Chinese Studies Research Group Seminar 11 December 2009

Chinese Studies Research Group Seminar and Christmas Celebration

Date: Friday, 11 December 2009

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

RSVP to Xinwen Chi x.chi@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au by 7th December 2009 for catering purposes.

Program

10:45 - 11:00

Registration and morning tea

11:00 - 11:10

Welcome (Ji Ma, President, Chinese Studies Research Group)

11:15 - 11:55

Topic: Managing Urban Water Supply in China

Speaker: Ji Ma, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Resource Management and Geography, Melbourne School of Land and Environment, the University of Melbourne.

Summary:

With the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in China, the Lower Yangtze Delta, including metropolises such as Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou, has become one of the most developed and highly populated regions. Urban water supply is always the focus of urban sustainable development. Since the early 1990s, the Chinese Central Government started to decentralise its power in water governance; after 2002, foreign companies were allowed to invest in urban water industry. All these transformations have resulted in rocketing water prices in urban China, which had huge social impacts on the lives of millions of urban residents.

My study aims to gain a full understanding of the nature and causes of the transformation of urban water supply in the Lower Yangtze Delta, China. In this case, my research can contribute in planning urban developments in more sustainable ways in the future. Firstly, it offers a historical background into the urban water supply industry, more than 120 years in the Lower Yangtze Delta. The interplay between the government, water suppliers and consumers since 2002 will be studied; therefore, Neoliberalism framework will be adopted to achieve better insight views of this interaction. Pricing related issues, where the logics of tiered pricing and wastewater treatment fee can be discussed. I will also explore something about social segregation by urban water supply.

12:00 - 12:40

Topic: From object to subject: Cinema as a hint of spatiotemporal transition in post-martial law Taiwan

Speaker: Chia Hui (Francis) LIN, PhD candidate, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning

Summary:

This is a work in progress of the research which looks at post-war Taiwan through the interaction between cultural politics and architecture. As one of the distinctive cultural representations in post-war Taiwan, Taiwan cinema plays a vital role in linking different cultural political registrations as a means of pos-war Taiwanese historiography. This work intends to scrutinise the spatial transition which has been inscribed in Taiwan’s political, cultural and societal respects in its post-martial law era (since the late 1980s to the present). The temperament of post-martial law spaces will be analysed and finally the key cultural political characteristics will be discussed to outline the spatiotemporal tendency in Taiwan after the late 1980s.

12:45 - 2:00

Lunch, Christmas Celebration and exchange Christmas present. Everyone please bring a present for exchange.

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