International Roundtable on Gender, Law, and Women Trafficking in Chinese History
Organized by Ruoyun Bai and Li Chen & Yunli yuetianxia
由多伦多大学白若云教授和陈利教授与“云里阅天下”公众号共同组织
You are cordially invited to attend the following roundtable. Thirteen scholars, including internationally renowned experts in multiple disciplines and fields, will come together to share their insights and research on the institutional, cultural, economic, legal, and social contexts and ramifications of women trafficking and sale in historical and contemporary China. The time, venue and free registration link can be found below.
Ruoyun Bai (Toronto, media studies), Li Chen (Toronto, history/law), Shuang Chen (Iowa, history), Xiaoping Cong (Houston, history), Yue Du (Cornell, history), Siyen Fei (Pennsylvania, history), Kishimoto Mio (Ochanomizu, history), Sida Liu (Toronto, sociology/law), Zhao Ma (Washington, history), Johanna Ransmeier (Chicago, history), Matthew Sommer (Stanford, history), Ying Zhang (Ohio State, history), Tiantian Zheng (SUNY, anthropology). 参与本次圆桌论坛的十三位学者包括（括号内为所在大学和专业）：白若云（多伦多大学，媒体研究），陈利（多伦多大学，历史/法律），陈爽（爱荷华大学，历史），丛小平（休斯顿大学，历史），杜乐（康奈尔大学，历史），费丝言（宾州大学, 历史），岸本美绪（日本御茶水女子大学，历史），刘思达（多伦多大学，社会学/法律），马钊（华盛顿大学，历史），任思梅（芝加哥大学，历史），苏成捷（斯坦福大学，历史），张颖（俄亥俄州立大学，历史），郑田田（纽约州立大学，人类学）。
Speakers 与会学者简介（按姓氏字母顺序）
Ruoyun Bai
白若云
Ruoyun Bai 白若云received her Ph.D. in communications from the University of Illinois (UIUC) and is currently Associate Professor of Media Studies and Comparative Literature at the Univeristy of Toronto . Her research and teaching focus on media as institutional, textual, and cultural practices. She is attentive to textual and visual representations, and to the materiality of such representations, i.e. how texts and images are produced and circulated in historically specific political, economic, social, ideological, and technological contexts. She has published a series of articles in areas such as the political economy of Chinese television, the relationship of Chinese writers and intellectuals to the market and the state, and the Internet-based youth culture in China. Besides two edited books: Television Drama in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014), she has also published a monograph, Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics (UBC Press, 2015) and is working her second book manuscript, Gendered Scandals：Chinese Women and Digital Media which is expected to be completed by May 2023.白若云, 北外英语系学士和文学硕士，伊利诺伊大学传播学博士。曾任美国纽约大学媒介、文化和传播系助理教授(TT) (2007-2008年), 现任加拿大多伦多大学文化和媒体研究系以及比较文学中心副教授，系该校UTSC校区媒体研究专业创建者并曾任该专业Program Director。她的研究兴趣包括媒体与社会、媒体与性别、大众文化和比较媒体研究。学术著作包括专著Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics (UBC Press, 2015) 和另外两本合编英文著作(TV Drama in China, coedited with Ying Zhu and Michael Keane in 2010; Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century, Entertaining the Nation, co-edited with Geng Song in 2014)及一系列文章。目前在研究丑闻（scandals）事件所反映的新媒体、流行文化与政经和社会因素之间的相互作用及影响。
Li Chen
陈利
Li Chen 陈利,J.D.(Illinois)/Ph.D.(Columbia), is Associate Professor of History and Law (cross-appointed) at the University of Toronto. He was the founding President of the International Society for Chinese Law and History in 2014-2017 and has served on the Editorial Board of the Law and History Review since 2014. His research focuses on the intersections of law, culture and politics in Chinese and global history since 1500. Besides a series of articles on the critical history of international law and Sino-Western relations, his recent publications include a monograph, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016) (which won the 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and honorable mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Prize of the American Society for Legal History), and a co-edited book, Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (Brill, 2015). He is completing a SSHRC-funded book manuscript entitled Invisible Power and Juridical Capital of Confucian Legal Specialists in Late Imperial China and is working on another book project Confucian Justice, Juridical Politics, and Symbolic Power in the Qing System of Capital Justice.陈利，美国伊利诺伊大学法律博士(J.D.)和哥伦比亚大学历史系博士(Ph.D.)，现任多伦多大学历史与文化研究系、历史系副教授，法学院兼任副教授，2016-2019年间任该校历史与文化研究系主任,2014-2017年间任中国法律与历史国际学会会长，该学会现任董事和编辑。他的研究集中于明清以来中国和全球史中的法律、文化及政治领域间互动关系。除了其他编著和文章外，其专著Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes《帝国眼中的中国法律：主权、正义和跨文化政治》获亚洲研究协会2018年中国领域列文森 (Levenson) 著作奖，其中文版将由浙江大学出版社发行。他目前正在完成一本关于清代司法幕友和司法资本的英文专著，并在撰写一本关于清代秋审/死刑制度和皇权政治的专著。
