Daoist priests in central and northern Hunan Province (PRC), an area known as Plum Mountain (Meishan 梅山), are the custodians of many local traditions. Among them is an ancient and elaborate ritual dedicated to a sacred site famous since medieval times: Peach Blossom Spring (Taohuayuan 桃花源), or Peach Spring Grotto (Taoyuandong 桃源洞), locally also referred to as Immortals’ Precinct of Peach Spring (Taoyuan Xianjing 桃源仙境). In addition to a written iteration by the medieval poet Tao Qian 陶潛, the site’s miraculous efficacy is ritually channelled into households of the region, consecrated on domestic altars, and its transcendent beings embodied by domestic spirit-mediums. Peach Spring forms an ecological complex where a vision of the landscape as sacred continues to be relevant.

This talk examines how intimacy becomes a site of governance in contemporary Sinophone speculative fiction. Rather than treating intimacy as a private or purely affective domain, I explore how it is increasingly regulated by state power and techno-capitalist systems. Focusing on works by Hon Lai-Chu (韓麗珠), He Jing-Bin (賀景濱), and Chi Ta-Wei (紀大偉), I analyze how intimacy and interpersonal relations are monitored, structured, and controlled through technological intervention, often in ways deeply entangled with corporate and governmental power. In some cases, technology appears to open up new forms of agency; in others, it traps subjects within increasingly complex systems of state regulation, technological surveillance, and the instability of identity. In dialogue with these earlier works, the second part of the talk turns to my own speculative fiction—Contactless Intimacy and my work-in-progress, Unquantifiable Distance—as a form of critical practice. By imagining a system in which intimacy is quantified and translated into social value, my writing explores how dominant sexual and romantic scripts are produced, naturalized, and enforced, while also asking how alternative modes of relationality might be imagined. By bringing together literary analysis, critical theory, and creative practice, this talk proposes a speculative framework for understanding intimacy as a contested, governable, and programmable domain in the Sinofuturist world. About the Speaker Hsin-Hui Lin is a science fiction writer and researcher, currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. She received her Ph.D. in Taiwanese Literature from National Chengchi University and was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (2022–2023). Her doctoral dissertation, Porous Bodies: Rethinking Taiwanese Science Fiction through New Materialist Politics, examines how Taiwanese science fiction imagines bodily permeability, disaster, and shifting boundaries between the human, the nonhuman, and the environment through a new materialist framework. She is the author of the sci-fi novel 'Contactless Intimacy' (2023), with an Italian translation, Intimità senza contatto, published in 2025. Her debut book, 'Human Glitches' (2020), won the 2020 Taiwan Literature Award for Books, one of Taiwan’s major literary prizes. Her creative and critical work explores the blurring boundaries between humans and nonhumans in the contemporary technological era. Lin also frequently publishes reviews and essays in major media outlets, examining the intersections of literature, visual art, and technology. The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004), Taiwan's beloved and pioneering postwar cook book author and television celebrity, was often called the "Julia Child of Chinese cooking." Fu appeared continuously on television for forty years, wrote dozens of best-selling Chinese cookbooks, owned a successful cooking school and traveled the world, teaching foreigners about Chinese food. Women in her generation, which included both housewives and career women, turned to Fu because she taught them how to cook an astounding range of unfamiliar Chinese regional dishes, in ways their own mothers and grandmothers never could. Her cookbook also represents the transpacific journeys of thousands of migrants, as they carried her recipes in their suitcases, traveling far from home. Fu's story offers us a window onto not just food, but also family, gender roles, technology, media, foreign relations, and cultural identity. This is not a story of timeless culinary tradition, but one of modern transformation-- of self and family, of cuisine and society.

Economic planning in socialist China required the local planners to gather comprehensive information within their jurisdiction on one hand and implement centrally issued plan on the other. The dual challenge of knowing the real economy and following ever shifting policy targets is particularly daunting in pre-mechanized sectors. Taking the 1950s Beijing transportation as a case study, this article describes the municipal transportation authority’s effort to control and tally the dispersed, privately-owned, muscle-powered transportations in and out of the city, with the purposes of establishing a state monopoly, fixing transportation costs, and making the transportation sector plannable. Through triangulating planning policies, statistical documents, and institutional archives, the paper shows that despite the indispensable role that muscle-powered transportation played in the economy, the statistical regime upholding the planning failed to incorporate it. This failure could only be partially explained by the accounting difficulty caused by the dispersed nature of muscle-powered technologies. Also important was the conflation of the plan and the reality.

This talk examines the growing securitization in U.S.–China competition. As both Washington and Beijing increasingly treat interdependence as a source of vulnerability, securitization has become a central feature of economic and technological policy. While some expansion of security is necessary, its unchecked growth risks strategic self-harm—undermining innovation, raising economic costs, and weakening long-term competitiveness. The talk advances bounded securitization as a framework for managing this dilemma. Rather than rejecting security measures, it emphasizes discipline: prioritizing high-probability risks, aligning policy tools with their economic and strategic costs, and maintaining flexibility through review mechanisms. Drawing on recent U.S.–China policy dynamics, the analysis shows how securitization can generate reinforcing cycles of restriction, pushing targeted de-risking toward incremental decoupling. The key challenge is not whether to securitize, but how to do so without eroding the benefits of openness and interdependence. Effective strategy therefore requires discipline rather than maximalism in security policy. About the Speaker Xiaoyu Pu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order (Stanford University Press, 2019) and has published widely in leading journals, including International Security, International Affairs, and The Chinese Journal of International Politics. He was a Fellow with the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.–China Relations and a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations. He has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University and completed postdoctoral training at Princeton University. The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact ciw@anu.edu.au

We are pleased to invite you to a thought-provoking discussion that explores China in Africa paradigm in a comparative perspective with India. While much attention has been centered on China in Africa and Global China as a lens through which to examine changing patterns of investment and infrastructure in Africa, this panel puts the China in Africa paradigm in a comparative perspective with India, which has longstanding commercial and trade ties with East and South Africa. This online panel, co-sponsored with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies of The New School, will assess Indian and Chinese engagements in Africa through the lens of technology transfers, skills upgrading, educational exchanges, and knowledge flows. Participants will explore patterns of expertise and technology transfer, higher education partnerships, cross-border research collaborations, and supply chains, among other forms of engagement between Chinese and Indian organizations with African counterparts Register here.