FINAL PART (previous entries below)

Networking on Asian research

I ask Sean if something like a “Mediterranean profile” exists with regards to Asian studies and research and also what the status and future is for European networks seen from the Spanish perspective?

He says that compared to the Nordic countries, which have a relatively long tradition of Asian research, Asian programmes are relatively new in Barcelona and Spain as well as in most other Mediterranean countries. He states it this way that, Spain is just beginning, Portugal and Greece are at a more initial stage, while Italy has a longer tradition for Asian studies at the Universities in Naples, Rome and Venice. Still, CIDOB and UAB are developing their programmes and are participating in various Meditteranean, European and Asian networks.

One example of Meditteranean cooperation is MedAsia, which was founded in 2006. It is a network for Mediterranean research units joined by CasaAsia in Barcelona, Réseau-Asie-CNRS (France), Instituto Italiano per l´Africa e l´Oriente (Italy), Instituto de Estudos Estratégicos e Internacionais (Portugal) and the University of Athens (Greece). With regard to European networks, both CIDOB, CasaAsia and the Centre for East Asian Studies are members of the Europe China Academic Network (ECAN), a European Commission initiative, in which NIAS also participates and which works with the promotion of policy relevant EU-China knowledge and research. CIDOB and UAB are also part of the Asia-Europe Foundation and collaborate with, among others, NIAS Senior Researcher Timo Kivimäki in studies of regional security in Asia. NIAS and CIDOB are also both joining in the ASEM Educational hub. Another example of the growing relations between NIAS and Barcelona’s Asia research institutions is that NIAS Senior Researcher Cecilia Milwertz has been invited to UAB to give a talk on Chinese gender issues in October 2007. The Nordic and Mediterranean countries need each other, Sean says. Joining European networks and exchanging knowledge is surely the way forward - and it is certainly also a way of getting funding. With regards to networks with Asian institutions, a range of exchange programmes for students in Chinese and Japanese language exist. In China, exchange programs have been established with universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and a number of Chinese students come to Barcelona to study. While some of them join the Chinese studies programme, others join European studies. Thus, exchanges and networking on Asian studies and research are carried out between 1) Spain and Mediterranean countries, 2) Spain and European countries and 3) Spain and Asian countries.

Sean assesses that the main challenge for Spain to is recruit new specialists – especially Ph.D.’s. In Spain, he estimates, there are only around 200 people with a degree in Asian studies, which makes the issue of recruiting new people crucial, but also challenging. Unlike in Denmark, for instance, Ph.D.’s in Spain only get their tuition fees paid by the government, while they are responsible for further funding themselves. Some scholarships exist, covering Asian research topics, but they are few and not very high. At Institut Barcelona, D’Estudis Internationals, IBEI, next door to CIDOB, some students and researchers carry out research on Asia, while also some MA students at UAB work with Joaqin Bertrand on field research on Asia.

Most of the work to establish strong degrees and research on Asia remains to be done in the future, Sean concludes. Perhaps an increased European cooperation, in which both Spanish institutions and Nordic institutions such as NIAS take part, will contribute to this work.

For my own part, I will take the opportunity to thank Sean and CIDOB’s staff for welcoming me at CIDOB, and I look forward to learning more about the different work being done on Asia, both here and in other institutions in Barcelona.

http://www.cidob.org/ - CIDOB’s homepage.

www.uab.es – Autonomous University of Barcelona’s homepage.

PART I

I have been in Barcelona for three months now. Apart from acclimatizing, tasting local delicacies and generally sucking in the city’s atmosphere along with strong coffee, I am writing my MA thesis at the Centre for International Relations and Development Studies, CIDOB. The centre is based in a reformed 1587 Augustinian building in the central migrant and workers’ neighbourhood Raval - just 200 meters off the renowned walkway La Rambla - which is rapidly changing its face into to an up-scale creative area with two universities, exhibition halls, galleries, international bookstores, cafés, bars and shops as well as Richard Meyers’ museum of contemporary art, MACBA. What the area lacks in terms of the supreme library facilities at NIAS, it compensates for with a vibrant student life, exciting cultural facilities and what seems to be a successful dialogue between the educational and cultural institutions and the local neighbourhood.

