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Thursday, November 21, 2013 - 19:30

Hidden Treasures: 16th - 18th Century Maps of Asia and China

Vince Ungvary, Collector, Antique Maps

Antique maps are far more than merely geographical representations; they also communicate historical, political and religious power, provide ethnographic details about "strange lands and peoples" and were often used for strategic military and commercial interests. Vince Ungvary will show how the European Age of Exploration and Discovery of Asia are represented through the changing shape and knowledge of Asian continent maps from the 16th to 18th century. He will also explore how sabotage, subterfuge and thievery of key geographical knowledge of Asia intensified as the potential unlimited...
Thursday, November 14, 2013 - 19:30

UNICEF in China: Supporting Advances for Children

Gillian Mellsop, Representative, UNICEF China

UNICEF and China have a long history of collaboration. In 1947, China became the first country in Asia to welcome a partnership with UNICEF, and its first program provided emergency relief services to children. Today, China's phenomenal growth in per capita income masks the complex problems that continue to face a very large number of Chinese children. In this talk, Gillian Mellsop, Representative, UNICEF China, will discuss how the Chinese government has made enormous strides in the areas of children's education, health and nutrition, and remaining challenges as China deals with...
Thursday, October 31, 2013 - 19:30

China's One-Child Population Policy after 30 Years: Impacts and Prospects for Change

Joan Kaufman, M.A., M.S., Sc.D.

Director, Columbia Global Centers, East Asia

After more than 30 years of China's one-child policy, China has entered a new phase of below-replacement fertility that may be hard to reverse. Some negative social and demographic impacts of the policy will have long lasting societal impacts — notably the sex ratio at birth in favor of males and the skewed age ratio and high dependency ratio of the elderly-to-working-age population — possibly undermining China's economic competitiveness. This lecture will examine the social and economic impacts of the one-child policy and efforts by China's leading demographers to convince policy makers...
Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 19:30

China's New Architecture

Yung Ho Chang, Architect and Founder, FCJZ/Feichang Jianzhu,

Professor of Architecture and former Head of the Department of Architecture, MIT,

and Founding Head and Professor, Graduate Center of Architecture, Peking University
BIS is pleased to present China's first international architect and one of China's most important architectural pioneers, Yung Ho Chang, who will discuss contemporary architecture, design, planning and art through an exploration of the specific predicament of people, the buildings they inhabit and the cities they constitute in this period of China's unprecedented growth. Yung Ho Chang will share his groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary work, and his practice FCJZ/Feichang Jianzhu, including inhabitation, construction methods, urbanism, tradition, perception and culture. Yung Ho...
Thursday, October 10, 2013 - 19:30

Cinema with Chinese Characteristics

Isabel Wolte, Ph.D.

The Chinese film market has become the second largest in the world after the United States, with an output of 500 – 700 films a year. It can be ignored neither domestically nor internationally, but what does Chinese cinema really stand for? Why do we rarely see Chinese films abroad? Cinema is entertainment; it can be fun and exciting. At the same time, it is a reflection of society and provides a means to grasp what audiences care about. This lecture will present an overview of recent developments in the Chinese film industry, the successes it has achieved and the challenges it...
Thursday, September 12, 2013 - 19:30

Awash with the New: Contemporary Chinese Ink Art

Britta Erickson, Ph.D.

Chinese ink painting or wash painting (水墨 shui mo) has developed over the course of millennia. It arrived at a complex artistic vocabulary of brushstrokes that required decades of training to master and that were capable of expressing the artist's connection to the universe. While this tradition was rudely interrupted in the twentieth century by the introduction of Western methods and by the government's insistence that art function as political propaganda, since Mao's death ink painters have hewn a long path back to artistic excellence and creativity. Britta Erickson, an...
Thursday, May 30, 2013 - 19:30

China's Superbank: Debt, Oil and Influence - How China Development Bank is Rewriting the Rules of Finance

Michael Forsythe and Henry Sanderson

Reporters, Bloomberg News
Anyone wanting a primer on the secret of China's economic success need look no further than China Development Bank (CDB) — which has displaced the World Bank as the world's biggest development bank, lending billions to countries around the globe to further Chinese policy goals. In China's Superbank, Bloomberg authors Michael Forsythe and Henry Sanderson outline how the bank is at the center of China's domestic economic growth and how it is helping to expand China's influence in strategically important overseas markets. Formerly a reporter for the Associated Press in Beijing...
Thursday, May 16, 2013 - 19:30

China's Urban Billion

Tom Miller

Journalist and Author

By 2030, China's cities will be home to 1 billion people — one in every eight people on earth. What will these mega-cities be like? What kind of lives will China's urban billion lead? Will China's leaders get urbanization right? Or will giant slums emerge in the years ahead? In his pivotal book, China's Urban Billion (Zed books, UK 2012), Tom Miller presents the story behind the biggest migration in human history and explains the economic, social and environmental consequences of China's rapid urban development. He explains why through this staggering process China has...
Thursday, April 25, 2013 - 19:30

