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China at 60: Myths and Realities
All lectures held at 4:30 p.m.
(with receptions at 4:00 p.m. on Jan. 26 and Feb. 23)
Free and open to the public
Mandel Center for Non-Profit Organizations
11402 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
Visitor Parking: metered lots at corner of Euclid and Ford, and on Bellflower Road across from Mandel Center; Campus Center Garage (below Severance Hall, entrance on East Blvd.)
Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program with funding from the Mitzie Levine Verne and Daniel Verne Endowment for Asian Studies.
About the Series
In the Chinese zodiacal calendar the passage of 60 years marks the completion of a full cycle. The People’s Republic of China has now entered its second cycle, and the prognosticators are busy contemplating how it will unfold. The Asian Studies Program has invited four experts on contemporary China to share their visions of where China has been and where it is likely to be going. The series starts with the question, “How Fragile is China?” and then considers separately the role of China’s military, the significance of electoral reform, and the unsettled and unsettling question of China’s minority nationality policies.
Paul E. Schroeder
How Fragile is China?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Many believe that China is quickly becoming a major superpower challenging the U.S. China faces challenges, however, that question this assumption. An export-driven development model threatens continued growth with industrial overcapacity. Severe environmental degradation poses an increasing public health hazard. Bold calls for political reform from Chinese intellectuals and increasing public protests over numerous social issues all pose serious problems for continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Schroeder will examine many of these issues and will pose possible scenarios for China's future, none of which offers quick solutions.
Paul Schroeder is Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University. He has been active in China for 30 years as a journalist, business executive, and scholar, and worked as trade representative for the State of Ohio, and in New York as corporate programs manager for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Albert S. Willner
China: A Security Perspective
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
China's security perceptions, requirements and priorities are changing in response to a host of internal and external drivers. The People's Liberation Army in particular is undergoing a transition to address these changing dynamics which present new opportunities and potential challenges. How are China's security priorities changing and why? What impact will this change have in the region and beyond? How is the PLA adapting and what is the potential impact? This presentation will address some of the important security shifts underway, highlight key drivers and discuss the implications for China's neighbors and in particular, the United States.
Albert S. Willner is the Director of the China Security Affairs Group at CNA in Alexandria, Virginia. Before joining CNA, he was an Associate Dean at Georgia Gwinnett College. A retired U.S. Army colonel, Dr. Willner completed his service as the first active-duty U.S. Defense Attaché equivalent since 1979 assigned to Taiwan. He has served in various Defense Department positions coordinating Asia-Pacific
strategy, plans, and policy, and as the Director of International Relations and National Security Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point.
Qingshan Tan
Village Elections and Governance?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Village elections have been implemented throughout China for more than a decade. In spite of improvements in the election process and villagers’ increasing awareness of democratic rights, the elections are widely viewed as producing little effect on village governance. Why have village elections remained largely irrelevant to effective self-governance? Tan addresses such questions by examining causal factors, village governance structure, township re-assertiveness over villages, and dual-leadership factors.
Qingshan Tan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Cleveland State University. His appointments include senior research fellow at the East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore, among others. Tan has published more than 30 academic articles in English and Chinese and is the author of the book, Village Elections in China: Democratizing the Countryside.
Melvyn C. Goldstein
Is Minority Unrest China's Achilles Heel? The Case of Tibet
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
China's rapid rise to economic and military superpower status belies certain internal flaws that have serious ramifications for China's future stability. One of the most serious of these is the increasing militant unrest in China's vast Western Regions where Uighur and Kazakh Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists are increasingly alienated, angry and bitter about Chinese policies in their homelands. This lecture will discuss China's ethnic problem by focusing on Tibet, the most internationally prominent area of unrest. It will examine the core issues in the dispute, the role of the U.S; and the likelihood that Beijing's current strategy for placating Tibetans will succeed.
Melvyn Goldstein is the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tibet (Tibet Autonomous Region of China) on a range of topics including nomadic pastoralism, modern Tibetan history, monasticism, and socio-economic change in rural Tibet. Dr. Goldstein's current projects include: a large Tibetan Oral History WebArchive that will be permanently housed and maintained by the Library of Congress, Volume Three of his History of Modern Tibet series, and a longitudinal study of change in farming and nomadic parts of rural Tibet. |