Shuang Chen
陈爽
Shuang Chen 陈爽, Ph.D. (Michigan), is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. As a historian of late imperial and modern China, her research interest encompasses social, economic, and legal history, with an emphasis on exploring how the interplay of state and local institutions over the long term shaped the early modern Chinese society. Her book, entitled State-Sponsored Inequality: The Banner System and Social Stratification in Northeast China (Stanford University Press, 2017), utilizes legal cases and household and land registers to explore the social economic processes of inequality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural Manchuria. In addition, she has also published a set of articles and book chapters on family and population history, examining the interaction between demographic behaviors, social stratification, and institutional context under the setting of frontier settlement.
Xiaoping Cong
丛小平
Xiaoping Cong 丛小平, Professor of history at the University of Houston. She received PhD in history at UCLA in 2001 and started teaching at the University of Houston. Cong’s study focuses on the 20th century China, specializing history of education, women's history, intellectual history, history of revolution, and extending to legal history and cultural history. Cong’s first book, Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Chinese Modern Nation-State, 1897-1937 (British Columbia University Press, 2007). The Chinese version was published in 2014. Her second book, Marriage, Law, and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. The Chinese version of this book is forthcoming by Social Sciences Academic Press.丛小平，美国得克萨斯州休斯顿大学（University of Houston）历史系教授。美国加州大学洛杉矶校区（UCLA）历史学硕士（1995）、博士（2001）。2001年起在休斯顿大学任教至今。研究领域为中国近现代教育史、妇女史、思想史、革命史，并涉及社会史、法律史、文化史。主要专著有Teachers’ Schools and the Making of Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937 (2001，2014年商务印书馆中文版)、Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940-1960 (2016, 社科文献出版社中文版即将出版)，同时发布中英文学术论文多篇。
Mara Yue Du
杜乐
Mara Yue Du 杜乐 is an assistant professor teaching modern Chinese history at Cornell University. Her first book, State and Family in China: Filial Piety and Its Modern Reform, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2022. Approaching family through the lens of law, this book studies “ruling the empire by the principle of filial piety” (孝治天下) as a governing mechanism that characterized China-based empires across the second millennium c.e. This governing mechanism, which influenced how family relations were perceived by the imperial state and local actors alike, set the stage for state-sponsored family reform in twentieth century China. Her current project, tentatively titled China: From a Nationless State to a Nation Defined by State, explores the evolvement of the notion of sovereignty in China's empire-to-nation transformation. It centers on the multifaceted concept guo 國, which meant a dynastic state in classical Chinese but which came to represent the modern nation state in the twentieth century. She is also collecting materials for her third book-length project, Twice a Stranger: China, the United States, and Trans-Pacific Intellectuals, a narrative that tells the story of the two countries through the life experiences of six transnational figures. Mara Du has published on law, family, empire- and nation-building, and Pan-Asianism in journals such as Late Imperial China, Modern China, Asia Major, International Journal of Asian Studies, NAN NÜ, Journal of Family History, and Frontiers of History in China.
