APSI Visiting Scholars’ Seminar

In this seminar, two visiting scholars, Suk-Jung Han and Ran Xu, will share findings from their research, inviting the audience to engage with questions and feedback:

Suk-Jung Han—“Representing the Manchurian Landscape: Manying to the Manchurian Western”

Abstract:
Manchuria has been valorized as the sacrosanct stage of resistance in both South and North Korean films. In the films produced by the Manchuria Film Association (Manying) (1937-45), the official filmmaker of Manchukuo, the puppet state of Japan in Northeastern China (1932-1945), Manchuria was represented as a pristine, mysterious landscape that retained its sovereignty through Asian unity against the ‘Western hegemony.’ I trace the contrasting points of the filmic appropriation of Manying and the “Manchurian Western” and the flow from the former to the latter. I will show the cracks in their appropriation, eventually suggesting that ideology is not a fixed, but bypassed entity in the films. The Manchurian continent was too wide to be contained by the unitary theme, namely, the ode to the nation-making of Manchukuo or Korea.

Ran Xu—“Running for Survival: Tibetan Antelope Conservation and China’s Environmental Movement in the 1990s”

Abstract:
Across the windswept uplands of the Chang Tang, the Tibetan antelope—chiru—once roamed in vast herds, their migrations echoing an ancient rhythm of life and survival. By the late twentieth century, however, global demand for shahtoosh, the so-called “king of wool,” had driven this creature to the edge of extinction. This paper explores how the Tibetan antelope crisis evolved from a borderland poaching issue into a formative moment in China’s emerging wildlife protection movement. Drawing on archival documents, Chinese media reports, and international NGO investigation materials, it traces the convergence of transnational enforcement efforts, domestic environmental narratives, and the activism of early Chinese ENGOs, particularly Friends of Nature, from the 1990s into the early 2000s. The study argues that the protection story was not simply the heroic narrative celebrated in mainstream official environmental discourse, but a complex process shaped by cross-border barter trade, transnational NGO interventions, and the dynamics of global capitalist fashion markets.

About the speakers:

Suk-Jung Han is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Dong-A University. His research interests include the films of prewar Japan and their influence on post-liberation Korean filmmaking; the growth of the craft beer industry in East Asia; and the environmental and labor impacts of women migrating as domestic workers across and within Asia.

Ran Xu is a PhD candidate at Renmin University. Her research focuses on environmental history, civil society and NGO studies, hydraulic history, economic history, and quantitative history.