View from the terasse of CIDOB of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA

It was Sean Golden, the director of CIDOB’s Asian programme and director of the centre for international and intercultural studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, UAB, where he is also a professor in East Asian studies, who kindly arranged a working place for me at CIDOB. On account of his long-term work as a scholar on China and Asia and primus motor in establishing Asian study and research programmes in Barcelona, Sean seamed to be the right guy to ask about the state of the field of Asian studies and research in Barcelona and Spain, and I decided to interview him for this purpose. He starts sketching out a historical overview and then talks about the status and directions of the different programmes.

Asian studies in Spain
In 1984, there were no Asian programmes in Spain, and Sean, who had a long experience with research in China, approached the government with a request: Since there was already considerable commerce between Spain and Asia, he thought it obvious that they should also initiate academic programmes on Asia in Spain.

In 1988, then, he and his colleagues started teaching Chinese and Japanese language in Barcelona, and in 1992 a center for East Asian studies was set up in Madrid in order to create an official degree course. In 2000, a degree in International and Intercultural studies was established at UAB. The degree combines economical, political and social issues with Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Then, in 2001, the first official BA degree in East Asian studies was established in Barcelona and Madrid. Also, in Salamanca, a BA in East Asian studies is now offered, but only covering Japanese language. In 2006, an official MA degree on research in East Asian studies was established at UAB. In 2001, a summer school was established from Barcelona with an Asian seminar, from where papers are published.

In Barcelona, the Annuario Asia Pacifico periodical is published by CIDOB, CasaAsia and Real Instituto Elcano, with the first issue released in 2004. CasaAsia, which was opened in 2002 in Barcelona, is a culture house that organizes conferences, lectures, exhibitions and cultural promotions for the public and the local business circle. It also has a small library with titles on Asia. The Real Instituto Elcano is a Madrid based think tank with an Asia-Pacific programme, which among other activities publishes briefings, reports and working papers. CIDOB further publishes Revista d’afers internationals (review of international affairs) with Asian editions, Enciclopedia del Mediterráneo, as well as a series of working papers and books on Asian issues. The general approach to Asian studies and research in Barcelona, Sean explains, is interdisciplinary with a focus on social sciences.

PART II

CIDOB’s Asia programme
CIDOB was established as a private foundation in 1979. It is sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the regional Catalan government, the local government of Barcelona, as well as by some public donors and banks. It is currently headed by Narcís Serra, former minister of defence in Spain. The foundation’s goal is “to be a framework of reference in the sphere of international, and development studies”. It is a centre for International Studies, a documentation centre and it also hosts the Biblioteca Internacional de Barcelona, BIBA. Main areas of activities include organizing conferences and seminars, as well as publishing yearbooks, journals and books.

Especially CIDOB’s Asia programme, which is co-ordinated by Alex Gonzalez and headed by Sean Golden, should be of interest to NIAS. While networks have already been established between Northern and Southern institutions doing Asia related research, including between NIAS and CIDOB, more academic exchanges, mutual learning, interdisciplinarity and inter-European research programmes covering Asia, seems to be a trend that also attracts funding.

Sean Golden came to CIDOB in 2001 to establish its Asia programme, which currently hosts five research areas:
1) America – Asian relations as well as Spain – Latin America – Asian triangulation, focusing on business, international relations and policy.
2) Asian migrations, Asian communities in Spain and Mediterranean Europe, focusing on the economic actions of Asian communities in Spain.
3) Economic emergence and Civil Society in Asia, focusing on international power politics of Asia.
4) Transition processes, political dialogue and Asian powers in international systems, focusing on international relations and conflict resolution.
5) Central Asia in the 21st Century.

The challenge for CIDOB is to choose research topics that give the institution a unique identity, Sean explains. With the combination of the five research programmes, CIDOB’s Asia programme resonates with other European programmes at the same time as it maintains a singularity making sense in the local Spanish context. Comparing these research areas with the ones covered by NIAS could prove interesting for continuing dialogues, while the differences between the two institutions’ approaches to Asian research, differences perhaps more generally between Mediterranean and Nordic approaches, could also prove a learning experience for NIAS. While CIDOB’s programmes 3), 4) and 5) in some respects overlaps with some of NIAS’s focus areas, the first two programmes seem more cultural specific to Spain.

The Asian migrations programme focuses on Asian migrants to Spain and specifically on the rapidly developing ethnic business communities in Spain. As I am still trying to search out the different institutions and people focusing on issues that might resonate with my own MA project on Chinese migrants’ business at a ‘fake’ market in Shanghai, this programme is especially interesting for me, while it also exposes some urgent local issues in Barcelona.

