Abstract:

For several weeks in March and April, university students in Taiwan camped out in the legislative and cabinet offices to protest the Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services between China and Taiwan. Joined by hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, spilling out to the streets, the demonstrators claim President Ma Ying-jeou negotiated the agreement with China without seeking any public input and bypassing the legislative process entirely. Implications of this historical social movement include the functioning of Taiwan's democratic institutions, which have undergone regime change but democratic consolidation remains in question. Additionally, a potential cross-strait crisis can affect U.S. - China relations in the post-Cold War era. Two important forces are also at play: China's meteoric playing-by-its-own-rules economic rise, and the evolving Taiwanese national identity after its transition to democracy. This talk will center on the national specific consequences of liberal trade and democracy for Taiwan's economic globalization and political development.

Speaker Bio:

Roselyn Hsueh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University and currently, Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the politics of market reform, comparative capitalism, development, and other areas of international and comparative political economy. (Her publications include China's Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011) and "China and India in the Age of Gloablization: Sectoral Variation in Postliberalization Reregulation," Comparative Political Studies 45 (2012): 32-61. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and has served as a Hayward on R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California and conducted research as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The period from the arrest of the “gang of four” in October 1976 to the final step in the removal of Hua Guofeng in mid-1981 saw CCP rural policy go through a number of phases. The initial emphasis on a moderate version of the Dazhai model gave way to “traditional policies” (luoshi zhengce) by mid-1978; these policies were supplemented in 1979 by “responsibility systems,” the most radical of which, household contracting (baochan daohu), became a sharply divisive issue in 1980, but still not the main aspect of agricultural policy. The tide was moving strongly toward household contracting by mid-1981, but had not yet achieved unambiguous endorsement as the Party policy.

A number of inadequate approaches have dominated the literature, notably 1) a power/policy struggle between Hua Guofeng's neo-Maoists and Deng Xiaoping's reform coalition; 2) the power of the peasants; and 3) the leading role of provincial reformers. The first has no validity, the second and third must be viewed through more complex lenses. The talk will explicate the key factors and present an alternative explanation of the success of rural reform.

Frederick C. Teiwes is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. He is the author of various books on Chinese elite politics including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 1993), Leadership, Legitimacy, and Conflict in China (1984), and Politics at Mao's Court (1990). Some of his most important work has been jointly authored with Warren Sun including The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization: Mao, Deng Zihui, and the "High Tide" of 1955 (1993), The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971 (1996), China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Emergence of the Great Leap Forward, 1955-1959 (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976 (2007).

In the immediate postwar period, when very real limits on the power of the party-state remained and the population was still recovering from the dislocations of the war, the socialist promise of what in North Korea came to be known as the ‘new living’ became the subject of much ideological and material investment on the part of a wide spectrum of actors. Yet the construction of such ‘new living’ was certainly not straightforward. This paper analyzes political anxieties that emerged over worker dormitory life, tensions surrounding consumption in a growing economy, and worries about the comforts of family life offered by new fangled apartments.

RSVP required at http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/event_detail.php?id=3713

Debate upon the status of colonial buildings in South Korea today has swirled around the public buildings most symbolic of colonial authority. Yet the most prevalent remaining buildings are much smaller in scale; they are the houses abandoned by or appropriated from Japanese residents upon the defeat in war and a chaotic withdrawal from the colonies. This talk turns to the “enemy house” to ask how the homely figures in the domestication of colonial history.

RSVP required at http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/rsvp.php