Chinese Studies Research Group Lunch Seminar 12 December 2008

Chinese Studies Research Group Lunch Seminar

Date: Friday, 12th December, 2008

Location: Tutorial / Committee Room, Ground floor, Baillieu Library.

RSVP to Bick-har Yeung bhy@unimelb.edu.au by 8 December 2008 for catering purposes.

Program

10:30 - 10:45

Registration and morning tea

10:45 - 11:00

Welcome (Tyler Harlan, President, Chinese Studies Research Group)

11:00 - 11:40

Topic: Resources for researching Cultural Revolution of China.

Speaker: Bick-har Yeung, East Asian Librarian, the University of Melbourne Library.

Summary:

This presentation is a repeat session of the program delivered during the Asia week in October. The speaker will discuss the resources published during 1966-1976 covering primary and secondary sources such as posters, pamphlets, journals, working diaries manuscripts, monographs and children’s books held at the East Asian Collection, the University of Melbourne Library. Two Chinese collections in Hong Kong containing valuable resources of Cultural Revolution will be introduced. Electronic databases and internet resources will also be examined.

11:45 - 12:25

Entrepreneurship has accompanied China’s wide-ranging economic reforms in its market transition.  A decline in state-owned employment and massive foreign investment spurred private sector growth, creating a group of entrepreneurs with strategic interests.   In Xinjiang, however, the central government continues to subsidise the economy built upon oil and gas, whilst capital available in the eastern provinces is in short supply.  Despite this, a small private sector operates on its comparative advantage, mostly in international trade.  The Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority in Xinjiang, make up a sizeable portion these new urban entrepreneurs.

This presentation focuses on Urumqi, the economic centre of Xinjiang with a Han Chinese majority, and the characteristics of its Uyghur businesses.  Theories of ethnic entrepreneurship propose that groups like the Uyghurs operate within an ‘opportunity structure’ that both enables and constrains the type and size of their businesses.  For some Uyghur entrepreneurs, transition from the bazaar to larger markets necessitates a change in the way business is structured and operated as well as a shift in the structure of social relationships.  These entrepreneurs do more than employ Uyghur labour – they integrate more fully into the market system where economic self-interest and development trump ethnic difference.

12:30 - 1:10

Topic: Rights, space, and culture in modern China

Speaker: Jonathan Benney, PhD candidate, Asia Institute.

Summary:

This paper has three aims. First, it will attempt to provide a fresh contextualisation of rights discourse in China. It aims to move beyond a simplistic division between what Xudong Zhang has termed the "imagined totality of the government" and rights-defending citizens, and consider the wide range of rights activity in China from a consciously post-socialist view. In discussing this issue, the paper will consider some of the schisms between various groups of rights-defending lawyers and academics, as well as considering the historical basis for the concept of "rights defence" (weiquan) in China.

Secondly, this paper will consider how rights activity in China reflects changes to the ideas of citizens' property and space. It will consider concrete changes to legal rights, such as the constitutional amendments of 2007 which broadened property rights, and well as exploring how space and property are perceived by modern urban Chinese citizens. This section of the paper will touch on — among various examples — the interaction between the state and citizens in modern gated communities.

Lastly, this paper will attempt to explore a more theoretical issue:
rather than considering how the principles and theories of rights can be used to enlighten us about Chinese society, it will consider what Chinese society can tell us about rights. By imagining rights not as concrete laws or stable written principles, but as negotiable "claims"
to real or virtual space, this paper will try to begin to resolve some of the fundamental clashes between Western and Chinese concepts of law and rights.

1:15 - 2: 00 Lunch

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