Concerned Asian Scholars, 55 Years Later: A Symposium

Friday, May 10 | 9am - 6:20pm
1010 Weiser Hall

The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) was founded in 1968 in the wake of the US aggression in Vietnam. Fifty-five years later, what lessons might be drawn from CCAS' efforts to practice anti-imperialist research? Join us for a full day of intergenerational conversations among the founding and early members of CCAS, editors of critical Asian studies journals, and younger scholars working on Asia. We will discuss the place of politically committed scholarship in the academy and the role of the public intellectual in our society, all in order to ask: What does it mean to be a scholar concerned about Asia in the US today?

Cosponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, Nam Center for Korean Studies, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Center for South Asian Studies, Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

Tani Barlow

George & Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities
Rice University

Tani Barlow graduated from San Francisco State College (1975) and received her doctoral degree in History at University of California, Davis (1985). She has worked at University of Missouri, Columbia; San Francisco State University; University of Washington, Seattle and Rice University. She is the author of two major monographs, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004) and In the Event of Women (2022) both under Duke University imprint. Barlow was founding senior editor of positions journal between 1992 and 2022. She is a Visiting Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, where she is working on a manuscript under the current title of The Material Life of Society.

Bruce Cumings

Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History
University of Chicago

Bruce Cumings received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and taught modern Korean history, international history, and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago from 1987 until he retired in 2023. He was chair of the History Department from 2007 to 2014. He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton,1981, 1990), War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed. 2005), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations (Duke, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2004), co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil (New Press, 2005), and author of Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (Yale, 2009). The Random House Modern Library published his book, The Korean War: A History, on the war’s 60th anniversary in 2010.

Joseph Esherick

Professor Emeritus of History
University of California at San Diego

Joseph W. Esherick received his B.A. from Harvard in 1964 and his PhD from Berkeley in 1971. His scholarship has focused on the last years of the Qing dynasty and the social and political transformation of modern China. His dissertation and first monograph, Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei explored the social background of China’s republican revolution. His book on The Origins of the Boxer Uprising won the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. Ancestral Leaves explored the tumultuous history of nineteenth and twentieth-century China through the lives of successive generations of one family. His new monograph, Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China, is a study of the founding of the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region of northwest China. In edited volumes, Esherick has analyzed Chinese local elites, the transformation of Chinese cities, American policy toward China during World War II, the Cultural Revolution, and the transition from empire to nation in comparative perspective, and the year 1943 in China. After forty years of teaching at the University of Oregon and the University of California at San Diego, Esherick retired in 2012 and now lives in Berkeley, California.

Tom Fenton

Editor emeritus, Critical Asian Studies

Tom Fenton, Born in Jamaica, Queens (NYC), holds a B.A. in Philosophy, an M.A. in Theology, and an M.Div. degree. With his wife, Mary J. Heffron, Tom has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Oakland, CA, and Cedar, MI (the latter location being the official address of BCAS). They have one son, Michael, who is deputy principal violist with the Badische Stateskapelle in Karlsruhe, German. From 1997 to the end of 2016, Tom edited Critical Asian Studies (formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars). He now manages administrative affairs for BCAS and has edited and produced more than 70 independently published books on topics as varied as the physics of baseball, male supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church, and women in the resistance struggle in Guatemala.

Tom Grunfeld

SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of East Asian studies
The State University of New York

A. Tom Grunfeld is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at SUNY/Empire State College. He taught Modern East Asian History, the history of Tibet and the history of the US wars in Indochina. He has been in the region many times since his first foray in 1966. His first trip to China was in 1977 and Vietnam in 1991. He has published widely including books, chapters in edited books and articles in both peer-reviewed journals as well as more general ones. He co-authored a book on the US war in Vietnam.

