HUI ZHOU & GENIA KOSTKA (FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN)

December 4, 2025 at 1:15 PM UTC

Online via Webex. Please register here:fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/4a9b46cc059949ec85b7360d963cca0a AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT are gaining increasing popularity and importance against the backdrop of the AI revolution. Despite the plethora of chatbots on the market, the questions of which chatbot a user adopts and why some users develop stronger emotional attachments remains understudied. Capitalizing on a large-scale survey with over 8,000 responses collected from Germany, the United States, China, and South Africa, this study scrutinizes chatbot acceptance and emotional attachment in the context of ChatGPT and DeepSeek. We find that product usefulness and social influence play a critical role in the acceptance of chatbots. We also find that respondents are significantly more likely to accept chatbots from countries toward which they had positive feelings and to oppose chatbots from countries associated with negative sentiments. This study further seeks to explain why some users develop stronger emotional attachments to chatbots than others. We propose a dynamic interaction theory of emotional attachment, which emphasizes the perceived emotional support from chatbots, users’ social networks, and the depth and frequency of chatbot use. We find that over one-third of respondents reported some form of emotional attachment to chatbots, depending on how attachment is measured. For instance, 39% of respondents considered chatbots to be their friends, and 62% of respondents used polite expressions such as “thank you” when interacting with them. Second, there is a strong correlation between the perceived emotional support and self-reported emotional attachment. Those who obtained emotional support from chatbots, such as the decrease in loneliness, were more likely to report a higher degree of emotional attachment. Both the frequency and depth of chatbot use are positively correlated with emotional attachment. To our surprise, however, the size of social network is negatively associated with emotional attachment. These findings have important implications for the appropriate use of AI chatbots in the context of emotional support. Bio: Hui Zhouis postdoctoral researcher in the "Privacy China" project at the Institute for Chinese Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He graduated with a PhD in Political Science from University of Houston and worked as an Assistant Professor at Saint Louis University before joining Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include Privacy, Digital Governance, Crisis Management, Dispute Resolution, and Distributive Politics. Genia Kostkais Professor of Chinese Politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on digital transformation, local governance, and environmental politics. She is particularly interested in how digital technologies are integrated into local decision-making and governance structures in China.

ROBIN LUNG AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER AND PRODUCER OF FINDING KUKAN HER CURRENT PROJECT EXPLORES CHINESE-HAWAIIAN HISTORIES THROUGH THE HAWAIIAN-LANGUAGE PRESS AND PERSONAL ARCHIVES. DISCUSSANTS PROFESSOR MIN ZHOU (VIRTUAL PARTICIPATION) DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY & ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES DIRECTOR, UCLA ASIA PACIFIC CENTER DR. JONATHAN KAY KAMAKAWIWOʻOLE OSORIO DEAN, HAWAIʻINUIĀKEA SCHOOL OF HAWAIIAN KNOWLEDGE, UH MĀNOA MODERATOR SHANA BROWN DIRECTOR, HONORS PROGRAM ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, HISTORY DEPARTMENT, UH MĀNOA

December 5, 2025 at 12:00 AM UTC

When filmmaker Robin Lung began research in 2022 for a new documentary about Hawaiian language newspapers (nūpepa), she set out to explore how the writings printed from 1834 to 1948 continue to influence today’s artists, scholars, and activists. She didn’t expect the journey to lead her home—to her own family’s story in the Hawaiian Kingdom. In this talk, Lung reveals the remarkable life of her distant uncle Lee Ahlo, who immigrated from China in 1865, married a full Hawaiian woman Lahela Kehuokalani, became a successful merchant and planter, and emerged as a powerful voice for Hawaiʻi’s early Chinese community. Drawing from rare nūpepa articles and other primary sources, Lung reconstructs a vivid portrait of a man navigating identity, belonging, and resistance amid rising anti-Chinese sentiment and discriminatory laws. Her story opens new windows into the intertwined histories of Chinese and Hawaiian peoples and the shifting alliances that shaped the islands’ multicultural landscape. The lecture also offers a “hands-on” component—guiding viewers to explore archival sources for themselves and to reflect on the legacies of families like the Ahlo–Kehuokalani ʻohana in today’s Hawaiʻi. Following her presentation, Dr. Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dean of the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge and Robin’s former advisor, will reflect on the Hawaiian historical and cultural contexts of the nūpepa archive and the evolving relationships between Native Hawaiians and immigrant communities. Professor Min Zhou, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies and Director of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, will offer a comparative perspective on Chinese diaspora experiences, family narratives, and community identity formation across the Pacific. Together, their dialogue will explore a broader conversation about belonging, historical memory, and the power of storytelling to reconnect communities today.

