Reception 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Patio 1517
Lecture 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1517

This lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available for $10.00 per day, or $2.00 per hour in the Social Science Parking Structure on the corner of Campus Drive and Stanford. Please RSVP to Marilu Daum at daumm@uci.edu by May 15, 2016.

About the talk
It is now well-known that the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) sharply altered their predecessors’ understandings of what it meant to rule “all under heaven”; meanwhile Qing conquests doubled the empire’s land area. Initially, much of the Chinese elite saw much of this new territory as mere buffer zones, to be occupied only insofar as this kept hostile nomads from doing so. A central reason for this skepticism was that many of the newly-acquired lands were ill-suited to agriculture, the “fundamental occupation” of “civilized” life. By roughly 1850, however, Han literati came to see many frontier regions as properly “Chinese” territory. More gradually, they also came to see certain previously despised groups of people – including such common frontier figures as miners and loggers -- as potential “good subjects.” These transformations – influenced both by changes in official discourse and changes in who was actually migrating – set the stage for further changes later: ones which re-imagined China’s far west as resource-rich territories which had to be held and “developed,” even when the Chinese state was hard-pressed on other fronts.

About the Speaker
Dr. Pomeranz’ research is in social, economic, and environmental history, though he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the seventeenth century to the present.

About the Kiang Lecture Series
The Wan-Lin Kiang Endowed Lecture Series was established in 2003 by Mrs. Assumpta Kiang in memory of her husband, Wan-Lin Kiang, a noted international scholar, political advisor and businessman. The series annually brings to campus a noted scholar on relevant topics related to China.

About the Center for Asian Studies
The center is comprised of more than 40 interdisciplinary UCI faculty members who study China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and enhance the study of the many countries and cultures of Asia. The center provides a forum for discussions across geographic and disciplinary boundaries both on campus and within the community.