AP Forum: Student Summer Research (Fall 2024—Session 1)

Each semester, APSI organizes several events under the banner of our Asia-Pacific Forum. These informal sessions are opportunities for graduate students and members of our community to gather and discuss topics of interest, including research projects and opportunities.

At this event, three of our returning students will share findings from their summer research:

Qiwen Li—“Crystal Village (1976-2024): Donghai's Transnational Crystal Trade”

Donghai, a small village in Jiangsu, China, is the biggest world-famous crystal trade market. Its development is deeply entangled with the history of China’s reform and opening up (gaige kaifang) and now it is actively investigating the post-COVID online trade. This research asks in what ways the villagers monetize the crystal as a natural resource and how the local government, national policies, merchandisers and young unemployed labor act together to build the crystal trade chain through fieldwork and interviews.

Lucy Law—“Remembrance, Silence, and Creative Resistance in Hong Kong”

In Hong Kong, a context where speech is limited, how do people still find ways to speak? How is evidence of silence actually substantial and material? Against the backdrop of the 2020 and 2024 National Security Law (NSL), this research focuses on how people find ways to creatively resist when more overt forms of protest become untenable. This thesis aims to call attention to the erosion of Hong Kong’s unique political and cultural identity as a Special Administrative Region (SAR). Research was conducted over three weeks through ethnographic observation, visits to former protest sites, and documentary photography. Using theories of semiotics, silence as a form of listening, and resistance to power, one can better understand how Hong Kong’s people speak without words. Preliminary results suggest that symbols of memory and democracy are being limited and erased. Evidence also emerged of how disruption impacts physical spaces as contested sites of power. From the owner of a subversive bookstore to a street artist, people in Hong Kong are anything but silent. 

Tianlin Wang “Promises and perils of provincial archives: studying the history of infrastructure in 20th century North China”

This talk will discuss how to use provincial archives to study the histories of infrastructure - railroad, highway, postal service, etc. - in twentieth-century North China. Beginning with a brief introduction to the general situation of government archives preserved in national, provincial, and municipal archives in China, this talk will highlight some features of the provincial archives in North China. In light of the increasing obstacles to accessing local archives, I argue that provincial archives - at least in North China - are particularly helpful to studying histories of twentieth-century North China for both methodological and practical reasons, particularly for topics such as infrastructure in that they were more decentralized than many other contemporaneous institutions and that their networks usually overlapped with multiple provinces. At the same time, however, we should also be well aware of their inherent shortcomings and gather other genres of primary sources to complement them. 

Lunch will be provided to registered participants.