PROFESSOR JUANJUAN PENG (GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY) JUANJUAN PENG IS A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY WITH A PRIMARY RESEARCH FOCUS ON CHINESE BUSINESS HISTORY. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OFTHE YUDAHUA BUSINESS GROUP IN CHINA’S EARLY INDUSTRIALIZATION(LANHAM, MARYLAND: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2020), WHICH TRACES THE TRAJECTORY OF A MAJOR CHINESE TEXTILE ENTERPRISE FROM THE SELF-STRENGTHENING MOVEMENT OF THE LATE QING TO THE SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF THE EARLY PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC.

December 5, 2025 at 1:00 AM UTC

This article examines the experiences of the DuPont Company’s operations in Shanghai during the tumultuous period of China’s Communist Revolution, from the immediate post-World War II recovery to the outbreak of the Korean War. Drawing upon the DuPont Company archives at the Hagley Museum & Library, this research reveals the pragmatic and often collaborative stance of American businessmen, including DuPont employees, towards the new Communist regime. Initially, these foreign enterprises, much like their Chinese counterparts, sought continuity and opportunity within a rapidly changing economic landscape, hoping for state investment in industrial development. However, the subsequent Chinese entry into the Korean War and the resulting American sanctions dramatically altered this dynamic, ultimately compelling DuPont to withdraw its presence and abandon its operations in China. By focusing on the strategic business decisions made by DuPont managers, this paper aims to bridge a gap in existing scholarship by providing a foreign business perspective on the crucial transition period of the Chinese modern economy across the 1949 divide.

PROFESSOR ZHANG YANG (AMERICAN UNIVERSITY) YANG ZHANG IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF GLOBAL INQUIRY AT THE SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL SERVICE, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC. EARNING HIS PHD IN SOCIOLOGY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. ZHANG’S RESEARCH SPANS HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, ELITE AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS, AND SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY. HIS WORK HAS APPEARED IN THEAMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND SOCIETY, JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, AND MOBILIZATION, AMONG OTHER OUTLETS. ZHANG HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED WITH THE CHARLES TILLY ARTICLE AWARD FROM THE COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY SECTION AND AN HONORABLE MENTION FOR THE DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO SCHOLARSHIP ARTICLE AWARD FROM THE COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS SECTION, BOTH FROM THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION.

December 5, 2025 at 4:30 AM UTC

In this talk, I propose a new approach to studying elite politics by focusing on changes in network structures that emerge from elites’ informal conversations. I apply this method to solve two interrelated puzzles from China’s early reform era (1977-1992): on one hand, why did intense political conflicts frequently occur (often among reformers) despite their common reformist goal? On the other hand, why did economic reform persist despite these intense power conflicts? To tackle these issues, we employ network analysis and narrative to analyze an original dataset of elite conversations and primary sources that have only been made available recently. We find that elite conflicts were contingent on the relational structure of their conversational interactions. Meanwhile, the persistence of reform was the result of a dynamic process of elite clashes and the rise and fall of mass politics, leading to compromises on economic policy while ultimately restricting the possibility of political pluralization. By integrating micro-sociological theories, historical sociology, and network analysis, this project offers significant methodological and theoretical implications for unpacking the black box of elite politics and its role in macro-historical change.

PEIYU YANGIS CURRENTLY A TERM ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ARABIC AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY. HER MONOGRAPHTRIANGULAR TRANSLATION: GENDER, POLITICS, AND THE MAKING OF THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD BETWEEN CHINA, EUROPE, AND THE MIDDLE EAST, 1880-1940(2023, LEGENDA PRESS) INVESTIGATES HOW INTELLECTUALS DURING THE NAHDA (THE PERIOD KNOWN AS THE ARAB CULTURAL RENAISSANCE) TURNED THEIR ATTENTION TO CHINESE CULTURE AND ITS OWN ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE, CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION, AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS. SANDY ZHANGIS A SCHOLAR OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS, WITH A SPECIAL FOCUS ON CHINESE AVANT-GARDE LITERATURE AND ART OF THE 1980S. SHE IS CURRENTLY AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHINESE AT SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY. HER RECENT ARTICLES, PUBLISHED INHUMANITIES,CHINESE LITERATURE AND THOUGHT TODAY,THIRD TEXT,PRISM, ETC, EXAMINE THE INTELLECTUAL, LITERARY AND ARTISTIC REFORMS OF CHINA'S 1980S. THOMAS CHANIS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORIAN OF MODERN CHINA SPECIALIZING IN THE INTERTWINED HISTORIES OF MEDICINE, CULTURAL PRODUCTION, POLITICAL VIOLENCE, AND STATE FORMATION. I HAVE SPECIAL INTERESTS IN DRUGS, VIOLENCE, AND POPULAR CULTURE. MY CURRENT BOOK PROJECT, FROM USERS TO CRIMINALS: CREATING, PATHOLOGIZING, AND KILLING ‘DRUG CRIMINALS’ IN TWENTIETH CENTURY CHINA, ANALYZES HOW FROM 1906 TO 1953 BOTH GOVERNMENTS DEHUMANIZED DRUG USERS AND TRAFFICKERS TO ENCOURAGE COLLECTIVE IDENTITY FORMATION AND PROMOTE STATE-BUILDING. MODERATOR:JONATHAN PETTIT, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIONS & ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

