Upcoming Events
Past Events
Revolution, History and Time
Revolution is a time of history, and it is thus a narrated time. This talk attempts to explore historical temporality and revolutionary narrative as central problems in modern Chinese history. It derives from two separate sources. One is a dialogue held a couple of years ago with the Taiwan-based historian, Yang Rubin, whose mode of conventional conservative history is methodologically useful for thinking about texts and history. The second source is the speaker's 2020 Verso book, China's Revolutions in the Modern World, which re-centers the radicalism of revolution in China's and the world's modern history. The talk interweaves narrative concerns with paradigmatic questions. READ MORE...
The Institutionalized Hypocrisy of Qing Government
Kaisa Group Lecture Theater (IAS LT), Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST
Qing statecraft was characterized by a kind of institutionalized hypocrisy. Many aspects of Qing governance have been condemned – both during the dynasty and since – as irrational, aberrant, or corrupt. But these very aspects were key to how that government actually worked. The land tax and other official revenue sources were insufficient to finance operations; nor did nominal salaries cover more than a fraction of officials’ real incomes and expenses. For this reason, Qing government at all levels depended on informal sources of revenue, as well as informal personnel employed in excess of centrally mandated quotas, even though most of this technically constituted “corruption.” Similarly, much of the judicial system was outsourced to private parties who operated in a gray zone to advise both litigants and magistrates and even to publish the law; and given the limited reach of the state, social order depended in practice on the extra-judicial community regulation of a wide range of transactions and relationships, many of which were nominally prohibited. Emperors and officials alike employed a pious, self-serving discourse to condemn what actually constituted routine features of the system upon which they all depended, while corruption laws were enforced only occasionally, when an emperor decided to assert himself arbitrarily in order to cow his subordinates. Far from dysfunctional, however, the Qing government worked quite well until the late nineteenth century, when it finally faced unprecedented problems that it could not solve. READ MORE...