Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings is a new translation that draws on traditional and recent scholarship to present the ideas, reasoning, and worldviews of the Zhuangzi writings (4th-2nd century BCE) as clearly and accurately as possible using smooth, natural English. The translation aims for fidelity to the source text at the level of the sentence, rather than the individual word or phrase, seeking to produce flowing, idiomatic English sentences that accurately render the content of the Chinese original. The volume includes extensive explanatory notes aimed at clarifying the text and guiding readers to develop their own understanding. The Introduction summarizes recent philological work that finds the Zhuangzi to be a composite, accretional anthology of short anonymous writings and accordingly advocates a discourse-based approach to interpreting the material, rather than single-author model.

In the post-2020 era, South America has become a key arena for Chinese global enterprise, with Chinese goods and services achieving unprecedented popularity. This presentation argues that the groundwork for this contemporary success was not only laid by recent state-led initiatives, but also by a much earlier, understudied phenomenon: the rise of the first-generation Overseas Chinese business community between 1960 and 2000. Arriving in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela with minimal state support and confronting a legacy of anti-Chinese sentiment, these entrepreneurs nevertheless achieved remarkable upward mobility. This talk will examine how they succeeded, exploring their business models, and the crucial role of community-based support systems and kinship networks in navigating challenging social and economic landscapes. I contend that their accomplishments did more than secure personal prosperity; they initiated a fundamental shift in the local perception of the Chinese, transforming a historically marginalized group into a respected economic community and laying the relational foundation upon which the PRC’s later influence would be built.

Reading and Conversation w/ Michael Luo - Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Join us for a book reading by Michael Luo in conversation with Kat Chow, with welcoming remarks by Qin Gao, Acting Director of the Asian American Initiative. In Strangers in the Land, award-winning journalist Michael Luo tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan—Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. Federal lawmakers enacted legislation aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. The Chinese became the country’s earliest undocu­mented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is a revelatory and unforgettable American story.

In 2003, the U.S. Congress added a civil liability provision to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) permitting victims to seek damages from those who engaged in or benefitted from forced labor and human trafficking. Over the last 20 years, labor advocates have sought to use this statute to hold accountable companies who rely on forced labor inside the United States or occurring overseas, including in Asia. Cases have been filed against U.S. companies using workers trafficked from China or importing shrimp peeled by Cambodian migrants in Thailand, tuna caught by Indonesian fisherman, and equipment made by Chinese prisoners. Three experts will discuss recent cases brought under the TVPRA based on forced labor in Asia, and will explain the debate among federal courts over extending civil liability under the TVPRA to overseas actions.

This talk investigates how local constructions of the “national fengshui master” (guoshi 國師) reshaped geomantic discourse in the Ming in ways that indirectly reinforced the imperial model of centralized control. Before the fourteenth century, guoshi referred primarily to Buddhist and Daoist court preceptors. In Ming local writings, however, the title was retrospectively applied to geomancers active between the ninth and eleventh centuries in southern mountain communities, recasting them as authoritative masters of terrain-based fengshui. As this southern tradition circulated through state adoption, printed manuals, and itinerant teaching, earlier distinctions—formulated by Zhu Xi—between court orientation methods and the southern terrain tradition were blurred, redirecting debates toward questions of origin and textual authority. Amid this shifting epistemic structure, the guoshi emerged in local narratives as an exiled figure whose authority rested on an imagined link to court expertise and on claims of unbroken family transmission. Drawing on local gazetteers, genealogies, and geomantic manuals, the article argues that the guoshi was not simply a projection of imperial authority into the past but the outcome of a complex negotiation in which local actors —geomancers, landholders, and literati—mobilized textual traditions to define their position vis-à-vis the state. By situating the guoshi in earlier dynasties and promoting stories of court-trained masters, they sought to reestablish hierarchy within the geomantic field amid its increasing decentralization, thereby inadvertently echoing the imperial logic of centralized order.

We continue our speaker series about Taiwan’s status in the world with a look at its relationship with the European Union. None of the EU’s twenty-seven member states has diplomatic relations with Taiwan, but nineteen member states and the EU itself have opened quasi-embassies there and the EU holds a ministerial-level trade and investment dialogue with its government. In recent years, as tensions with China have heightened over trade disputes and the war in Ukraine, the EU Parliament has increasingly emphasized Taiwan’s shared democratic values and their similar experiences living with a powerful, authoritarian neighbor. Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, a scholar who divides her time between Brussels and Taiwan, will unpack the drivers and limitations of Europe’s affinity for Taiwan. *Please note this event was originally scheduled for March 10. Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy is an affiliated scholar at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, adjunct assistant professor at National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, Taiwan, and visiting fellow on EU-Southeast Asia relations at the Martens Centre. Based in Taiwan since 2020, she has worked as a geopolitical analyst and academic, expanding her regional network and deepening her expertise in the Indo-Pacific. Her work on Taiwan’s internationalization, viewed through a European lens, places particular emphasis on Southeast Asia and India—key regional partners for Europe. From 2008 to 2020, Dr. Ferenczy served as a political advisor in the European Parliament, focusing on European foreign and security policy and human rights in the world. She is the author of Europe, China, and the Limits of Normative Power (Edward Elgar Publishing 2019) and Partners in Peace. Why Europe and Taiwan Matter to Each Other (Palgrave Macmillan 2024). In addition to her academic roles, she is associated research fellow at the Institute for Security & Development Policy (ISDP Stockholm), head of the Associates Network at 9DASHLINE (London), fellow at Agora Strategy (Munich), and a regular commentator in international media.

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.

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.