The Carolina Asia Center is sponsoring a China Speaker Series for 2006-7.

This past Spring we sponsored three talks by distinguished professors from both Tsinghua and Peking Universities covering "Migration in Tibet", "AIDS Rumors in China," and "The Struggle for Hong Kong after World War II."

This Fall we have had talks by Dr. Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, and Dr. Elizabeth Economy of the Council of Foreign Relations.

In Spring 2007 we are planning talks by Peter Hessler, author of "River Town" and the just released "Oracle Bones," Susan Shirk, Director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC-San Diego, and Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Fall 2006 we have had talks by Dr. Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, and Dr. Elizabeth Economy of the Council of Foreign Relations.

Spring 2007

Susan Shirk, Director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC-San Diego

Date : April 16, 2007
Time: 7:00 - 8:30 pm
Place: FedEx Global Education Center Room 1005.

Her new book China: Fragile Superpower will be available for purchase/signing from 6-7pm in the FedEx Global Education Center Atrium.


Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His talk is titled; "The Rise of Innovative China?"

Date: April 18, 2007
Time: 12:30-2 pm
Place: FedEx Global Education Center Room 1005.

Triangle East Asia Colloquium 2007

POLITICS, ECONOMY AND THE CHANGING SHAPES OF FAITH: GLOBALIZATION, RELIGION, AND THE STATE IN EAST ASIA

In recent years, East Asian nations have witnessed a host of religious innovations ranging from new religious movements to ethical reforms to material changes in ritual practices and patterns of popular religiosity. At the same time, "globalization"--a term that has come to index a diverse array of processes and effects associated with the growth and empowerment of a range of transnational political, economic and cultural forces and institutions ? has inspired powerful political and economic changes throughout the region and its diasporic communities.

The 2007 TEAC invites scholars in the Triangle and surrounding regions to examine the intersection of these transnational trends, state practices and new forms of religious and cultural agency, and to reflect on the questions that these transformations raise. In what ways can we understand the relations between current refigurations of political and economic power and new practices in the social and religious domains? What do these new movements and forms of religiousity reveal about states, their citizens, and their histories in East Asia? What do they reveal about neoliberalism in its global form? How are such political, economic and religious transformations shaping and remaking East Asian states and civil societies today?

Featured Speakers:

SPEAKERS

Robert Oppenheim is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Oppenheim studies the politics of culture and knowledge that flow out of various practices of collecting, selecting, encountering, centering, and materially caring for monuments and other objects in a historic landscape. The focal point of his research has been the historic Korean city of Kyôngju, the site of the first millennium kingdom of Silla, and the way its modern officials and inhabitants have negotiated conflicts between historical preservation and development, archaeology and everyday life. He is currently working on a research project on tapsa, a popular contemporary form of "field study" travel or domestic heritage tourism centering on individual or group visitation to historic monuments, often off the beaten track, in the interest of authentic experience.

Ellen Schattschneider is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University. A sociocultural anthropologist with strong ethnographic interests in Japan, her work focuses on ritual performance, gender and embodiment, spirit mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular religious experience and comparative capitalist cultures. Her first book, Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Duke University Press, 2003) explores healing, self-fashioning and embodied psychodynamic processes on a sacred landscape associated with a Shinto shrine founded by a rural Japanese woman in the 1920s. Her current book project, Facing the Dead: Japan and its Dolls in the Mirror of War, examines the significance of dolls and human figurines in popular Japanese experiences and memories of World War II.

Robert P. Weller is the Acting Director of Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs and a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. His past and present research include the role of religious variation in Taiwan's changing economy and society, the development of the environmental movement and nature tourism in China and Taiwan in the context of economic growth, and the role of local voluntary organizations as mediators between state and society in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. His most recent book is Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (Cambridge, 2006). Others include Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan; Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (1999); Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (1994); and Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (1987). His edited and co-edited volumes include Civil Life, Globalization and Political Change in Asia (2005); Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (1996); and Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe and Latin America (1982). He also has consulted on poverty and unemployment relief in western China.

The 2007 Triangle East Asia Colloquium is organized by faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Funding for the Triangle East Asia Colloquium is provided by Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the U. S. Department of Education Title VI grant.

See detailed Program.

If colleagues have comments or suggestions, please send these to Dr. Lauren Leve (lgleve@unc.edu).

**We would urge all colleagues to circulate this preliminary announcement as widely as possible, and particularly to colleagues and collaborators at other UNC campuses.**

A NEW APPROACH TO ENDING SWEATSHOPS:
LESSONS FROM CHINA AND THAILAND

A Talk by

HEEWON KHYM
NGO and Trade Union Coordinator
Fair Labor Association

Social compliance auditing does not always lead to sustainable change in the garment industry. The Fair Labor Association is testing an approach in China and Thailand that moves beyond its traditional monitoring approach to a more integrated developmental approach to sustainable compliance.

