Seminars

Crisis is often spoken of as if its meaning were self-evident, yet what counts as a crisis — and what counts as a response — has never been universal. In early China, sources confronted conflict, disorder, and uncertainty with vocabularies that resist neat translation into modern categories, offering distinctive ways of parsing danger and disruption. This project-in-progress examines how these distinctions were articulated in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) through close readings of transmitted classics alongside excavated and newly recovered manuscripts. While these texts may not provide a single “theory of crisis,” they reveal frameworks for thinking about it: moral language as a means of prevention, political admonition and historical exempla as lessons from past disorder, and strategic narratives as warnings about perilous situations. From the ecological paradigm of Great Yu’s flood control, which cast disorder as natural calamity, to the admonitory lessons of manuscripts such as the Tsinghua slips, where imbalance was expressed through metaphors of illness and culinary skill, these sources offered a diverse repertoire of approaches to danger and disruption. In turn, they illuminate how such frameworks informed decision-making and strategies of risk mitigation.

This talk explores how collective action shaped social complexity in two of early China’s prominent late Neolithic centers: Liangzhu and Shijiahe. Both sites, dating to around 5500 BP, achieved large-scale urbanism and undertook extensive public works, yet they diverged significantly in political organization, ritual practice, and elite infrastructure. Drawing on recent archaeological findings, I argue that while Liangzhu reflects a model in which elite control and symbolic monopolies were central to power, Shijiahe presents a more decentralized structure characterized by inclusive ritual practices and minimal elite materialization. By analyzing construction methods, labor organization, and ritual distribution, I suggest that collective action could generate contrasting trajectories of governance and social cohesion. These two cases demonstrate the multilinear nature of social development and highlight how ritual and labor mobilization functioned both as instruments of elite authority and as expressions of communal agency.

This talk, based on newly mined data from newly unearthed manuscripts and traditional sources, explores convict politics in the early Chinese empires. Whereas a substantial number of bureaucratic personnel were convict laborers, assisting local officials, the central court reemployed numerous previously convicted individuals as high officials. The talk argues that convict politics emerged because the mutual responsibility system and high-performance- oriented law extensively criminalized people, including the innocent. Convicts were not only the continuity of politics but were politics itself. Scholars of Chinese history are well-acquainted with the use of convict labor for various state projects. This talk will focus on convict labor in local government and convict politics in central court. I argue that via a framework of legal regulations, structured institutional mechanisms, and systematic administrative processes, convict laborers were integrated as essential aides to officials in the realm of local governance. While being used as objects and instruments to sustain the political economy, convicts at the same time occupied crucial positions in operating the local governmental apparatus, regularly assisting technical bureaucrats in administering the populace. The administrative space in local government was an open prison. Convict politics also characterized the central court. Former convicts were entrusted with power, serving as important officials or even chancellors. Approximately 20% of recorded high officials throughout the two centuries of the Western Han were once condemned; some of them even received the death penalty but they managed to re-ascend to the center of politics. At the same time, officials easily fell into the law and became convicts themselves. As a high-risk job, approximately 40% of the high officials during their tenures were accused of violating the law and received punishments ranging from hard labor to the death penalty. Severe tension emerged between the nature of the law and the status of convicts, between the lawful and the guilty, and between the philosophical elaboration on the treatment of criminals and the actual practice.

China’s ancient history and the myths of common ancestors have played a crucial role in shaping contemporary Chinese national identity. This talk examines the revival of ancestral cults—particularly the veneration of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi)—in distinctly new forms in today’s China. It explores key themes such as intangible cultural heritage, religious revival, history-making, the construction of locality, and national identity. Drawing on case studies and fieldwork in Henan, the talk analyzes how local governments and cultural actors strategically brand “Yellow Emperor culture” to engage in interregional heritage competition and craft distinctive local identities. It argues that the resurgence of Yellow Emperor worship—a legendary ancestral figure—has been driven by the forces of nationalism, a grassroots search for tradition, and religious revitalization. This revival also entails the active search for and reinterpretation of historical narratives, contributing to the ongoing construction of history in the present. Ultimately, the talk contends that global heritage discourses offer legitimizing frameworks that enable diverse localities in China to assert their cultural distinctiveness. In doing so, they foster new forms of cultural and religious expression that actively contribute to the construction of national identity in contemporary China

This talk explores how cutting-edge imaging technologies and immersive media are transforming our understanding of the Han dynasty Mawangdui tombs. Drawing from CAMLab’s interdisciplinary research and the recent publication Cosmic Cycle of Life 生命时空, the project Digital Mawangdui reinterprets the material, cosmological, and spiritual dimensions of Mawangdui through a multisensory lens. From XRF pigment mapping to high-resolution textile reconstruction, from 3D visualization of funerary objects to AI-driven interactive storytelling, the project reveals the dynamic processes of hua (化)—transformation—that define Han concepts of life, death, and the cosmos. This talk presents the development of a digital platform and immersive exhibition that reimagines the tomb not as a static burial site, but as a generative space where philosophical imagination, alchemical knowledge, and sensory experience converge. By bridging scientific analysis with artistic expression, Digital Mawangdui offers a new model for multimedia storytelling in cultural heritage interpretation.

Among the many contests evinced by the written record of the Warring States Period, one has received relatively little attention among modern scholars: the debate over the normative social forms that should structure literati’s life and work. In this essay I will unpack three different models of literati engagement that were advocated in early sources. These models were in tension with one another and were variously advocated for by groups competing for the allegiance of literati throughout the Zhou domain. The most familiar model was that of “Master and disciples,” first promoted by the fellowship that formed around the figure of Confucius (551 B.C.E.-479 B.C.E.). Much scholarship assumes that this was the norm governing all literati activity during the Warring States, but such was not the case. By the late fourth century B.C.E. many courts were promoting a “state patronage” model of literati engagement first developed and aggressively advocated by the rulers of Qi. In the third century B.C.E., following a strategy first pioneered by Tian Wen (Lord Mengchang, fl. ca. 280 B.C.E.), a new class of great “private patrons” emerged. The patronage retinues that formed around these figures were not formed exclusively of literati but made vital use of literati talents in pursuit of political agendas and mimicked some of the social functions of “Master-disciple” fellowships like those of the Confucians and Mohists. In this essay I will examine the evidence for the nature and history of these three models of literati engagement, and the negotiations that transpired between their respective advocates.

The political history of the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BCE) was marked by two overarching, seemingly inverse trends. On one hand, the hundreds of polities comprising the fragmented multi-state order of the era competed, conquered, and were gradually consolidated into a handful of larger territorial constructs. In that process, powerful, unifying hegemons (five following traditional historiography) successively rose to fill the power vacuum left in the wake of the Zhou royal house’s decline. On the other hand, peering under the veneer we see a picture of increasing disintegration as elite lineages constantly split and segmented into cadet branches that provoked intense intra-state discord often more destructive than the wars between states. In time, the lineage would grow increasingly segregated from the state as the traditional Zhou lineage system broke down. The goal of this seminar is to unpack and explore the ebbs and flows of centripetal and centrifugal impulses involved in these two interdependent trends, and reassess or challenge this narrative of the fundamental shift in the organizational principles of early Chinese state and society in the Spring and Autumn period. The wide range of associated social and political developments of the era will be introduced for discussion through a set of heuristic dichotomies including patriarch-monarch, warrior-soldier, and shaman-bureaucrat. While I will draw as examples mainly on textual and archaeological evidence from the state of Qi, it is hoped that incorporating participants’ expertise on other states, regions, or periods will shed additional light on regional variabilities or alternative processes of socio-political change in early China.