December 10, 2025 at 10:00 PM UTC

CCS brings together three rising scholars whose research opens new windows into China’s global, literary, and social transformations. Peiyu Yang traces how Arab intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries imagined China during the Nahda, revealing surprising cross-cultural engagements with China’s anti-colonial struggles, constitutional reform, and debates over women’s rights. Sandy Zhang examines the vibrant literary experimentation that unfolded within China’s state-run publishing system in the 1980s. Focusing on the journal Shanghai Literature and editor Li Ziyun, she shows how insiders navigated censorship and institutional constraints to champion modernist and avant-garde writing, helping reshape the literary landscape during Reform and Opening. Thomas Chan explores how early twentieth-century China redefined the very meaning of drug addiction. Highlighting the work of Dr. Wu Liande and other medical reformers, he demonstrates how Chinese physicians advanced individual-based models of addiction that influenced global addiction science and drug-control regimes. Together, these talks illuminate China’s interconnected cultural, intellectual, and medical histories while showcasing innovative new scholarship on the twentieth century.

ANGELA HUYUE ZHANG (UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA)

December 11, 2025 at 5:15 PM UTC

Online via Webex. Please register here:fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/4a9b46cc059949ec85b7360d963cca0a In recent years, China has emerged as a pioneer in formulating some of the world’s earliest and most comprehensive regulations concerning artificial intelligence (A.I.) services. Thus far, much attention has focused on the restrictive nature of these rules, raising concerns that they might constrain Chinese A.I. development. This Article is the first to draw attention to the expressive powers of Chinese A.I. legislation, particularly its information and coordination functions, to enable the A.I. industry. Recent legislative measures, such as the interim measures to regulate generative A.I. and various local A.I. legislation, offer little protective value to the Chinese public. Instead, these laws have sent a strong pro-growth signal to the industry while attempting to coordinate various stakeholders to accelerate technological progress. China’s strategically lenient approach to regulation may therefore offer its A.I. firms a short-term competitive advantage over their European and U.S. counterparts. However, such leniency risks creating potential regulatory lags that could escalate into A.I.- induced accidents and even disasters. The dynamic complexity of China’s regulatory tactics thus underscores the urgent need for increased international dialogue and collaboration with the country to tackle to safety challenges in A.I. governance. Bio: Angela Huyue Zhangis a Professor of Law at the Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California. Widely recognized as a leading authority on Chinese tech regulation, Angela has written extensively on this topic. She is the author of"Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation" published by the Oxford University Press in 2021. The book was named one of the Best Political Economy Books of the Year by ProMarket in 2021. Her second book,High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, released in March 2024, has been covered in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Wire China, MIT Tech Review and many other international news outlets. Angela is currently teaching and conducting research on topics including the U.S.-China tech rivalry and the global regulation of artificial intelligence.

EDDIE YANG (PURDUE UNIVERSITY)

December 18, 2025 at 1:15 PM UTC

Online via Webex. Please register here:fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/4a9b46cc059949ec85b7360d963cca0a There has been a flurry of recent concern about the question of who directly controls large language models. We show through six studies that coordinated propaganda from powerful global political institutions already indirectly influences the output of U.S. large language models (LLMs) via their training data, a pattern which is easiest to see in China. First, we demonstrate that material originating from China's Publicity Department appears in large quantities in open-source pre-training datasets. Second, we connect this to U.S.-based commercial LLMs by showing that they have memorized sequences of propaganda, suggesting that it does appear in their training data. Third, we use an open-weight LLM to show that additional pre-training on Chinese state propaganda generates more positive answers to prompts about Chinese political institutions and leaders---evidence that propaganda itself, not mere differences in culture and language, can be a causal factor in the behavioral differences we observe across languages. Fourth, we show that prompting commercial models in Chinese generates more positive responses about China's institutions and leaders than the same queries in English. Fifth, we show that this language difference holds in prompts of actual Chinese-speaking users. Sixth, we extend our findings with a cross-national study that indicates that the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger pro-regime valence than those with higher media freedom. Finally, we show results that demonstrate that the phenomenon described here is broader than propaganda and state media alone. Our findings join the ample recent work demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. Together, these results suggest the troubling conclusion that states and powerful institutions will have increased strategic incentives to disseminate propaganda in the hopes of poisoning LLM training data. Bio: Eddie Yangis an Assistant Professor of Political Science and faculty member in the Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California San Diego. Yang studies the politics of innovation and technology. His research has been published at theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, andPolitical Analysis, among other outlets.