Siyen Fei
费丝言
Siyen Fei 费丝言 received her PhD degree from Stanford University in 2004. She teaches and researches Chinese history at Penn. Her work to date is primarily concerned with the political and cultural activism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ming dynasty China (1368-1644). Examining the action of wide-ranging historical actors—women, urbanites, and border residents—she engages and expands the new scholarly paradigm of “defiant late Ming energy” that re-visions a society formerly considered submissive to an all-powerful imperium. In particular, her research on gender, urbanization and empire breaks new grounds by exploring how this emerging state-society dynamics drove and shaped unprecedented transformations in Chinese history: A patriarchal system subverted by court-promoted control of female sexuality; an idealized rural empire facing drastic waves of urbanization; a self-proclaimed Han-native Chinese polity destabilized by cross-border migration and resultant de-sinicization. Excavating these paradoxical historical movements, her books uncover fascinating stories about the interplay of structure and agency. Her current book project examines cross border captivity across late Ming borderlands and the complicated nexus between capture, trafficking and migration. This project looks at the life and struggle of people at the borderlands and caught in the making and unmaking of the Ming empire and examines how they confronted their plight on their own terms. It tells a story about a time when familiar vocabularies such as empire/identity were unavailable, and in that absence, how the commemoration of chaste heroines—women who martyred themselves to preserve their chastity—became a venue to negotiate destabilized frontier identities and to re-imagine the Chinese world.
Mio Kishimoto
岸本美绪
Mio Kishimoto 岸本美绪is Professor Emeritus, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, and Research Fellow of Pre-modern Chinese Studies Group at the Toyo Bunko. She graduated from the University of Tokyo, and majors in socio-economic history of the Ming and Qing periods. Her main works (in Japanese) include Economic Change and Price Fluctuations in Qing China (Tokyo, 1997); The Ming-Qing Transition in Jiangnan: The Problem of Social Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Tokyo, 1999); Collected Works on Ming and Qing History, 4 vols. (Tokyo, 2012-2021). The articles related to this panel include “Selling Land, Selling People: The Concept of Ownership in Comparative Perspective,” Nihon chūtō gakkai nenpō, Vol. 19, No.1, 2003 (in English); “Qi ke mai fou?: Ming-Qing shidaide maiqi, dianqi xisu 妻可卖否？：明清时代的卖妻,典妻习俗,” in Chen Chiu-kun and Hung Li-wan eds., Qiyue wenshu yu shehui shenghuo (1600-1900), Taipei, 2001 (in Chinese); “Lijiao, qiyue, shengcun: Shixi Ming-Qing minshi shenpanzhongde hengping yuanze,” Fazhishi yanjiu, No.27. 2015 (in Chinese).
