China researchers from many fields have adapted their inquiry due to the effects of the ongoing polycrisis — border exclusions, restrictions on movement, illness, and economic decoupling. This symposium will think through the challenges and obstacles that recent disruptions have presented to transregional China studies as a ‘new normal’ that will be reinforced as the climate crisis worsens. The practical challenges we have faced in the last two years provoke new relationships to area studies, as transregional researchers will be called upon to more radically situate their study in their home region. Our present challenges also propose elemental intellectual challenges to area studies: in a situation where physical and cultural connectivity to the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan is low or intermittent, what is the meaning of China studies in the locations where they take place? When the global atmospheric crisis causes highly disparate local impacts, how will local needs affect globalized epistemologies and transregionally distributed knowledge networks? And how can the study of China contribute to survivance in a highly unpredictable future?

Participants:
Carles Prado-Fonts, associate professor of Arts and Humanities, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Jack Zinda, assistant professor of Global Development, Cornell University
Ding Fei, senior research associate and lecturer in Global Development, Cornell University
Nick Admussen, associate professor of Asian Studies, Cornell University

Hosted by the Department of Asian Studies, with generous co-sponsorship from the East Asia Program.