Laura Hein

Harold H. and Virginia Professor of Japanese History
Northwestern University

Laura Hein is the Harold H. and Virginia Professor of Japanese History at Northwestern University. A recent book, Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after World War II, London: Bloomsbury Press and a Weatherhead Institute Imprint book, 2018, just came out in Japanese as 『ポスト・ファシスムの日本――戦後鎌倉の政治文化』, Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin Press, 2023. It focuses on the late 1940s-1970s efforts to build a more democratic society by individuals who had just survived an era of what they called fascism. When I started working on it, many people I spoke to considered the question arcane. I am sorry to say that this is no longer my experience in either the USA or Japan.

Katsuya Hirano

Associate Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Katsuya Hirano teaches history at UCLA. He is the author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern and modern Japan, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, settler colonialism, and critical theory, including the most recent book chapter “The Foundational Violence of Sovereignty: The Racist Logic of Rescuing the Ainu” (A New Approach to Global Studies from the Perspectives of Small Nations). His forthcoming book, titled Settler Colonial Dispossession (University of California Press), examines the intersection of racism, capitalism, and sovereignty in the settler colonization of Ainu Mosir. He is also an associate editor of positions (Duke University Press).

Suzy Kim

Professor of Korean History
Rutgers University

Suzy Kim is a historian and author of Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023), and Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. She is senior editor of positions: Asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History. As a public scholar, she has been an advocate for social justice and peace in Korea as a founding member of Women Cross DMZ.

Fabio Lanza

Professor of Modern Chinese History
University of Arizona

Fabio Lanza is professor of Modern Chinese History in the departments of History and East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010) and The End of Concern: Maoism, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017).

Paul Pickowicz

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Chinese Studies
University of California, San Diego

Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and inaugural holder of the UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History. His books (authored, coauthored, and coedited) include Marxist Literary Thought in China (1981), Unofficial China (1989), Chinese Village, Socialist State (1992, winner of the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies), New Chinese Cinemas (1994), Popular China (2002), Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (2005), From Underground to Independent (2006), The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (2006), Dilemmas of Victory (2007), China on the Margins (2010), Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China (2011), China on Film (2012), Restless China (2013), Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013) Filming the Everyday (2017), China Tripping (2019), A Sensational Encounter with High Socialist China (2019), and Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2020). He has won three distinguished teaching awards: UC San Diego Alumni Association (1998), Chancellor’s Associates (2009), and Academic Senate (2003). He has been invited to teach his famous course on the history of Chinese silent cinema at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Heidelberg, and Renmin University (Beijing). In 2012 he taught the same course in Chinese at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Pickowicz has graduated 37 PhD students, with 4 more currently in the pipeline. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, National University of Singapore, University of Edinburgh, University of Heidelberg, East China Normal University, City University of Hong Kong, Ecole Normale Superieure (Lyon, France), Hong Kong Institute of Education, and Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is associate producer of the documentary films China in Revolution, 1911-1949 (1989) and The Mao Years, 1949-1976 (1994). Pickowicz was honored by the German government in 2016 when it presented him with a Humboldt Research Award for lifetime accomplishments in research and teaching.

Gareth Porter

Independent investigative journalist and historian

Gareth Porter was a Ph.D candidate  at Cornell in Southeast Asia studies  from 1968 to 1975, specializing in the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle with French and U.S. imperialism. He spent nearly 15 months in South Vietnam in two trips in summer 1968 and 1971, and during the latter year, while doing research on the PhD dissertation, he was Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International.  He was the Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars at Cornell from 1969 through 1971.  From 1973 through 1976, he was Co-Director of the Indochina Resource Center and was actively involved in 1974-75 in helping to draft and gain support in Congress for legislation aimed at finally ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. His first book, A Peace Denied, on the Paris Peace Agreement, was published in 1975. He was on the staff of the Congressional Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia in 1976.

He was on the faculty of City College of New York in 1982-83 and at American University from 1985 to 1989. In 1991 he was co-author of the first college textbook on global environmental politics, and from 1991 through 2005, he was the director of the International Program for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and then an independent contractor to the World Wildlife Fund, OECD, the United Nations Environment Program and the Global Environment Facility. In 2005, his book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam was published.

