Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

Topic: From the League of Nations to the United Nations: Internationalism in China and Chinese Internationalism

Speaker: Lucas Tse (Examination Fellow, All Souls College; PhD Candidate, Faculty of History, University of Oxford)

Moderator: Charles Chih-Hao Lee (Assistant Research Fellow, IHP)

Discussant: Kuan-Jen Chen (Assistant Research Fellow, IMH)

Date: February 21 (Thu.), 2023, 15:00–17:00

Venue: Room 701, Research Building, IHP

Organizer: Cultural and Intellectual History Research Center, IHP

Remarks:

1. The talk will be given in English, whereas the discussion will be held in both Mandarin Chinese and English.
2. Attendees are required to wear a face mask for the entire duration of the event.

Contact: Mr. Wang Yanxiang, cihasihp@gmail.com

Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a PhD candidate in history. He works on the international and economic history of modern China, and on Asian participation in global governance. His doctoral research is on China and international organisations in the 1930s and 1940s. Before that, he studied at the University of Chicago, and grew up in Hong Kong.

Abstract: In this session, I will begin by introducing the context and motivation of my overall project: to globalise both the study of international institutions and the study of Chinese modernity by tackling them together. In particular, I hope to highlight the need to probe the role of physical, economic as well as imagined geography in these relations. The middle part of my presentation will focus on a chapter I am writing on the League of Nations and the UN’s operations in rural China, including disaster relief, hydraulic engineering and agriculture. I will then discuss how these case studies could contribute to the larger agenda, as well as remaining issues surrounding sources and historiography.