East Asia Program Lecture Series Presents "Studying China in the Absence of Access: Relearning a Lost Art"

Speaker: Andrew Mertha, Director of the SAIS China Research Center, George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Description: As our access to Chinese data sources becomes increasingly constrained, many China scholars outside China have been scrambling to find new and innovative ways to mitigate these trends. One promising avenue is dusting off the tools Sinologists utilized from the 1960s through the 1970s, when it was impossible to contemplate the access that many of us have been able to take for granted, but which allowed these scholars to get so many things about China right. What are these skills—the analytical tools and the strategies to deploy them—and how might we be able to adapt them to the current research climate (and the foreseeable future)? This is the subject of the SAIS China Research Center’s first publication, featuring four eminent Pekingologists – Joe Fewsmith, Tom Fingar, Alice Miller, and Fred Tiewes. I present our findings here.

Refreshments will be provided.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.