Center on Contemporary China launches, Beijing added as Global Seminar location

The University has launched the Center on Contemporary China, added Beijing as a destination for the Global Seminar Program and appointed professor Yu Xie jointly with the sociology department and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies as a result of a recent effort to gear courses and programs toward contemporary China, PIIRS director Mark Beissinger said.

Beissinger said that the hope is that the appointment of Xie will invigorate student interest in the current issues of China, and will make the University one of the leading universities in research on contemporary Chinese society.

He noted that while the University previously had a number of classes related to China under the Department of East Asian Studies, there was only one person in the social science department actually teaching about contemporary China.

“It’s one of the most exciting things here to happen in the University, in terms of the study of contemporary China and it will be a transformative factor in terms of the opportunities available to students to study contemporary China,” Beissinger said about Xie’s appointment.

Xie said that the study of China is a very contentious issue and that there is such an influx of information and opinions about the rapid development of China today, especially from foreign scholars. He explained that he wants to bring a neutral, factual and empirical perspective to the study of contemporary China.

“We will use quantitative information, such as population growth, economic growth and education and so on, to understand China using social science perspective and methodology,” Xie said.

Xie was at the University of Michigan for 26 years and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences. He is known for his empirical social science research on the demography of China and is currently conducting a general consumer survey on the country.

Yan C. Bennett, the new manager of the CCC, explained that the purpose of this center is to gather faculty and students interested in contemporary China from a number of different disciplines, including politics, economics and environmental studies.

The center will hold an annual speaker series, Bennett said,with the first talk being delivered by sociologist Don Treiman on Oct. 19. In addition to this, she added, the center will have workshops for graduate students and will host visiting post-doctoral scholars from Beijing University.

Xie explained that the CCC is unique because it will be completely interdisciplinary and will draw from all aspects of Chinese society today, including the country’s economic situation, political structure, educational system and household construct.

The center will be instrumental in exposing the Princeton community to research-based information from local perspectives, he said. Beissinger said that the University has decided to invest heavily in the study of contemporary China partially because of the interdisciplinary nature of this center.

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“What happens in China affects the rest of the world in almost all significant domains,” Xie said. “So what happens in China today has huge consequences for the world. That’s why I believe that the educated person now should know something about China and about what’s going on in China.”

Beissinger explained that PIIRS has also introduced Beijing as a sixth location for next summer’s Global Seminar program with Xie as the supervising instructor. The six-week course will bring together 15 students from Princeton and 10 students from Beijing University to attend lectures by various prominent scholars within the country.

Beissinger said that the intention of the Global Seminar is to expose Princeton students to China, to make them more interested in China and to eventually encourage them to follow up on that interest by working in China or taking more classes on contemporary China.

“All Princeton students will benefit from knowing something about China,” Xie said.

To amplify the transformation that Xie is leading within the University, the CCC plans to add a number of appointments related to contemporary China within the social studies department, Bennett said.

Beissinger said that the University will need to build a real group of faculty who focus on the study of contemporary China.