Held on May 29, 2020

Webinar entitled Combating COVID-19: The Chinese and the Danish Perspectives. The global outbreak of COVID-19 has been shocking in every sense of the word. An enormous challenge to global health, its consequences on economy and political order, at both the national and international level, have been deeply felt and will continue to evolve in the years to come. Strategic responses to health crisis vary significantly among countries.

Why and how have the approaches of response been introduced the way they have? This dialogue aims to put these issues in perspectives by comparing the Chinese and Danish experiences. It seeks to promote an informed debate and nuanced understanding about the variety of strategic choices in the struggling for survival and solidarity.

Held on May 27, 2020

Virtual book talk on the book Just Hierarchy – Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei, moderated by Chunrong Liu and commentated by Wang Zhengxu.

All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones. Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.

Held on May 6, 2020

Virtual Book Talk on the book Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China by Joel Andreas, Professor at the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. In the decades following World War II, factories in many countries not only provided secure employment and a range of economic entitlements, but also recognized workers as legitimate stakeholders, enabling them to claim rights to participate in decision making and hold factory leaders accountable. In recent decades, as employment has become more precarious, these attributes of industrial citizenship have been eroded and workers have increasingly been reduced to hired hands.

As Joel Andreas shows in Disenfranchised, no country has experienced these changes as dramatically as China. Drawing on a decade of field research, including interviews with both factory workers and managers, Andreas traces the changing political status of workers inside Chinese factories from 1949 to the present, carefully analyzing how much power they have actually had to shape their working conditions.

Held on April 23, 2020

Co-hosted with NYSEAN – New York Southeast Asia Network
Recording of the online book launch “Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand”, written by NIAS Director and NYSEAN Co-founder Duncan McCargo and recently published by Cornell University Press.

In this online book launch, the author engaged in a conversation with two US-based scholars – Tyrell Haberkorn of the University of Wisconsin Madison, and Frank Munger of New York Law School – both of whom have done extensive research on the Thai justice system. At the end of the event, a few questions from the audience were discussed too.

You can find more on the book here and more on NIAS’ upcoming events here.

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