This talk examines how Japanese colonizers and Taiwanese subjects transformed colonial Taiwan—the sub-tropical island Japan acquired from China in 1895—into a staging ground for imperial expansion across the East and South China seas. Taking advantage of Taiwan's proximity and cultural affinities with South China and Southeast Asia, Japanese colonial leaders innovated new strategies to compete with the Chinese and Western powers for regional hegemony.

When in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party “liberated” the ethnocultural frontier region known to Tibetans as Amdo, its goal was not just to construct a state, but to create a nation—not just control, but transformation. While state building might have been accomplished through coercion, Party leaders understood that nation making required narratives and policies capable of convincing Amdo’s diverse inhabitants of their communion with a wider political community.

Following the South Korean government’s drive in the 1990s for globalization and deregulation of higher education, Korean universities aggressively recruited Chinese students as both symbolic and economic resources. The number of Chinese students studying at Korean universities consequently increased 57-fold between 2000 and 2019 (from 1,200 to 68,537).

Thinking toward a media archaeology of global popular music, this presentation will trace the contemporary circulation of “golden era” 1960s and 1970s "Cambodian Rock." The lecture seeks to contextualize and historicize revivals of pre-Khmer Rouge pop recordings through the mediated movements, dubs, and remixes of cassette tapes among North American independent labels and the activities of online archivists and heritage centers in present-day Cambodia, which helped to generate the documentary film Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, the play Cambodian Rock Band, and the Los Angeles based group Deng

This lecture is about a little-studied embassy to the Qing court, a Dutch mission of 1794–95. Drawing on Dutch, French, Spanish, Qing, and Korean sources, it explores not just the mission itself but also the question of why it has been neglected and misunderstood. It also reflects on long-standing metanarratives about the history of Sino-Western interaction.

By examining two case studies on how the Chinese diaspora came to shape biomedicine in China and Taiwan from 1937 to 1970, this talk makes the case for a new historical concept of "global medicine." "Global medicine" highlights the multivalent and multidirectional flows of medical practices and ideas circulating the world that shaped Chinese East Asia in the 20th century.

No other industry had more profound impact on the environment and communities of northern Vietnam than coal mining. Since the French discovery of the Quang Yen coal basin in the 1880s, Tonkin, a French protectorate in northern Vietnam, had risen to become one of the world’s largest coal exporters. However, as in many other parts of the world, coal mining also denuded forests, fashioned massive open-pit wastelands, polluted the air and water, and created some of Vietnam’s most troubling and enduring environmental problems.

Join us for a virtual discussion about current issues and US, China and Taiwan Relations with Pitt Global Professor Michael Liu along with a national webcast with CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria.
To register for this event, click here

This roundtable will discuss how the conflict in Myanmar has further spotlighted failures of the international law and relations systems, how technology and modern journalism
are challenging those failures, and what options exist for pursuing a path to peace in Myanmar. To register, click here.