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PLEASE NOTE: EVENT START TIME IS NOW 2:00PM

The Oksenberg Lecture, held annually, honors the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). A senior fellow at Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor Oksenberg served as a key member of the National Security Council when the United States normalized relations with China, and consistently urged that the United States engage with Asia in a more considered manner. In tribute, the Oksenberg Lecture recognizes distinguished individuals who have helped to advance understanding between the United States and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.

 

This year, the Oksenberg Conference will be organized around the publication of Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County that has just been published by Stanford University Press. The rural Chinese county of Zouping was a place and topic very dear to Professor Michel Oksenberg’s heart. In 1984, Professor Oksenberg achieved a milestone--obtaining official access for foreign scholars to do research in a rural site in China—the first after Opening and Reform.  Since its opening, eighty-seven U.S. academics have conducted fieldwork in Zouping, generating waves of serious scholarship, resulting in numerous books and articles.  This new volume includes the extensive research notes of Michel Oksenberg, which he sadly was unable to use before he passed away. These notes were used to complete this volume, supplemented with new research by a number of Oksenberg’s own students and his “academic grandchildren.”  It provides a big and clear window onto the surprising changes that have taken place in China over the last two decades of reform.

The conference will convene a panel of China specialists with deep personal and scholarly connections to Zouping who will provide insights into the unfolding history of doing research and fieldwork in China. The panel will also assess through this rural Shandong county the breathtaking as well as surprising changes China has experienced from the 1980s until the present.

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For directions to the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center, please click here.

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Agenda

2:00-2:15 PM: Welcome and Introduction
 
2:15-3:35 PM:
Panel I: Doing Fieldwork in China: How We Got There and Its Impact
 
Chair: Prof. Steven Goldstein (Smith College)
 
·         Prof. Mary Brown Bullock (Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC)
·         Prof. Thomas Gold (U.C. Berkeley)
·         Prof. Thomas Bernstein (Columbia University)
·         Prof. Andrew Walder (Stanford University)
 
3:35-4:55 PM:
Panel II: A Window onto China:  Understanding Continuity and Change
 
Chair: Prof. Jean Oi (Stanford University)
 
·         Prof. Jean Oi (Stanford University)
·         Dr. Douglas Grob (Albright Stonebridge Group)
·         Prof. Charlotte Lee (Berkeley City College)
 
5:00-5:30 PM:  Book signing and sale of Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County

 

Speakers

Thomas P. Bernstein taught Chinese politics and comparative communism at Indiana, Yale, and Columbia from 1966 to 2007. After retirement, he moved to Irvine, California with an affiliation at University of California, Irvine. He has published on Chinese and Soviet collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward famine and its Soviet counterpart, Chinese youth and education, and on reform era rural politics. He did research in Zouping in 1985. Most recently he co-edited (with Hua-yu Li) China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (2010).

 

Mary Brown Bullock, president emerita of Agnes Scott College,  is an educator and scholar of U.S. – China relations.  She served as the founding executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University from 2012-2015.  Previous positions include distinguished visiting professor Emory University, director of the Asia Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and director of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China. She is vice-chair of the Asia Foundation, a trustee of the Henry Luce Foundation, and a member of the Schwarzman Academic Advisory Committee and the Council on Foreign Relations.  She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese history from Stanford University.  Her most recent publications include The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China (2011) and as co-editor of Medical Transitions in Twentieth Century China (2014).

 

Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies. From 2000-2016 he was Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies. His research addresses issues of social and political change on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. He was a member of the first group of American government-sponsored exchange students to China, spending February 1979-February 1980 at Fudan University. He spent a month in Fengjiacun/Zouping County in 1986 looking at sprouts of private entrepreneurship.

 

Steven M. Goldstein was the Sophia Smith Professor of Government at Smith College from 1968 to 2016. He is now an Associate of the Fairbank Center and the director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop at Harvard University. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University and United States Naval War College. Goldstein's research interest has been largely related to issues of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. He has published studies of Sino-American relations; Sino-Soviet relations; and the emergence of a Chinese Communist view of world affairs. His current research focus is on the relations between the mainland and Taiwan as well as the evolution of U.S.-Taiwan relations.

 

Douglas Grob is a Senior Vice President at Albright Stonebridge Group. He previously served as head of the Asia Section of the Congressional Research Service. Prior to that, he served at the U.S. Department of State as a senior advisor on East Asia to the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. He also served as Staff Director of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, established by statute as the United States and China normalized trade relations prior to China’s accession to the WTO. Prior to entering public service, he was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, a senior research scholar at the School of Law of Peking University, and a research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center of Stanford University.

 

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at Shorenstein APARC. Professor Oi also is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems.  Oi has written extensively on China’s political economy. Her most recent works include, Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, with Steven Goldstein (2018); Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization, with Karen Eggleston and Yiming Wang (2017); Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (2011); and Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China’s Transformation, with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou (2010).

 

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Department of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at FSI. He has previously taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published widely on political economy, social structure, inequality, social mobility, and political conflict under state socialism and afterwards, with a special emphasis on contemporary China. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent books are Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009), and China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (2015).
 

 

 

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Register here to secure your seat.

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Related links:

China Daily Article on Zouping Research