PART III

The Asian migration programme: Making sense of Chinese tapas and cheap haircuts
The area around Arc de Triomf, where I live, has recently been developing into a type of Chinatown with dense clusters of businesses and shops owned by Chinese family business networks. A long row of shops situated next to each other sell Chinese produced clothes engross at cheap prices, while Chinese hairdressers, restaurants and – equally interesting – Chinese “Spanish style” cafés and restaurants, offering tapas and espressos, are scattered around the area.
It has come to the point where local Catalan business owners are complaining about the take-over of their businesses by Chinese. But at the same time the power of the Chinese business owners has been increasing as they have joined the association for small, and medium sized commerces.
Sean explains that there are three steps for the business owners: First, they arrive, then they accumulate capital and open shops catering mainly to other Asians, and finally they buy local shops.
As we speak, I start to wonder how the workers are recruited and enter the country, how business networks are organized and how the shops are run? Especially, since walking down C/ Trafalgar does not seem all that different from walking in Shanghai’s Xiangyang market: A long row of Chinese owned shops selling the same kinds of cheap clothes for negotiable prices. I do not remember any similar concentration of this type of Chinese businesses in Copenhagen. Also, it occurs to me that I have seen very few studies of, for instance, the business strategies of Chinese migrants in the Nordic countries, (though NIAS Press has just published Mette Thunø’s book Beyond Chinatown: New Chinese Migration and the Global Expansion of China on Chinese past and present migration).
The responsible of CIDOB’s Asia migration programme, Joaquín Beltrán, is based at UAB, and coordinates case studies of the Chinese business in Barcelona funded by CIDOB. With 12% of Barcelona’s population being migrants, many of them illegal and dependent on economic strategies and business networks alternative to those available in the “formal society”, this programme seems highly relevant in the local setting. Joaquín Beltrán works on the theme in collaboration with Amelia Sáiz López at UAB and with researchers in Madrid and the Canary Islands.

I arrived in Timor Leste the 23^rd of February to a country which had changed considerably since my first fieldwork here in 2005. Particularly the capital, Dili, where I am currently staying has changed its appearance. Refugee camps for IDPs are scattered throughout the city, often around convents or churches; others in parks. The Catholic Church has been heavily involved in providing assistance to people displaced during last and this year’s crisis. Many, many people have lost their homes. My Timorese family was not spared. They lost their house and all their belongings when their home was set on fire almost a year ago. They have now found other places to live, but many others remain in the camps. There is no immediate solution in sight as to how and when they can return to their normal lives.

Dili Life
One big security concern for many people is that of youth gangs in the capital. In 1999, the major part of buildings and infrastructure in Timor Leste was destructed by militia and Indonesian army; and it is sad to see how things have again gone in the wrong direction. It seems that every week fights between rivalling gangs leave people injured and houses or cars burned down. Many people lost their homes this way during the past year. My Timor-family too lost their house and all their belongings with it when their home was set on fire last year. They all managed to escape through the back yard, but for some of them, this makes the third time in their lives they have lost their home and belongings due to unrest: in the late 1970s, in 1999, and now in 2006. Their trouble isn’t over yet, either. Saturday a member of the family was stopped in his taxi by drunken members of one such gang. His mobile phone was stolen and they demanded money as well. When he didn’t have any to give, they decided to break his car window with an iron bar. The cost of replacing it resembles two months’ full pay. This is no small thing for a man who can name the day, date and exact time when his family became the owners of a car. As many others, they have no trust in the police or justice system in general and will not report this. Still, on a more positive note, the last two-three weeks have in fact generally seemed calmer than what many people feared, possibly due to the increased presence of military and police in the capital.

