Shared seminar: China's War against Covid-19 // Swedish Small Scale Farming

Time: 24/11/2020 - 13:00 to 15:00
Type: Seminar
Place: Zoom. Registration requried.

Seminar with Annika Pissin and Jiang Jue, researchers at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies.
N.B. there will be two presentations during this seminar.Title: The ‘Gridded Management’ System in China’s ‘War Against COVID-19’Along with China’s long-delayed response to the COVID-19 outbreak is its nationwide activation of the ‘gridded management’ (wanggehua guanli) system. Relying largely on the mass recruitment of the war-time rhetoric and ideology in mobilizing the people to watch and tell on each other, this ‘gridded management’ system is officially highlighted as playing a key role in China’s combat against COVID-19. Through examining the operation of the ‘gridded management’ system, this presentation discusses the harms it has done on human rights and dignity. Drawing upon a historical analysis of the systems assuming the similar function of self-policing in ancient and communist China, this presentation further proposes the potential harm the ‘gridded management’ system may produce on communal trust, which is arguably the cornerstone of populist authoritarianism in China. Dr JIANG, Jue is a guest researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian studies 1 November 2020- 31 March 2021. She obtained her PhD from the faculty of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013 and worked at human rights NGOs after that for four years. Her research is focused on criminal justice, human rights, and political-legal development in China. She is the author of the book Criminal Reconciliation (xingshi hejie) in Contemporary China: An Empirical and Analytical Enquiry (Edward Elgar, 2016) and multiple articles published in The Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family and Journal of Contemporary Asia etc. Title: Farming in Sweden: Forms of societal integration and coevolutionary spheres of activityInternational organizations suggest that small-scale diversified farms are the most important actors for securing planetary survival. And yet their numbers have radically decreased across Europe. Monocultural, high external in-put, industrialized farms appear to thrive, while small-scale diversified farmers face many challenges and obstacles in an economic and political environment largely formed by agrobusiness. In the project “Sustainable welfare and transitioning to sustainable agriculture: small-scale ecological farming in Sweden”, we ask farmers, social entrepreneurs, and food artisans about their farms and challenges of keeping and working on farms. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and its theoretical framework. Dr. Annika Pissin is a researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies since 2010. She studied classical and modern Chinese as well as Anthropology in Heidelberg, Tainan and Leiden and attained a doctoral degree from Leiden University. Applying historical anthropological methods, her dissertation describes how children lived and were dealt with in medieval China (500-1000 CE). At Lund University her research shifted to contemporary China (she conducts only some research about imperial China now), but she still focuses on children and childhood in China as well as in a global and historical comparative perspective.