This interdisciplinary conversation bringing together specialists in Chinese history, literature and politics will move from the year of the Boxers through the time of Tiananmen. The focus will be on the politics of memory and the different ways that contested events have been brought into or left out of narratives about China's past circulating inside that country and in other parts of the world.

This paper draws upon Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson to trace the shifting coordinates of social and spatial experience through novels set in Karachi (Pakistan). I bring Lefebvre's understanding of the “concrete abstraction” of space under capitalism together with Jameson's insights on the content and form of narratives to develop an understanding of “space” as constitutive to literary fiction.

Decolonisation as a moment, process, and movement is polyvalent. This talk explores decolonisation through its many prisms while focusing on the statelessness of the Rohingya people of present-day Myanmar through their role within irregular armies of the British military in World War II. The territorial metamorphosis of borderlands to bordered lands in Arakan mediated by the spectacular violence of global war made the Arakanese Muslims, or Rohingyas, as they are known today, foreigners in their own lands.

The rising digital surveillance system in China attracts attentions from the world. In this talk, based on the detailed information of newly utilized government procurement contracts, Professor Pinghan Liang will introduce some ongoing quantitative works about the features, the motivations and social impact of China's public surveillance system. The talk will attempt to answer the following questions: Why did local governments procure surveillance cameras? Which government departments are the main buyers?

Digitisation is transforming the organisation and global geography of industries, with the emergence of global modular ecosystems. This talk focuses on the smartphone industry over the past two decades and explains how new forms of organisation in the global economy complicate the process of decoupling. Although Chinese firms have carved out a dominant role in this industry, it is difficult for any country to become completely independent of the global system. From a policy perspective, interdependence through massive modularity makes decoupling both attractive and at the same time risky.

In this presentation Dr Chabrowski will address three main themes developed in his recent book, Ruling the Stage: Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People’s Republic of China (Brill, 2022). Firstly, he will discuss the changing social role of opera in Sichuan across the last two centuries, underlining its role in the (broadly conceived) social welfare of the rural and urban communities. Secondly, Dr Chabrowski will focus on the fundamental role of opera in transmitting 'traditional' culture into the modernizing urban environment of the early 20th century.