Black Hawks Fooled by Rebel Spirits?
At the moment there seems to be a heavy presence of international military and police almost everywhere in the capital: as I am writing this, two trucks loaded with armed foreign soldiers pass by my veranda and military helicopters are buzzing in the sky above. The morning of my arrival to Timor, Australian troops shot at Timorese youth during trouble in a refugee camp near the airport. Two of them died. Resentment against Australian troops grew further when they shot dead five Timorese during an attempt to capture Alfredo Reinado, a former major and rebel leader, who at the time was hiding in Same south of Dili with a number of armed supporters. Reinado, however, escaped. He is said to have participated in a ceremony with traditional leaders who blessed him with the strength of Dom Boaventura – a leader of a rebellion against the Portuguese in late 1800. Thus, he can easily fool the spiritually unarmed Australian troops attempting to capture him: with the strength of Boa Ventura some believe he can walk right in their midst without being seen. The strength of Boa Ventura is also said to have caused two Black Hawks used in the search for his whereabouts to become suddenly covered in black clouds on an otherwise fine and sunny day. With such limited visibility he was not found. According to one local newspaper an eyewitness tells the story thus: “Actually at that time the sky looked bright and clear, I don’t know where that thick cloud appeared from” said Soares, full of surprise”. Another rumour claims that the Australians have also had losses; they just do not want the Timorese to know. One story thus goes that 12 Australian soldiers were killed and flown home by night. “Don’t you remember that plane that came late at night?” I was asked, “People say that is when they picked up the bodies and returned them to

Fieldwork
My PhD project is part of the research network Re-enchantment of Politics: Religious Dimensions of Democratisation in Asia. My project concerns the relation between religion and politics in the democratisation process of this newly independent nation. With this focus, the present time promises a busy but interesting fieldwork experience; the first presidential election taking place at this very moment, and the parliamentary elections will be held around 2 months later. The current President Xanana Gusmão has been one of the most popular national figures in both the resistance against Indonesia and in independent Timor Leste. He will no longer run for president, so now the battle has begun for his soon empty seat. Although Gusmão had reportedly claimed he would retire to grow pumpkins, it appears he will also take part in the parliament elections with a newly formed political party. The Catholic Church here has traditionally been playing a central role in political life, and I am therefore interested in how it has adjusted to independence. I have thus been conducting a number of interviews with members of the Church. At the same time I have been following the currently journeying image of Our Lady of Sorrows, who is received in various neighbourhoods of the city as a highly honoured guest. In my neighbourhood people spent days cleaning all the streets through which she would pass and all the neighbours collected money for the preparation. A tall, flower decorated bamboo arch was erected under which she was received last Friday. Elsewhere she has been received by anyone from nuns, traditional dancers to cheerleading high school girls. The passing over of the image from one neighbourhood to another at times mean that otherwise rivalling groups will meet. Here nuns have played a role in, at least temporarily, reconciling youth groups so the ceremony would run smoothly. Returning here for the second time has meant that it has been a lot easier to get started with my project. My Timor-family has, again, been ever so helpful. The family has many contacts in the church which they seem only glad to share, and have also assisted me with getting in touch with politicians taking part in the election campaign. This means that I have been able to participate in a number of exciting activities and make quite a few interviews already. My original plan was to go to the remote district where the family is from, but the situation has seemed unstable enough that I did not like the idea of being that far from the airport; within the first week of my stay many left the country on advice from their embassies. Instead, after spending the first weeks in a depressing hotel, I have rented a house two doors from where the family lives, in a neighbourhood which has so far been relatively trouble-free. Now I am crossing my fingers that the situation remains stable enough to carry on with my remaining 9 months of fieldwork. If not exactly clear from the above, it is good to be back in Timor Leste!

For more information on time and place please contact Martin Bech, NIAS, martin.bech@nias.ku.dk.

Elaine Jeffreys’ visit is part of the new NIAS initiative: Nordic Tour: How do we study Asia? which during the coming years is expected to send scholars around the Nordic region and have them share their thoughts on new ways of studying Asia.

Does security have anything to do with culture?
Another major thing we have been working on at NIAS during x-mas and new years is this year’s Second Annual NNC conference which is called Culture and the configuring of security. The conference takes place in November in Höör outside Lund and features a range of interesting and internationally renowned speakers. The intention of the conference – which is by the way also includes a PhD workshop – is to facilitate discussions between macro- and micro perspectives on security. We are hoping to get people from difference scientific disciplines (e.g. international relations, anthropology, political science, economics, law, linguistics) with an interest security related aspects to engage in a cross-disciplinary dialogue and hopefully thereby add new insights to the theoretical framework of security.