Sida Liu
刘思达
Sida Liu 刘思达 is Associate Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Toronto. He received his LL.B. degree from Peking University Law School and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Professor Liu has conducted extensive empirical research on China’s legal reform and legal profession. In addition to his empirical work, he also writes on theories of law, professions, and social spaces. Professor Liu is the author of three books in Chinese and English, most recently, Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (with Terence C. Halliday, Cambridge University Press, 2016). He has also published many articles in leading law and social science journals. Professor Liu is a Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, a Vice President of the China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies, as well as an affiliated scholar of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University and the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. In 2016-2017, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Zhao Ma
马钊
Zhao Ma 马钊 is a social and cultural historian. He received his Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University in 2007, and joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis in 2011. His first book, Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Strategies in Wartime Beijing, 1937-1949《逃婚妇女、都市犯罪与战时北平的生存策略, 1937-1949》, was published by Harvard University Asia Center in 2015. It uses criminal case files to explore lower-class women’s role in remaking wartime Beijing’s social and moral order. He is currently writing a new book, Seditious Voices in Revolutionary China, 1950-1953. It examines the relationship between rumor-mongering and political propaganda during the Korean War campaign, and offers a lens through which to study the transformation of urban informational space against the backdrop of war fever and emerging revolutionary politics in Mao’s China. At Washington University, Dr. Ma teaches courses on 20th-century Chinese history, urban culture, and the history of US-China relations. Besides researching and teaching, Dr. Ma has been a Public Intellectual Program (PIP) Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations since 2014. As a PIP fellow, he has been working closely with public media, including writing op-eds for Chinese newspapers, giving interviews to New York Times, South China Morning Post, BBC, Financial Times, VOA, NPR, NBC, and PBS, on topics of Chinese foreign policy and US-China relations.
Johanna Ransmeier
任思梅
Johanna Ransmeier 任思梅 received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and is currently Associate Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research explores the relationship between family life and the law in modern China, often through the lens of crime. She is the author of Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China《清末民国人口贩卖与家庭生活》(Harvard, 2017), in which she shows that despite traffickers most frequent protestations poverty was not solely to blame. Traditional Chinese family structure itself enabled a highly flexible market for everyone from slaves, servants, wives, concubines, wet nurses, prostitutes, private drivers, funeral musicians, and apprentice street performers. Her next project will introduce the concept of legal literacy in the early twentieth century. In this new area of research, she asks a question with special resonance for China today: What happens when citizens’ legitimate expectations of the law get ahead of the ability of legal institutions to deliver on the promise of new legislation? Prior to joining the University of Chicago she taught in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.
Matthew H. Sommer
苏成捷
Matthew H. Sommer 苏成捷 (BA Swarthmore, MA Univ. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. Before moving to Stanford in 2002, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years. Sommer is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China 《明清中国的性、法律与社会》(Stanford, 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China 《清代中国的一妻多夫与卖妻：生存策略与司法介入》(California, 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the Peter Gonville Stein Award from the American Society for Legal History. He is currently completing a new book with the working title Transgender in China: Case Studies from the Qing Archives.
Ying Zhang
张颖
Ying Zhang 张颖, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Department of History and Director of Institute of Chinese Studies at the Ohio State University. She received her PhD in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan in 2010. Her research interests include late imperial Chinese bureaucracy and governance, political culture, women and gender history, and the history of Confucianism. She is the author of Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Washington Press)，Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (Brill, 2020), and co-editor of Masculinity Studies男性研究 [Chinese] (Shanghai sanlian chubanshe, 2012).
张颖，美國密西根大學歷史與婦女研究聯合博士，任教於美國俄亥俄州立大學歷史係，兼任俄亥俄州立大學中國研究中心主任（2019-2023）。主要研究興趣：明代中國政治史，制度史，婦女及性別史，儒家文化史。主要著作Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Washington Press)，Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (Brill, 2020), 以及《男性研究》（合編）（上海三聯出版社）。
Tiantian Zheng
郑田田
Tiantian Zheng 郑田田 is SUNY Distinguished Professor at State University of New York, Cortland, with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University. Besides five edited journal issues and over a hundred articles, she is the author and co-author of ten academic books, including Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China《红灯区：后社会主义中国的性工作者生活》(2009); Sex Workers and Criminalization in North America and China: Ethical and Legal Issues in Exclusionary Regimes (co-authored, 2016); Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China (2015); Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia (edited, 2017); Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-socialist China (2022). She has received two national book awards and one “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice (the 2010 Sara A. Whaley Book Prize and 2011 Research Publication Book Award). Her fourth ethnography Violent Intimacy: Intimate Partner Violence in Postsocialist China, will be forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.