Join us for our first distinguished lecture this year on Thursday 28 March to hear from Professor Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics, Fudan University.
China’s Economic Catch-up: Is This a Merited Success?
China has been progressing well in its structural transformation and integration of its economy with the rest of the world. This has resulted in a substantial narrowing of its productivity gap with the advanced economies over the past 40 years. However, its success in catching up is increasingly being blamed, for instance by the US, for intended violation of a level playing field and forced transfer of technology. In this lecture Professor Zhang will present evidence to show:
- Why China, as a latecomer, could learn to mimic the model of East Asian high-performing economies
- Why China’s fast growth could largely be accounted for by its high rate of saving and investment, which is common to the East Asian Miracle.
Biography
Professor Zhang Jun is the Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University in Shanghai and Director of the China Centre for Economic Studies. He is one of the leading economists in China and a respected commentator in international and Chinese media. He is a graduate of Fudan University and studied at the London School of Economics and the University of Sussex. Professor Zhang has contributed to many economic journals and in 2018 received the Bergson Prize from the American Association for Comparative Economic Studies. He has authored or edited numerous books including Economic Transition with Chinese Characteristics: Thirty Years of Reform and Opening Up (McGill-Queen University Press, 2008) and End of Hyper Growth In China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Registration 5.30pm / Lecture 6pm / Q&A , Networking & Drinks 7. 30pm
Location: Main Auditorium, University of Edinburgh Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JS
All Welcome! Please help us by booking your seat via this Eventbrite link.
Join us in Abden House when the Confucius Institute for Scotland hosts a party to mark the arrival of the Year of the Dog from 6pm-9pm on Friday 23rd February 2018.
Smog art, which refers to artwork that engages with the issue of severe ambient air pollution, has become increasingly common in China. It includes various art forms such as paintings, photography, and performance art.
It searches for the Chinese common reader in three distinct places: in the materiality of cheaply produced texts-books as objects; in the usable-and wondrous-information packaged in their crowded pages—texts as meaning; and in the spaces where this knowledge was consumed—reading as cultural practice. The texts include cheap, string-bound, lithographed books such as wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures), together with daily-use, letter-writing, household, and health manuals. Their contents include age-old cosmologies and fanciful representations of foreigners, together with treatments for opium addiction, methods for preventing cholera, and ways to graft a plant. The apprentices, workers, housewives, and lower-level bureaucrats who consumed this knowledge often did so on the fly, in the streets. Sitting, standing or leaning at street-side bookstalls, they avidly sought both the useful information and the marvelous diversion necessary to negotiate the epistemological uncertainty—and promise—of China’s revolutionary twentieth century.
Joan Judge is Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (1996), and co-editor of Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (forthcoming), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (2011). She is currently engaged in a project with the working title “In Search of the Chinese Common Reader: Usable Knowledge and Wondrous Ignorance in the Age of Global Science, 1870-1955″.
FAN Lizhu 范丽珠 is Professor of Sociology at Fudan University. Director of Globalization and Religious Studies. As a pioneer scholar on the study of sociology of religion in China, she has engaged in historical and ethnographic studies of Chinese folk religious beliefs, sociological theories of religion, and the study of the trends of folk religious beliefs in modern Chinese society. Her most significant works include The Religion and Faith Transition of Chinese in the Contemporary Era: Field Research of the Adherents of Folk Religion in Shenzhen; China and the Cultural Sociology of Religion (co-authored with James Whitehead and Evelyn Whitehead); Sociology of Religion: Religion and China (co-authored with James Whitehead and Evelyn Whitehead). Academic articles include “Conversion and Indigenous Religions in China” (Co-authored with CHEN Na) in the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion; “The Cult of Silkworm Mother as a Core of Local Community Religion in a North China Village” in China Quarterly, etc.. As an internationally recognized scholar, she taught at many distinguished universities, such as University of Chicago, University of California at San Diego, Lund University, Queen’s University, New School, Wabash College, University of British Columbia, Bergen University, University of Stockholm, University of Tokyo, etc.
LI Zhiqing is Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Economics, Fudan University. His research interests are: Environmental & Energy Economics; Public Economics; Political Economics; Economics of Climate Change; International Climate Policy; China’s Modern Economy