I’m betting that it’ll be a heck of a conference and so if you are interested in security and security theory please check out the conference website for more information and registration: www.asiansecurity.niasconferences.dk

// martin

Focus Asia – Young in Asia
Chased by grim weather moving towards Copenhagen from Western Jutland, a small delegation of four Asia interested people, including NIAS project coordinator Martin Bech and myself, escaped over Øresund and headed towards a clear, blue sky over Lund. The occasion was the Focus Asia Documentary Film Festival that showcased ten films which, according to the program, would “reflect the different challenges, choices and dreams of young people in Asia”. Tied together by this theme, the Film Festival was also to expose cultural and social differences in the region, and the locations of the films included rural and urban settings in North Korea, Japan and China, as well as Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India. The Film Festival was hosted by the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, who kindly provided free tickets to the two-day Film Festival. The following is this blogger’s subjective review of the first five films that were showcased on the first day:

Disaster tourists with a social conscience
The first film was The Tsunami Generation, directed by Folke Rydén (2005). It told the story of a few young people, who survived the Tsunami disaster in the Aceh province of Sumatra in 2004, where 200 000 people died and half a million were left homeless. We saw how these young people who had all lost familymembers and their homes in the disaster were trying to regain a life, home and hope in the uncertain, chaotic aftermath of the Tsunami.

Interspersed with the personal stories of the young people we got an image of the new complex situation in Aceh, where different parties with different interests all played an active role in the rebuilding of the province: A group of Acehnese pro-independence leaders based in a Stockholm suburn were busily in contact with GAM guerillas in the mountains above Banda Aceh and the Indonesian government in order to make a peace agreement, which would stop violence, disarm guerillas and give more control over natural resources to the Achenese. Radical religious Indonesian Islamist groups were trying to recruit members from the disaster struck population, and foreign NGO workers, who were portrayed with a good share of ridicule as western disaster tourists with a social conscience echoing the same development discourse, wanted to help the locals, but did not know how to manage the massive chaos and the different ways of doing things in the local context. A middle aged local man, who provided jobs and a shelter for three brothers who lost their father stood out as the one, who was perhaps doing the best job in getting at least some of the young people back on some kind of track towards a livable life.

The movie gave a good impression of the complicated situation in Aceh after the Tsunami, and the characters were portrayed in a sober way: As victims of a terrible disaster, who, however, were also agents of their own destiny, and who with some help will hopefully manage to build up a good new life in a new Aceh.

Not really revealing the challenges, choices and dreams of the next generation
Vietnam: The Next Generation by Sandy Northrop (2003) could have been exchanged with a walk in Lund’s cosy suncovered streets for two reasons. First, approximately halfway through the movie, the screen started to ‘freeze’ for some time only to ‘jump’ five seconds, then ‘freeze’ again, and so on, much in the way a cheap copied Chinese DVD will do it, leaving the viewer completely frustrated. Second, I simply didn’t find the film good, and was not all that disappointed, when it finally proved impossible to play it, and we stopped 2/3 into the film.

It had the aim of “revealing the challenges, choices and dreams” of the post-war Vietnamese generation, who are now “seazing opportunities unimaginable in their parents time” (cited from the programme), and depicted the lives of seven young Vietnamese in order to do that. This was the problem of the film. Because how to depict the choices and dreams of an entire generation through seven persons? I found that purpose far too ambitious and, as it was presented in the beginning with a catchy graphic intro, perhaps also pretentious.

VIETNAM: The Next Generation wanted too much, but was not able to deliver. All the the persons depicted were interesting characters for a documentary, but we never really got close to any of them – neither the success stories nor the tragic destinies. Also, I was not convinced about what they had in common – except being from the same generation. In my opinion there is too large a difference between a male Vietnamese-American MBA graduate doing business in Hanoi and a single-mother landmine victim farming ricefields in the countryside to present them as having anything in common, except that they are residing in the same country. Naturally, those are the social, cultural and economic differences which exist inside many rapidly developing countries in Asia, which is also an important point to make, but then we need to know something about the reasons and consequences of those differences. In my view, the film skated too lightly over its persons and the different themes and problems connected with their lives and would probably have benefitted from a more thorough focus on two or three persons.

A changing view on a changing place
What VIETNAM: The Next Generation didn’t achieve, FLYOVERDELHI by Paolo Favero and Angelo Fontana (2004) did. It aims at offering “a series of snapshots on the life of young middle-class men and women in globalizing New Delhi” (cited from the programme), and adresses a range of issues of importance to this emerging class, as well as to the audience trying to understand their lives, such as tradition vs. modernity, consumption, national pride, love and marriage.