Date: Thursday, January 18, 2007
Time: 5:30-7:00 PM
Place: 2nd Floor Conference Room, Saunders Hall

IONA ROZEAL BROWN

RECEPTION

Date: Monday, January 22, 2007
Time: 5:00 PM
Place: Stone Center Hitchcock Room

Iona Brown is an African-American painter who has traveled extensively throughout Japan and uses her knowledge of Asia to investigate Japanese and Korean youth culture's emulations of hip-hop. Her unique style has been referred to as "Shinto Hip-Hop."

In addition, the reception will feature a performance by Clarence and Janet Ledbetter, the founders of the Hillsborough based group "Circle in the Round." They studied the Shakuhachi flute for eight years in Japan under the instruction of Hozan Yamamotto.

Please open the attached flyer for additional information.

Global Music on WXYC

Tomorrow on the Global Music show: “Politics, Development & Music: A Perspective on Thailand” with guest Kevin Hewison, director of the Carolina Asia Center. Hosted by Pat Johnson. (view the flier here)

Friday, January 26 from 5pm – 6pm EST. Listen at 89.3 FM or on the web at www.wxyc.org

Carolina Asia Center Seminars

China's Changing Understanding of What Modernization Is

Qian Chengdan
Professor of History, Peking University
Co-Screenwriter of the China Central Television series The Rise of the Great Powers

This talk will be in Chinese.

Date: Sunday, February 11
Time: 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Place: Toy Lounge, 4th Fl Dey Hall

See flyer

Co-sponsored by the Associate Provost for International Affairs

Nation and Nation-Identity in European History

Qian Chengdan
Professor of History, Peking University
Co-Screenwriter of the China Central Television series The Rise of the Great Powers

Date: Monday, February 12
Time: 12:30 - 2:00
Place: Toy Lounge, 4th Floor Dey Hall

Co-sponsored by the Associate Provost for International Affairs, the Center for European Studies, the Department of Political Science and the Department of History

See flyer

Lunar New Year Celebration

Date: February 17, 2007
Time: 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Place: Great Hall, Student Union

Come join us for some great food, wonderful performances, and a night filled with Asian traditions!

This event is free and open to all students, so invite all your friends to come attend the festivities!!

Sponsored by Chinese Conversation Club, Chinese Undergraduate Students Association, Hmong Student Association at Carolina, Vietnamese Student Association

The Asian Development Bank and Greater Mekong Subregion
Development: Poverty Reduction or Development as Usual?

Jim Glassman
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Date: Friday, February 23, 2007
Time: 10:00 - 11:30 AM
Place: New West 219

Abstract:
The Asian Development Bank has been at the center of development projects for the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), particularly through funding of infrastructure that contributes to a more deeply interconnected regional economy. These projects are seen as keys to poverty alleviation in the Southeast Asian transitional economies, but such assessments ignore crucial debates about poverty conceptualization and measurement, and they also ignore the complexities of poverty reduction. This presentation notes how critical perspectives developed in welfare economics, along with perspectives on the complex heterogeneity of global economic space developed in economic geography, make it difficult to the employ a meaningful and non-redundant concept of income poverty—a point central to assessment of poverty alleviation strategies. These problems also shed light on social struggles in Thailand, with salience for GMS development.

See flyer

Agent Orange and the Environment: From Research to Remediation

Phung Tuu Boi, Director of the Nature Conservation and Community Development Center in Hanoi, Vietnam, and member of the Vietnamese Forest Inventory and Planning Institute.

Date: Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Time: 12:00 - 1:30 PM
Place: Room 1305 McGavran-Greenberg Hall at UNC School of Public Health.

For the past three decades, Phung Tuu Boi has studied the effects on forests of herbicides and defoliants used from 1961 to 1971 in the Vietnam War. He has also prepared forest development plans for sprayed areas in southern Vietnam, including the creation of natural barriers made up of locust trees to block exposure of humans and animals to residual, highly toxic dioxin from Agent Orange and other chemicals.

He is being hosted in the US by the Asian Studies Association and Dr. Pamela McElwee of Arizona State University, who also studies forestry, ecology, and environmental harm from wartime herbicides in Vietnam. Dr. McElwee will accompany Dr. Boi, and will also be available to discuss her work.

For additional information or to schedule time to meet individually with either of these visitors, please contact Trude Bennett, Department of Maternal and Child Health, UNC-CH SPH, at trude_bennett@unc.edu.

See Flyer