The Taiwan Studies Programme is delighted to announce that Professor Michael Szonyi Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University will be presenting in the 2015/16 series of Taiwan Studies lectures on "Local Politics and the Rise of China: Lessons from Kinmen (Quemoy)".

Speaker Biography

Michael Szonyi is Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University. His interests are in the local history of southeastern China from the Ming dynasty to the present. He is the author of Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China and Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line and editor of the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese History.

Abstract

After almost half a century of being on the front line of the global Cold War and the unfinished Chinese Civil War, in the early twenty-first century the people of Quemoy (Jinmen) found themselves on a different kind of front line: the front line of evolving Cross-Straits relations. An unexpected consequence for local society on this small island in the Taiwan Straits has been that virtually every local interest and issue has become entangled in some way with the larger Cross-Straits relationship. The current rise of China suggests that the same entanglement may increasingly shape politics in the rest of Taiwan, elsewhere in the region, and even beyond.