China in 1949: The Logistics Officer and the Art Historian
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS
- Room
- RB01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Diaries and personal records of the year 1949 allow us to examine the choices that were made during the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, many of which came to shape the state in the years that followed.
This talk will follow Chang Renxia 常任侠, a specialist in Asian art history whose diary records his return from India to China at the start of 1949 to support the revolution, and Liu Ruilong 刘瑞龙 who was responsible for supplying the People’s Liberation Army as it marched south after victory in the Battle of Huaihai, crossed the Yangzi River and took Shanghai.
Using these accounts, and focussing on northern Anhui and Jiangnan, it will argue for the central role that the army’s need for grain played in shaping ordinary people’s experiences of the revolution.
About the speaker
Henrietta Harrison is Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Stanley Ho Tutorial Fellow in Chinese History at Pembroke College. She is a Fellow of British Academy. Before coming to Oxford she taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and in the Department of History at Harvard University.
Her books include The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2021) which won the Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth Century Studies and was shortlisted for the Cundill and Wolfson prizes, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village 1857-1942 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013). She is currently working on a study of people’s lives and choices in the year of the 1949 revolution.
Chair: Professor Jieyu Liu, SOAS Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Organiser
Contact
- Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