The director Paolo Favero was present, and his introduction to the film and the subsequent discussion definitely had a positive effect on my impression of it. The film is based on Favero’s long-term anthropological fieldwork in Delhi. Introductory, he presented the purpose of the film as an attempt to spark a discussion of representation. He had therefore consequently left out the pictures of the dirty and poor streetside scenes, which, he said, are often the way filmmakers portray India. In fact, I had a hard time recognizing Delhi from when I was there as an after-high school backpacker, but that’s why the film was successful; because it managed to portray a Delhi and India, which most Western backbackers (in India and most other ‘exotic’ countries, probably) definitely don’t want to see. But it’s there and therefore relevant. As Westeners search for ‘traditional India’ - religion, spirituality, the country’s beauty in spite of it’s poverty and so on - these middle-class young people incorporate in their fastpaced lifestyles ‘Western’ ideals and practices such as consumption, entertainment, free love, less moral constraints at the same time as they cherish national pride of “whatever it is” that make up their cultural roots.

Viewed as “a series of snapshots”, the film gave a good impression of the hectic lifestyles and mixed concerns of the middle class people it depicts, because those snapshops are well-chosen, and because there is also left spaces for ‘breaks’ in the rythm, where the informants explain their views and concerns, and where academics analyzes the contemporary Delhi youth culture and identity. The form and content of the film therefore interact to form a coherent story in the sense that the mixed cultural influences of the middle class, their changing concerns, inspiration and impulsive jokes, acts and ideas, is reflected in the tempo, rhytm and filmic travel of the images as they change, move and break. FLYOVERDELHI gives exactly that; a changing overview on a changing place, at the same time as it introduces us to a certain social group who manage their lives in the midst of those changes.

It has to hurt
Cheered up by the funny scenes and fast pace of FLYOVERDELHI, we placed ourselves deep in the seats for the Chinese film To Live is Better than to Die by Weijin Chen (2003). We were to remain there in silence for 59 minutes, and to leave the cinema and head towards the trainstation and rainy Copenhagen in silence. This is a hard film, very good, but hard.

The film is from Wenlou in China’s Henan province, where more than 30% of the villagers got infected with HIV, when they sold their blood in the early 90’s. Weijin Chen stayed in the village for months and zoomed in on a small family, as they experience the terrible consequences of the disease.

The audience is confronted with the tragedy of the family through pictures that are so moving that it is impossible not to be affected by their pain. Sometimes I was thinking that the director is maybe going too close: When the mother lies halfway unconscious on a cart in the family’s small courtyard unable to speak or eat because the disease is already affecting her brain, and the camera films her face, the eyes, the spit in her mouth, the flies on her face. The smallest boy, who sits around naked from the waist down on the dirt floor and his own diorrhea, and his oldest sister (the only one in the family not infected) who is perhaps 7-8 years old and has to take care of her brother - carefully trying to get infected. The father, who does not know when his two youngest children will die, and what will happen to his oldest daugther, when he dies himself.

In retrospect, I think the filming is appropriate. It focuses so close on the faces of this slowly dying family that it hurts the audience. And it has to hurt. Their pain is so much worse and their story is so tragic that it seemed irrelevant to talk about the film, when it finished. People left the cinema silent. There was not much to discuss. This film was simply portraying a family’s tragedy, and if its purpose is to create awareness and empathy, I think it succeeded. Off course it should also promote a discussion of how it could happen that people got HIV from selling their blood, what China is doing to prevent the spread of the disease and how its victims are, and should be treated. But leaving the cinema with the fresh, strong impression of its images in the mind, no one was up for that discussion.

Wal-Mart suing Teddy Bear
We left Lund before the last movie, which we had already seen during the CPH:DOX Film Festival some days before, where the director Micha X. Peled had were present and led a good discussion about the film. To be sure, the film was certainly worth a second view, but To Live is Better than to Die did not leave us eager to go once again into the misery of the less fortunate people of modern China. China Blue (2005) is a very good film, which portrays the backside of globalization and China’s “economic miracle” through the lives of young female migrant workers, called dagongmei, who work in a jeans factory in Guangdong province.

We follow a young girl, Jasmine, on her trip from the village in Sichuan to the factory in Guangdong province, where she is hired to cut and check stiches on blue jeans for a salary at around 0,5 RMB pr. hour (around 0,4 DKK). The boss is portrayed as an overall unsympathetic new rich entrepeneur, who lands huge orders on cheap jeans from foreign importers, and makes the employees work 7 days a week, sometimes up to 17 hours pr. day without overtime pay. Often, salaries are withhold and the workers receive fines if they, for instance, dare to sneak out of the factory at night to have a view of the new city they are living in.