JEFFREY DING (GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY)

January 15, 2026 at 1:15 PM UTC

Online via Webex. Please register here:fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/4a9b46cc059949ec85b7360d963cca0a Emerging economies face significant challenges in managing safety risks from powerful technological systems. Indeed, many analysts have identified China as the most likely source of a major accident linked to emerging technologies. Yet, contrary to these expectations, China has achieved a remarkable safety record in certain technological domains, such as civil aviation and nuclear power. How? We theorize that, for industries in which one firm’s accident damages the reputation of all others, international industry associations can contribute to improved safety standards in emerging economies. When firms share a collective reputation, industry associations exert positive peer pressure by subsidizing laggards’ efforts to raise their safety standards and protecting members from public naming and shaming. This departs from existing theories of international private regulation on certification clubs that set strict quality, safety, and environmental standards to deny association benefits to non-members. To demonstrate differences between these two mechanisms, we examine interactions between international industry associations and Chinese firms in three high-risk technological domains: nuclear power, civil aviation, and chemicals. Our findings have implications for scholars interested in the interdependencies between international public regulation and private regulation as well as policymakers trying to manage the safety risks of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Bio: Jeffrey Dingis an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He researches great power competition and cooperation in emerging technologies, the political economy of innovation, and China's scientific and technological capabilities. His book,Technology and the Rise of Great Powers(Princeton University Press, 2024), investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition in emerging technologies like AI. Other work has been published or is forthcoming inEuropean Journal of International Relations,European Journal of International Security,Foreign Affairs, International Studies Quarterly,Review of International Political Economy, andSecurity Studies, and his research has been cited inThe Washington Post,The Financial Times, and other outlets.

DAVID Y. YANG (HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

January 22, 2026 at 1:15 PM UTC

Online via Webex. Please register here:fu-berlin.webex.com/webappng/sites/fu-berlin/webinar/webinarSeries/register/4a9b46cc059949ec85b7360d963cca0a Venture capital plays an important role in funding and shaping innovation outcomes, characterized by investors’ deep knowledge of the technology, industry, and institutions, as well as their long-running relationships with the entrepreneurship and innovation community. China, in its pursuit of global leadership in AI innovation and technology, has set up government venture capital funds so that both national and local governments act as venture capitalists. These government-led venture capital funds combine features of private venture capital with traditional government innovation policies. In this paper, we collect comprehensive data on China’s government and private venture capital funds. We draw three important contrasts between government and private VC funds: (i) government funds are spatially more dispersed than private funds; (ii) government funds invest in firms with weaker ex-ante performance signals but these firms exhibit growth rates exceeding those of firms in which private funds invest; and (iii) private VC funds follow government VC investments, especially when hometown government funds directly invest on firms with weaker ex-ante performance signals. We interpret these patterns in light of VC funds’ traditional role overcoming information frictions and China’s unique institutional environment, which includes important frictions on mobility and information. Bio: David Y. Yangis a Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and Director of the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. David is a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, a Global Scholar at CIFAR, and a fellow at BREAD. David’s research focuses on political economy. In particular, David studies the forces of stability and forces of changes in authoritarian regimes, drawing lessons from historical and contemporary China. David received a B.A. in Statistics and B.S. in Business Administration from University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Stanford.

NICHOLAS DE VILLIERS

January 22, 2026 at 11:30 PM UTC

In Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang(University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Nicholas de Villiers contends that we need to theorize both queer time and space to understand Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic explorations of feeling melancholy, cruisy, and sleepy.Building on those arguments, this presentation starts with a reading of Tsai’s short filmIt’s a Dream(2007)—set in a movie theater in Malaysia—as a microcosm of Tsai’s themes and motifs of sleep/dreaming, cruising, nostalgia, and the space of the cinema. It then addressesTsai’s “post-retirement” (after 2013) filmsand museum installations, including the queer Teddy award-winning digital feature filmDays(Rizi, 2020) shot in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, and the short filmThe Night(2021) shot in Hong Kong in 2019. Both were featured in the solo exhibitionTsai Ming-liang’s Daysat the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) in 2023, experimenting with "expanded cinema" and collaborative curation of Tsai's still expanding body of work. Nicholas de Villiersis Professor of English and film at the University of North Florida and 2023–2024 Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar in Taiwan at National Central University at the Center for the Study of Sexualities. He is the author ofOpacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol(2012),Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary(2017), andCruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang(2022), all from the University of Minnesota Press.