All are welcome to attend this early, speculative attempt to bring together the study of China with nascent research on the history of the neoliberal era. The talk seeks to expand the traditional focus on the internal crises of “the west” in the 60/70s by looking at parallel developments across the Asia-Pacific region in the post-war period through the 1980s. First, Liu will examine early 1980s experiments with rural, labor-intensive industrialization in Guangdong Province, powering the rise of China’s eventual export-driven industry; second, he will connect this local story to broader changes in Hong Kong and east Asia as a whole, simultaneously revisiting older literature on the “east Asia miracles” and the “four small tigers of Asia” in preceding periods; finally, he will argue that it is useful to pay greater attention to Asian history as the context for the global rise of “flexible accumulation” in processes of manufacture, labor, and corporate organization, a story now familiar to social-scientific literature on late-century globalization. Register here.
About the Speaker: Andrew Liu is an Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. He is the author of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, which was published by Yale University Press in 2020.
About the Discussant: Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU and the founding director of the International Center for Critical Theory (ICCT). He has published widely on critical theory and transcultural comparisons of Chinese and European modernities.
