CIWA Talk Series (All talks are free & open to the public)

“Insights into the Dynamics of China-Japan Relations”

October 17, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm, Guggenheim Hall 220, UW

Recently, we have witnessed a series of moves made by both China and Japan to repair the bilateral relations. While we are celebrating the ongoing amendment, we also need to realize the relationship between China and Japan has been strained for almost a decade, and that the tension still looms large. How will the China-Japan relations develop in the near future? What does this mean for the U.S. and its strategies in Asia-Pacific? The UW Committee on China-U.S. Dialogues and CIWA will be honored to welcome Dr. Ezra Vogel from Harvard University, together with Professor Kenneth Pyle from Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington to share their insights into “The Dynamics of China -Japan Relations”.
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“From Waiting to Burning: Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019”
Speaker: Prof. Lai Kwan Pang, Chinese University of HK

October 21, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm, Gowen Hall 201, UW

This talk first brings us back five years ago when the Umbrella Movement, the biggest and most peaceful one among all other occupy movements globally, unfolded in Hong Kong, generating a rich surge of creativity and also boundless frustrations. The political demands were fallen on deaf ears, but occupiers developed sincere bonding among each other, and they lived the central democratic idea of cohabitation. Five years after, when the hope for democracy is simply denied, the Hong Kong protesters are seemingly discarding their hard-earned democratic logic to embrace a more violent confrontational logic. But democracy is still at the core in the soul of this city, probably more so than most liberal-democratic countries.
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“Works of art and arts of work in China’s Great Leap Forward”

Speaker: Prof. Lai Kwan Pang, Chinese University of HK

October 22, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm, Padelford B-528, UW

To establish a perspective on the many different meanings of labor in the cultural productions of the Great Leap Forward, this article examines a number of visual arts produced in 1958 that celebrated the construction of the Shisanling Reservoir (十三陵水库） on the outskirts of Beijing. This reservoir construction was a showcase of the Great Leap Forward campaign, and it was meant to promote many similar projects taking place at that time. Offering close textual and contextual studies of these works, this talk analyzes how artists represented labor, which was central to both the actual operation and the abstract ideology of the Great Leap Forward. It concludes with a theoretical analysis of the meanings of arts to politics in socialism, arguing that it was not only physical labor but creative labor was also at the core of the ideological operation of Chinese socialism.