However, this is not only a story of the dagongmei as victims. It also shows their humor, resistance, love and dreams. This view of the dagongmei gives them a human face. They are exploited workers in a system, whose economy is largely built upon their cheap labor, surely, but they are also humans with resources and agency.

China Blue is the second part of a trilogy on globalization. The first one, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town takes a critical look on US supermarket chain Wal-Mart, which also receives an ironic comment in China Blue. When Peled efter the film was asked by a guy in the audience why his film production company is called Teddy Bear Films, he revealed a great critical irony, which made me want to watch that movie: “Can you imagine a headline in the New York Times saying ‘Wal-Mart suing Teddy Bear’”?

Unfortunately, none of us had the time to attend the second day of the filmfestival, which hosted four films. Judging from the programme they also had the potential of making the cinemaaudience leave in silence, but hopefully also a little bit wiser on the conditions of many young people in Asia, who are inextricably caught up in the effects of globalization.

To round up this long entry, I’ll just thank the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University for letting us watch these very different films. Maybe NIAS will be able to help hosting similar events in the future? Finally, thanks for reading, and if you have the chance, go and watch some of these films!

References:

Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University http://www.ace.lu.se/o.o.i.s/6038

Micha X. Peled’s Film Production Company http://www.teddybearfilms.com/

Jasmin is a doctoral candidate at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and a member of the Conflict Transformation Group, and the research project on weak states, based in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In June 2005 she graduated in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. For her MA thesis on civil society in Burma she conducted nearly three months of research in Burma., Thailand, Washington D.C. and on the Thai-Burma border. In addition to this, she has worked as a freelance researcher and consultant for aid agencies focusing on civil society developments inside Burma as well as on the debate on humanitarian aid for the country. Finally, in June 2006 she conducted another field study in Burma that focused on civil society developments in Burma in the sector of education specifically. Given these facts, the empirical data that Jasmin has acquired are unique in quality as well as quantity and therefore I highly welcomed the chance to work with her here at NIAS in Copenhagen. We are co-writing two articles about Burma: the first deals with the negotiation process between the Burmese regime on the one hand and the opposition on the other; the second focuses on the issue of sanctions in the Burmese context.

Using the NIAS library
Jasmin’s current research interests are civil society developments and democratization processes in comparative perspective. Her PhD focuses on the question of what kind of state constitutes what kind of civil society, using Vietnam and Bangladesh as case studies. And even though we have been very busy drafting the two articles she has also had time to do some work on her PhD. I know fore instance that she has sped a lot of time at the NIAS LINC (which is our library and information centre) conducting literature research and found material that she would not otherwise have access to.

As you probably can understand from the above it’s been a very productive stay for both of us. If fact, it is incredible what one can manage in two weeks at NIAS J

For more information about the NIAS SUPRA programme follow this link!

And for those of you interested in the Burma and civil society in Southeast Asia you might want to check out Jasmin’s publications:

Lorch, Jasmin (2006), Civil Society under Authoritarian Rule: The Case of Myanmar, in: SÜDOSTASIEN aktuell 2/2006, pp. 3-37 and
Lorch, Jasmin (2007), Civil Society – A Patch for Burma’s Education System. The Emergence of Civil Society in Areas of State Weakness, in: Mutz, Gerd/ N.N. (Ed.) (forthcoming 2007): Civil Society in Southeast Asia.

Picking the brains of keynote speakers
At their first meeting with the keynote speakers the PhDs presented their projects for the other members in the group. From that point and onwards it was more or less a regular seminar setup in which the participants in the group and the keynote speaker questioned and discussed each of the papers. This exercise continued all afternoon and continued the next morning and lasted until late afternoon where the intensive sessions ended. I know that each group chose different approaches and therefore it would be too much of a report to outline them here. However, generally speaking, it is my feeling that discussions were pretty lively and in most cases helpful for the participants. Especially I believe that it was useful to have a chance to ‘pick the brains’ of the keynotes even though some found it challenging and even provocative that it was not always easy to agree on theoretical and methodological issues. Furthermore, it is my impression that there was use for more senior scholars from different disciplines to facilitate a more nuanced debate in each cluster.

Final day
Thursday 9 November was the last day of the events in Turku. Acknowledging that it had already been a long week we only had scheduled activities in the morning and left the afternoon open for leisure activities.

