Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 16 February 2012 

Royal Asiatic Society

Stephenson Way 
London NW1 2HD

Wenlan Peng (Independent Documentary Film Maker, Chair of the Meridian Society)
The Chinese in Bengal

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Event Date; 12 January 2012 

Royal Asiatic Society

Stephenson Way 
London NW1 2HD

Ming Wilson (Senior Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum)
Dressed to Rule: The Chinese Emperor’s Wardrobe

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Event date: 14 October 2010 18:00
14 Stephenson Way
London NW1 2HD

Dr. Weipin Tsai
Breaking the Ice: the Modern Chinese Postal Service in the Winter Season in the Late Qing Period

The story of the modern Chinese postal service is highly instructive in understanding modern Chinese history. It particularly reveals how the Qing Government and later governments in the Republican period managed to reform, extend, unify and bring under state control China’s postal service, through lengthy and often energetic negotiations with both foreign and local powers, providing us with many insightful stories that illuminate politics and international relations. Meanwhile the arrival of the national postal service itself had significant effects across the whole of society, including impacts on trading patterns and the transmission of information and knowledge. Beyond institutional history and politics, the story of the postal service leads us into the heart of the communities it touched, and the changes in people’s daily lives.

Efforts to nationalise and unify the postal service were formally launched in March 1896, but in many ways this was a culmination of work initiated in previous decades. Beginning in 1878, a series of winter overland postal routes was established by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Gustav Detring (1842-1913), the Commissioner of Tianjin Port at that time, under the order of the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart (1835-1911), was assigned to manage this project. This article will focus on the period 1878 to 1882, and will examine several fundamental challenges encountered during this short four-year project, which set the scene for subsequent unification, reform and expansion.

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China: Past, Present and Future

Royal Holloway University of London Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Event Date: 29 April Thursday 2010

Small Mercies: Poverty/Charity, State/Market, and the Provision of Social Welfare in Urban China

Keynote Speaker: Professor Vivienne Shue
Leverhulme Professor and Director, Contemporary China Studies Programme, University of Oxford

Chaired by: Dr. Catherine Wang
School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London

Professor Vivienne Shue received the Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, taught Chinese politics at Yale and at Cornell universities for more than two decades. Since 2002 has served as Director of Oxford University’s Contemporary China Studies Programme.

Professor Shue’s main areas of research are in the political sociology, political economy, and political history of contemporary China. Her current research interests include: the politics of urban planning in China and the relations of local state power-holders to private capital investors; the increasingly ‘high-tech’ and ‘high-impact’ instrumentalities of ‘global-modern governance’ that have lately been adapted for use by the Chinese party-state; public opinion polling, e-government and changing ideals of ‘citizenship’ in China; and changing norms and ideals of charity, welfare, and social relief in urban and rural China.

Her most recent book, co-edited with Christine Wong, is Paying for Progress in China: Public Finance, Human Welfare and Changing Patterns of Inequality (Routledge, 2007).

PAPER ABSTRACT
Based on data gathered in 2008-09, including interviews in Tianjin, this paper tells the story of the recent rapid and very widespread establishment of ‘charity supermarkets’ in China’s cities. These charity shops, which were initially modelled after certain ‘thrift shops’ in the U.S., were set up for the purpose of assisting the urban poor and unemployed in meeting basic needs. Divergent contemporary discourses in China about poverty, charity, and business, and about the proper roles of the market and the state in the delivery of social welfare are explored and contrasted. The differing discourses and perspectives that are revealed throw interesting light on why China’s ‘charity supermarkets’ have not, so far, been able to develop well. This particular, not very satisfactory, social experiment is presented as a case study in the potential for achieving effective ‘mutual empowerment’ of state and society in the contemporary Chinese context.

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Event Date: 15 April 2010

Dr Laura J. Newby (University of Oxford) - The Chinese Emperor’s New Copper Plates: Art and Politics in the Late 18th Century

In the early 1760s, Jesuit missionaries serving as court artists in Peking were instructed by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736 – 96) to produce a set of sixteen sketches in celebration of his recent victories over the Mongols and the Turkic Muslims in the region of Xinjiang. The designs which were to be engraved on copper plates and printed in Europe were dispatched from Canton to Paris where the work was executed. Yet it was not until 1777, over a decade after the Qianlong emperor had initiated the project, that his order was fully realised and the sixteen original designs, the sixteen copper plates and 200 prints drawn from each plate had all arrived in Peking. This paper explores the politics behind the execution of this unique set of prints.

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Rethinking Children/Childhood in the 21st Century
Children / Childhood in China

Date: 5th February 2010
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David Pomfret, (Department of History, University of Hong Kong) ‘ Children of Empire’: Childhood in British and French Colonial Cultures

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Valentina Boretti, (Postdoctoral Fellow, SOAS) From new citizen to revolutionary successor: Playthings and the ideal child in Republican and Communist China

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discussant and Chair: Zhou Xun (University of Hong Kong)

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event date:
10 March 2009

Round Table

THE DECLINE AND RISE OF CHINA: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Dr Weipin Tsai

The ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ Revisited

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Dr Chi-Kwan Mark

Negotiating with Communism: Britain and China

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Dr Evelyn Goh

China’s Rise and the Regional Hierarchy in East Asia

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