Since 2005 to 2017 he published analyses and investigative reporting for Inter Press Service, as an independent journalist on U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and U.S. conflict with Iran.  He was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for investigative journalism, given in honor of the respected war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn. Since 2017, he has written investigative reports for several independent news outlets, including Truthout, Consortium News and The Grayzone.

Moss Roberts

Professor of East Asian Studies
New York University

PhD Columbia U 1966; Professor at Univ of Miami (1966-68); NYU since 1968. Published annotated translations of Chinese classics (Three Kingdoms, Dao de jing, Analects), a four-volume anti-imperialist history Twilight of the Empires: a Memoir, Journey to the East, various articles on current Asian political issues, recently collected in Bad Karma.

Mark Selden

Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program
Cornell University

Emeritus Professor of Sociology and History
State University of New York at Binghamton

I grew up in Brooklyn, majored in American Studies at Amherst and completed a PhD at Yale in Modern Chinese history. I taught Chinese and international history at Washington University in St. Louis from 1967-79. I was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars in Philadelphia in 1968, a foot-soldier at the time in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and sought to build CCAS at universities with Asian Studies programs.

My trips to Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, North Carolina, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Hong Kong and Tokyo helped jumpstart CCAS chapters. Progressive revolts at the time led to similar publications and groups including the Review of Radical Political Economics, the Insurgent Sociologist, the Radical History Review, and Science for the People, which challenged scholarly norms across the social sciences, humanities and sciences. International contacts were also made involving The Journal of Contemporary Asia (London), and Ampo (Tokyo).

For thirty years I was an editorial board member -- and for a decade the editor --, of The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and briefly its successor Critical Asian Studies. In 1969 and 1970 I helped organize a summer seminar at Harvard involving CCAS activists who found inspiration in meeting with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young, and Daniel Ellsberg. Participants came from campuses throughout the US and beyond to critically reassess Asian Studies scholarship and premises resulting in some early contributions to BCAS and led to the publication in 1971 of America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations (one of a series of Pantheon volumes presenting new approaches in multiple fields). In 1972 I joined the second CCAS China trip, having worked to establish US-China diplomatic relations.

From 1979-2012 I taught sociology and world social change at the State University of New York-Binghamton (the epicenter of World System Studies associated with the Braudel Center). In 2002 I became the founding editor of the pioneering electronic Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, which I edited for two decades until 2023. Since 2013 I have worked in New York City as a research associate at Cornell and Columbia.

My research has encompassed the modern and contemporary geopolitics, political economy and history of China, Japan and the Asia-Pacific, ranging across themes of war and revolution, empire, nationalism, inequality, development, the environment, precarity, social movements, and regional and world social change. My major books, many of them coauthored with CCAS authors, include The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China ; Chinese Village, Socialist State; Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance; The Resurgence of East Asia: 500-, 150- and 50-Year Perspectives; and The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Recent publications are Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers (2022) and A Chinese Rebel Beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia (2023). Over the last half century I have also edited numerous book series at Rowman & Littlefield, Routledge, M.E. Sharpe, and Lexington publishers. My homepage is: markselden.info.

Ardeth Thawnghmung

Professor of Political Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell

Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung is Professor of Political Science Department at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her areas of specialization are on Myanmar/Southeast Asian politics, ethnic politics, political violence, and political economy. She has written numerous books and articles on ethnic politics and political economy in Myanmar, including her most recent co- authored book with Jacques Bertrand and Alex Pelletier on Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2022) and her single-authored book Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Ardeth served as Political Science Department Chair from 2013 to 2021, interim Director for Peace and Conflict Studies Program in 2020-21 academic year. She has received fellowships and research grants from International Peace Research Association Foundation (2021-2022), Fulbright Public Policy Fellow (2020-2021), Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (2010-2011), Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, East West Center Washington DC, and Southeast Asian Institute Singapore. She is also a recipient of 2007 Outstanding Teacher of College of Arts and Humanities at UMass Lowell.