The morning programme constituted of four presentations: search techniques, publishing, conflict studies in St. Petersburg, and contact to the media.

The first two and the last were regular presentations that related to the life and activity of a full time researcher and were as such interesting and informative. I found it especially encouraging that there were quite a lot of questions during and after each session which might not have been expected after such a long week.

The third presentation was given by Vladimir Kolotov from the University of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, I did not hear much of this presentation, but later was made aware that it was quit interesting and provoked some new thoughts on the defeat of the US army in Vietnam and also presented some rather convincing ideas into why things are not really going the US way today in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. Anyhow, after Vladimir’s presentation I approached him and his colleague Anton Alexeev to ask if they would be interested in hosting a PhD course on Asian security next year which was something we had discussed previously at NIAS. They were very interested and therefore, if all goes well, we will be able to invite Nordic PhD students to St. Petersburg next summer. More on this in future updates.

So, this was it for the Turku conference and PhD workshop. We now have some very important evaluation work to do which among other things include going through the evaluation schemes filled in by the PhDs. Overall, it was a good and productive stay in Turku for sure. Nevertheless, we face some challenges in order to make the next conference/workshop even more appealing and useful. This I am convinced we can do and we have precisely 18 month to do it – the next conference/workshop on theoretical and methodological issues in the study of Asian is scheduled for spring 2008. Hope to see you then!

So before the blog-updates from the events in Turku is concluded I just want to congratulate the Turku team for a job well done! Also, to all the participants: thank you for coming and participating in the discussions!

Thanks for reading! // martin

10 minutes – over and out
To facilitate discussion it had been decided that each presentation (there were 8 and two discussants) should be limited to 10 minutes. This proved quit a challenge for the participants – maybe due to their academic training which does not normally promote few words and conclusions without thorough argumentation. As one of the participants noted during lunch after the event was over: ‘normally I would use ten minutes just to present my self…’ Well, this time it was ’10 minutes – over and out’ and it was fascinating to see how the participants in many cases ended up producing some rather provocative statements which was good for the following discussion.

The cold war is over – let’s look ahead!
This would be a rather extensive report if I was to mention all the aspects that were raised during the roundtable. Also, if would be obsolete since NIAS will disseminate minutes from the event shortly and make them available at the conference website. However, I will mention some of the major conclusions and point towards some of the obvious challenges.

It seems that the concept of ‘area studies’ is dead. It was a product of the cold war and now it makes no sense to stick to the paradigms it established. Nevertheless, disciplines such as ‘Asian studies’ or ‘African studies’ or for the matter ‘European studies’ etc. still have a relevance as academic disciplines and fields of expertise. However, it was also recognised that much of the research carried out in these fields are based in fore instance social sciences disciplines and no longer only in the institutes offering language training, philology, history and cultural understanding. Therefore, the fight between humanities, social sciences and hard sciences is irrelevant today; the different disciplines and their sub-disciplines must develop together. This will present a good basis for looking ahead and could be taken as a sign that the ‘cold war logic’ between the two sides is put away.

Speak out!
During presentations and discussions it was suggested that research projects would benefit from being problem oriented rather then just topical. Many researchers and PhD students are already working problem oriented and it seems to be a good way of making research projects and their findings relevant in a larger context. Also, it was suggested that comparative studies – especially in this so-called time of globalization – is a discipline that many research projects can benefit from. Comparative perspectives should be implemented in relation to specific subjects as well as on regional and trans-regional levels.

It was also suggested that Asian studies specialists should enter larger debates in society at large in order to demonstrate the value of Asian studies. Likewise there seem to be an ‘open space’ for engaging in international issues such as the Iraq war by incorporating Asian dimensions in the international debate. Speak out!

ACRSN is on the right track but new initiatives are needed
The cluster organization adopted by the ACRSN was widely acknowledged as a good idea and I hope this means that we will see some more activities in each cluster. However, we still need to have a clear format for the format, activities and functionality of each cluster and ACRSN in general.

One very concrete thing that was brought up was a network of co-supervisors. This is something that we have discussed previously but will now place increase attention on in order to get a framework up and running.

Finally, the conference and the roundtable showed clearly that there is a lot of innovation and exciting developments in the environments throughout the region. For these activities to be properly communicated it is important that NIAS and the ACRSN secretariat (me is continuously informed, so please keep the information flowing!

Next update will be on the PhD course it self.

Thanks for reading! // martin