Time: Thursday January 9, 12:00PM-1:15PM

Location: LIB 1119

Speaker: Dr. Yanqiu Zheng, Associate Director of Asia and Pacific Programs at St. Lawrence University’s Center for International and Intercultural Studies

Abstract

As the Go Out policy defines contemporary China’s global ambitions in the twenty-first century, it becomes increasingly important to understand China in the world as an evolving phenomenon rooted in history and open to different meanings of “Chinese.” In this talk, Dr. Yanqiu Zheng will reflect on his own research trajectory from the history of modern Chinese cultural diplomacy in the United States to the cultural politics around Chinese tofu in Cold War Taiwan. Gender turns out to be an inadvertent unifying theme among these disparate topics as it interrogates whose China becomes more dominant in the arena of competing representations.

Speaker’s Bio

Dr. Yanqiu Zheng is the Associate Director of Asia and Pacific Programs at St. Lawrence University’s Center for International and Intercultural Studies. He is trained as a historian of China in the world and is the author of In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875-1974 (University of Michigan Press, 2024).