Martha Winnacker

Independent Policy and Law Professional

Martha Winnacker joined CCAS in spring 1968 as a first-year graduate student. in Chinese History at Berkeley, where she studied from 1967 to 1970, obtaining a Master’s degree in 1968. She then accompanied her husband to spend a year-and-a-half at the East Asia Seminar of the Free University of Berlin followed by three years in Tokyo, where she was active in the Tokyo chapter. Returning to Berkeley in the final weeks of the Vietnam war, she volunteered at the Indochina Resource Center and was recruited to join its staff a year later. She remained at the Center, renamed Southeast Asia Resource Center in the postwar period, until it closed in 1984. She then spent three years as the editor of the California Historical Society’s journal California History followed by twelve years at the University of California Office of the President where she served first as the grants administrator for the Pacific Rim Research Program and Humanities Research Program and later as a policy analyst for copyright, research publication policy, and digital communications policy. In 2000, she entered law school at Berkeley, intending to specialize in intellectual property but finding other interests. After graduating and passing the California Bar exam in 2003, she clerked on the Alaska Court of Appeals in 2003-2004 and worked as an attorney for public defender and legal aid agencies from 2005 through 2007. She returned to UC as executive director for the UC-wide Academic Senate from 2008 to 2014. Since her retirement in 2014, she has volunteered as an attorney with groups working on reform of the criminal justice and child welfare systems in California.

CCAS was my throughline from 1968, when I joined as a first-year graduate student, through 1975, when I returned to Berkeley from a year-and-a-half in West Berlin and three years in Tokyo to pursue a non-academic career. I am still a member of the board of directors for Critical Asian Studies, the 21^st century successor to the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.

As a graduate student in Berkeley, where protests and violent police responses peaked when a helicopter sprayed CS gas on a crowd, CCAS was an intellectual and political community. From different disciplines and focused on different regions, we created a voice grounded in our shared knowledge of Asia, growing understanding of what the United States was doing and had done there, and our questions about whether our field’s dominant academic frameworks made its leading scholars unwilling or unable to oppose the war. We focused our research and writing to challenge assumptions and explore new analytical tools. Sometimes we went public, leafletting large lecture classes taught by distinguished scholars or marching in large demonstrations with signs identifying ourselves as CCAS. During the helicopter episode, we were midway through an outdoor press conference for members who had met with representatives of the National Liberation Front and Provisional Revolutionary Government in Stockholm. A fellow CCAS member made the introductions that resulted in my husband and me leaving Berkeley in 1970 to accept a junior faculty appointment for him at the East Asian Seminar of the Free University in West Berlin, where students had secured a controlling vote in the faculty selection process.

CCAS was central when we moved on to Tokyo in 1972. The chapter included American graduate students, visiting scholars, missionaries, and journalists. In addition to regular meetings and occasional gathering of signatures from American residents in Japan on letters to the US Embassy to protest actions like the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, we cooperated with Japanese peace activists in Beheiren (Vietnam Peace Alliance). Some of us volunteered as English copy-editors, researchers, and informal consultants at Ampo, an international journal published in English by Japanese in solidarity with peace and anti-imperialist movements throughout Asia. After the Hong Kong chapter pioneered academic travel to China in 1971, I was selected to join a proposed third trip that didn’t happen.

On our return to Berkeley in the last days of the war in March 1975, a CCAS colleague from Tokyo, a journalist with deep knowledge of Vietnam, introduced me to the Indochina Resource Center. I volunteered there as the small staff scrambled to respond to a flood of requests for information and insight. I was later recruited to become part of the staff that would carry the Center into a new era when its founders needed to move on. I worked there until it closed in 1984.