General Public

Not Seeing Like an Emperor: The Ambiguity of Trust in Early China

This talk examines debates about the visibility and invisibility of the emperor and imperial institutions as a site for thinking about the meaning of trust (xin) in early China. I argue that these debates can be fruitfully organized around two paradigms, what I call the invisible seer paradigm and the visibly blind paradigm. These two paradigms organize many discussions, but this talk will focus on two sites: ritual and law. In both places there was a struggle to articulate the proper balance between sight and blindness revealing the ambiguity of xin in early China.
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Chinese Whispers? (Disappearing) Communications in People’s Republic of China

Communication in China has been characterized as centralized, censoring, and, with the hyper-technologized dominance in facial recognition technologies, “techno-authoritarian.” This talk presents evidence that disappeared communications and erased messages, although ubiquitous, are often not results of censorship. Records and databases produce noir stories and dystopic narratives about Chinese media cultures. These stories are incomplete because they are skewed towards stored and “verifiable” data.

The Historian’s Ink: Writing and Reading Histories of Koryŏ in the Chosŏn (1392–1910)

The History of Koryŏ and the Essentials of Koryŏ History are two court histories on the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) compiled during the early decades of the Chosŏn (1392–1910). Written in the cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic, these two books became foundational texts for the Chosŏn elites to write and rewrite their past. Today, the two texts are centerpiece historical sources for the study of premodern Korea. In this talk, I examine the Chosŏn-era production, circulation, and reception of these two court histories.

Nuns, Relic Theft, and Power in Medieval Japan

“Scholars of religions have generally been more comfortable with ideas than with things… They have been particularly uncomfortable, perhaps, when people touched or rubbed or hugged or kissed things, especially when those things were themselves somewhat disconcerting—dead bodied, bits of bone or cloth, dirt or fingernails, dried blood. This uneasy itself may go a long way toward explaining why we still understand little about relics.

Conceptualizing Robotic Agency: Social Robots in Elder Care in Contemporary Japan

As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots to assist with elder care. However, Japanese society increasingly experiences the phenomenon of people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines such as social robots.

Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts

This is the first public presentation of Michelson’s forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, February 2022) on Chinese courts, judicial decision-making, family law, gender violence, and the limits and possibilities of the globalization of law. Michelson’s analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China’s own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women’s physical security.

Why did Hideyoshi invade Korea in 1592?

In 1592 Japan’s Hideyoshi regime invaded Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Later, Ming China sent an army to Korea to repel the Japanese invaders and, as a result, the war evolved into a major international conflict. The war ended in 1598 as the Japanese troops retreated empty-handed back to their country. The Hideyoshi regime eventually collapsed in 1600. In this talk, Hur explores one question: why did Hideyoshi invade Korea?

National Identity, External Threat, and Online Communication: The Case of Territorial Disputes in Japan

Lab-experiment and survey based studies find that intergroup threat and group identity have significant implications on the formation of political attitudes, that those factors encourage individuals to approach information with directional motivation. On the other hand, unrealistic assumptions prevent those findings to be directly generalized to the real-world context. In this study, we use novel twitter network data during rising territorial disputes in Japan to capture real-world information communication process under intergroup threat.

“Prosperity and Stability” meets “Democracy and Freedom”: Contention of Legitimacy to Govern Hong Kong

The recent political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest the city has not seen since the riots of 1966/67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong’s success. This catchphrase also came to be adopted as the slogan of the HKSAR government in its bid to seek legitimacy with socioeconomic appeals.

Academic Jobs Outside of the United States

Emily Baum (University of California, Irvine) and Denise Y. Ho (Yale University) present the second annual webinar series, Doing Chinese History (in a New Era). Designed for—but not exclusive to—graduate students and junior scholars in Chinese history and Chinese studies, these webinars aim to address persistent challenges in research and professional development.

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