Erke in China" at the conference.
LUCC director in New York Times
Andrew Chubb commented in New York Times story on the entertaining - but also deadly serious - WeChat account of China's Ministry of State Security. “The question is the extent to which you want everybody thinking about [national security]. Because it has major downsides in terms of constraining the activities people will engage in, interfering in people-to-people contact, just making people stop what they otherwise productively would be doing,”
Culture & Community
Tai Chi for beginners
Qimei Li is a keen amateur practitioner of Yang style Tai Chi who has practiced on and off for more than 20 years. She teaches Tai Chi in Lancaster on behalf of Lancaster University Confucius Institute.
Qimei grew up in Taiyyuan, Shanxi where her father, Yuming Li, was a teacher of Tai Chi for more than 30 years, achieving Master status. Qimei enjoys practicing and teaching Tai Chi because it is a good way to improve circulation, flexibility and to let go stress.
Time: Friday, 12:15 pm to 1:00pm, from 4 October to 13 December 2024
Venue: Garstang Arts Centre
Registration: Cost to attend - booking required
For more information: Tai Chi for beginners, Friday 4 October, 12:15pm - Lancaster University
Chinese Opera classes
Weekly Chinese opera classes for all staff, students and members of the community.
The 9-week culture course introduces some basic knowledge of Chinese opera, mainly with the example of Peking Opera, ‘the quintessence’ of Chinese culture and ‘World Intangible Cultural Heritage’.
The course aims at supporting learners to learn about some core pats of Chinese traditional culture that are still embedded in the contemporary China, and enabling learners to gain knowledge and skills of cross-cultural communication.
Time: Tuesday, 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm, from 15 October to 10 December 2024 (9 classes).
Venue: Lancaster University Confucius Institute (The Roundhouse)
Registration: Cost to attend - booking required
For more information: Chinese Opera, Tuesday 15 October, 6:00pm - Lancaster University
Lancaster Chinese weekend classes for children
(5-11 years old)
The children will have a one-hour Chinese language class and one hour for Chinese arts and crafts activities.
Beginner and advanced classes available.
Time: Sunday, 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, from 6 October to 15 December 2024 (10 classes).
Venue: Lancaster University Confucius Institute (The Roundhouse)
Registration: Cost to attend - booking required
For more information: Lancaster Chinese weekend classes for children, Sunday 6 October, 10:00am - Lancaster University
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