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Date(s)： 2019/07/01
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Archives 2nd Conference Hall
Speaker：Prof. R. Bin Wong（Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Distinguished ）
Organizer： Urban History Research Group
Abstract: This lecture aims to discuss 20th-century Chinese state transformation and more briefly early 21st-century changes in China’s position in the global political and economic order from the vantage point of Chinese history (and its differences from European history which supply most scholarly expectations about what kinds of political and economic changes we should expect globally). China is arguably the only country where a territorial empire becomes a national state in considerable measure relying on principles and practices related to those responsible for making possible a long-lived empire through the persistent reliance and reform of a political ideology and the political institutions created to pursue its vision. At the same time, this process is distinctive to China and different in some basic ways from the pattern of state transformations in Europe, which can be considered a world region comparable in spatial scale and population to China (closer in spatial scale than in population size). The surprise of a world region becoming a national state also includes sharp distinction between the relevance in the 20th century of earlier forms of domestic governance and the lack of similar relevance for earlier centuries of foreign relations. This juxtaposition depends on understanding how Europeans in the early modern era began to create the political and economic foundations of modern global order, which China now enters as an active international actor moving into other world regions for the first time on a major scale in the 21st century. How relevant history, whether China’s or Europe’s, will prove to be to understanding the future global order remains to be seen.