Back to Events of Thursday 26th May 2022

Wednesday
23
JUN

06:00 PM

1961, a year of not enough significance?

Why some years shape characterizations of the CCP more than others

Prof. Dr. Karl Gerth, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla (USA), Department of History

How much difference does the year make in characterizations of the Chinese Communist Party? What if this lecture series had checked in on the CCP at the end of each decade rather than the beginning? This talk examines 1961, when the CCP began to reverse the policies of the Great Leap Forward, and contrasts that year with 1959, at the height of CCP efforts to catapult the country into Communism. The contrast highlights the massive swings in the policy pendulum that characterizes the CCP during the Mao era (1949-76) and suggests characterizations of the CCP often rely more heavily on one set of policy extremes rather than the other in assessing its history.

Karl Gerth is Professor of History and Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Endowed Chair in Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His latest book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) investigates the impact of consumerism in China’s urban centers following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He is also the author of As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), which explores whether Chinese consumers can rescue the economy without creating even deeper global problems and China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2003), a history of economic nationalism in early twentieth-century China. After receiving his PhD in from Harvard in 2000, he taught at the University of South Carolina, Oxford University, and moved to UCSD in 2013. For more information on his work, see: www.karlgerth.com.

Homepage Event

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de/medien/lsm.html

Organizer

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS)

Homepage Organizer

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de

Contact

contact@cats.uni-heidelberg.de

Registration E-Mail

livingthesocialistmodern@gmail.com

Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Living the Socialist Modern: The Chinese Communist Party at 100—Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives ':

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. What did it mean to “live with the Specter”, to experience what one might call the making of the “Socialist Modern” that found a first point of culmination with the foundation of the CCP in 1921?

In a digital lecture series organized by the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies in Heidelberg (CATS), in cooperation with the ERC-funded research project READCHINA: The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China in Freiburg and the European Institute for Chinese Studies (EURICS) in Paris, we suggest unpacking the impact of this event on lives on the ground in a long century of Chinese and global history. Deliberately designed to offer alternative “histories” of the Chinese Communist Party, we will provide interdisciplinary views and experiences of the “Socialist Modern” and its many variants in a century now past, but also in the present and in the future, probing into different positions from not only from Political Science and Party History, but also from from Everyday History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and Sociology, Art History, etc.

Each lecture will focus on a specific time slot, marked by ten-year steps in the century of history that we are looking back to: 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, 2021. Lectures will begin on a particular date branch out, back and forth to the decades before and after so as to provide a long-term view of the situation at hand! We will encourage the use of a variety of different sources and global perspectives on the materials at hand.

Wednesday 14th April 2021, 06:00 PM

Young, Marxist, and Martyred: The First Movers of Chinese Communism

Wen-hsin YEH, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 21st April 2021, 06:00 PM

Plutarch and Transcultural Life Narratives: Analyzing Early CCP Leaders, Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan

Marilyn LEVINE (Central Washington University)

Wednesday 28th April 2021, 06:00 PM

Communist cosmopolitanism

Prof. Dr. Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge (UK), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Wednesday 05th May 2021, 02:00 PM

Living as a Cog in the Machine

Prof. Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Kyoto University (Japan), Institute for Research in Humanities

Wednesday 12th May 2021, 06:00 PM

Living the Socialist Modern in 1941

Prof. Dr. Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia (Canada), Department of History

Wednesday 12th May 2021, 06:30 PM

Creative Life in Yan’an

Prof. Dr. Ban Wang, Stanford University (USA), Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages

Wednesday 26th May 2021, 04:00 PM

1951 - A “Truth Regime” in the Making

Prof. Dr. David Wang, Harvard University (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Wednesday 26th May 2021, 04:30 PM

Singing, Recording, Promoting – New Sounds for New China

Prof. Dr. Andreas Steen, Aarhus University (Denmark), School of Culture and Society