Foreign Devils in the Middle Kingdom: What It Means To Be a Laowai in China

Graham Earnshaw, Publisher,

China Economic Review and Earnshaw Books

The status of foreigners living in China is a topic of sensitivity and puzzlement in a way that is not true of foreigners living in Brazil, India or France. Why? Graham Earnshaw, a long term and committed laowai, discusses the position and prospects of foreigners in the flowery kingdom, and tries to work out if and how they can ever achieve a status of "normality" somewhere between "honored guest" and "unsavory element." Graham Earnshaw is a businessman, writer and musician with many years of experience in the China world. He is publisher of China Economic Review and publisher of...
Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 19:30

Regarding the Mona Lisa: Chinese and Western Views of Art, Culture and the World

Christine Cayol, Philosopher and Writer;

Founder of Synthesis and Yishu 8

What do the Chinese see and think when they look at the Mona Lisa? In Christine Cayol's new book, A quoi pensent les chinois en regardant Mona Lisa ? (Ed. Tallandier, 2012) (What do the Chinese think when they look at the Mona Lisa?) she explores how the Chinese perceive Western culture, and what their reaction is when they visit museums full of paintings with subjects like the Gioconda, the Virgin Mary or the Suffering Christ. Is the Chinese gaze so removed from the Western one? What can Giotto, Picasso, Rembrandt, Velazquez and Leonardo tell us about cultural...
Thursday, March 28, 2013 - 19:30

Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China

Mitch Moxley, Writer

Mitch Moxley—writer, journalist and Chinese Cosmo Bachelor of the Year candidate — chronicles half a decade in China, presenting the illustrated story of personally absurd encounters and reverence for a place undergoing profound change. Accompanied by excerpts from his book, Apologies to my Censor (released internationally July 2, 2013), a candidly honest account of his years working as a journalist in China, Moxley presents six years that coincide with China's emergence as a global superpower — and his transformation into his alter ego, Mi Gao, or Tall Rice. Mitch...
Thursday, February 28, 2013 - 19:30

China's "Leftover" Women

Leta Hong Fincher, Sociologist

The term "leftover woman" (sheng nü) is often used in China to describe an urban, professional female over the age of 27 who is still single. Leta Hong Fincher argues that state-perpetuated myths about "leftover" women are part of the Chinese government's efforts to promote marriage and social stability in the midst of widespread discontent. China faces a severe demographic crisis of tens of millions of men who will be unable to find a bride because of the sex ratio imbalance. This talk will explore the consequences of China's state media campaign about "leftover" women and the...
Saturday, February 2, 2013 - 10:00

Outing: Appreciating and Interpreting Modern Chinese Painting and Calligraphy

Christopher Reynolds and Craig Yee

China Fine Art Management
This event is SOLD OUT
This outing is limited to 20 BIS members, reservations only.
Mr. Craig Yee and Mr. Christopher Reynolds will provide a hands-on workshop on how to look at, appreciate and interpret the calligraphy and painting of Zhao Zhiqian 趙之謙 (1829–1884)—the artist widely recognized as the father of Modernism in Chinese art. Zhao Zhiqian drew upon the nineteenth-century intellectual search for the authentic origins of Chinese civilization to overturn millennia of artistic tradition in calligraphy and painting. In its place he forged a new syncretism between the scholarly arts of calligraphy, painting and seal carving. The new brush painting that emerged...
Thursday, January 31, 2013 - 19:30

EU-China Relations

Markus Ederer

European Union Ambassador-Head of Delegation
to the People's Republic of China and Mongolia
Following the fifteenth EU-China summit in Brussels in September 2012 (and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's last summit with the EU), Dr. Markus Ederer presents the direction and strengthening of EU-China commercial and political relations by taking a look at the EU-China strategic partnership and security issues; the economic situation in China and in the Eurozone; and people-to-people issues such as educational exchange, tourism and new areas for cooperation. Markus Ederer was born in Germany in 1957. He has a Doctoral degree in International Law from the University of Passau, and...
Thursday, January 24, 2013 - 19:30

The Chinese Political System: Beyond Stereotypes

Patricia Rodríguez Hölkemeyer, Professor,

School of Political Science, University of Costa Rica

Since the beginning of economic reforms, China has produced its institutional innovations through the pragmatic process of trial and error. In her recent book, Sistema Político Chino (The Chinese Political System: Beyond Stereotypes), Professor Rodríguez examines the top-down – bottom-up political process and how the Chinese regime has generated creativity and an extraordinary learning capacity that has not been adequately noted or appreciated by scholars and political leaders in the West. Professor Rodríguez will look at how rapid economic growth has permitted...