Wednesday 02nd June 2021, 04:00 PM

Socialist Transformation of Man

Dr. Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Department of Chinese Studies, Paris (France)

Wednesday 09th June 2021, 06:00 PM

A Peripatetic Revolutionary in the 1950s

Prof. Dr. Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz (USA), History Department

Wednesday 09th June 2021, 06:30 PM

Performing New China through Campaigns and Consolidation: The View from 1951

Prof. Dr. Julia Strauss, SOAS, University of London (UK), Department of Politics and International Studies

Wednesday 16th June 2021, 06:00 PM

New Cultural Workers and their Self-Identities: The View from 1961

Prof. Dr. Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Wednesday 16th June 2021, 06:30 PM

Fighting against Mao with words

Prof. Dr. Anne Kerlan, L'Ecole des Haute Etudes ein Sciences Social, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 23rd June 2021, 06:00 PM

1961, a year of not enough significance?

Prof. Dr. Karl Gerth, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 23rd June 2021, 06:30 PM

Chinese Socialism after the Loss of the Communist Horizon

Dr. Puck Engman, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Wednesday 30th June 2021, 04:00 PM

Echolocating the Social

Prof. Dr. Dayton Lekner, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Wednesday 30th June 2021, 04:30 PM

1971 - Listening to Enemy Radio in the Socialist Media Ecology

Prof. Dr. Jie Li, Harvard University, Cambridge / Massachusetts (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Thursday 01st July 2021, 04:30 PM

建党一百周年座谈会 — A ROUNDTABLE:

The Studying Party History Small Group

Wednesday 07th July 2021, 06:00 PM

The CCP Goes Global: International Legacies of Cultural Revolution Maoism

Prof. Dr. Julia Lovell, Birkbeck, University of London (UK), Department of History Classics and Archaeology

Wednesday 27th October 2021, 06:00 PM

Forms of Credibility, Patterns of Identification

Prof. Isabelle Thireau, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 27th October 2021, 06:30 PM

1981 - The Chinese Communist Party and the Search for Historical Justice

Prof. Dr. Daniel Leese, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Wednesday 03rd November 2021, 06:00 PM

Modular Socialism - Interior Design for Everyday Life in 1980s China

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Altehenger, Oxford University (UK), Faculty of History

Wednesday 03rd November 2021, 06:30 PM

Restoring the Food industry in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Francoise Sabban, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Wednesday 10th November 2021, 06:00 PM

The Imprint of Maoist Socialism on Private Life in urban China - Shanghai in the 1980s

Prof. em. Dr. Deborah Davis, Yale University, New Haven / Conneticut (USA), Department fo Sociology

Wednesday 17th November 2021, 06:00 PM

Zhao Ziyang and the Voices for Reform

Prof. Dr. Klaus Mühlhahn, Präsident der Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen

Wednesday 17th November 2021, 06:30 PM

Radio Audiobooks in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Paola Iovene, The University of Chicago (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Wednesday 24th November 2021, 07:00 PM

The CCP Faces a Second Undulation of the Democracy Movement

Prof. Dr. Perry Link, University of California, Riverside (USA), Department of Comparative Literature and Languages

Wednesday 01st December 2021, 04:00 PM

Return to Communism? The Advent of the Xi Jinping Era in China

Prof. Dr. Steve Tsang, SOAS University of London (UK), China Institute

Wednesday 01st December 2021, 05:00 PM

Living in the Emergent Techno-Developmental State

Prof. Dr. Ya-wen Lei, Harvard Uniersity, Cambridge / MA (USA), Department of Sociology

Wednesday 08th December 2021, 06:00 PM

On the Edge - Feeling Precarious in China

Prof. Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford (UK), Faculty of Oriental Studies

Wednesday 15th December 2021, 06:00 PM

From Anti-Imperialist Coalitions of the Past to Today's Milk Tea Alliance

Prof. Dr. Jeff Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine (USA), Department of History