Based on in-depth interviews with thirteen middle-class mothers in Shanghai, this lecture explores the social construction of the ideal mother in metropolitan China. It reveals that middle-class women face the conflict between their own perception of the ideal status of being a mother and motherhood expected by the family and the society. Whereas the middle-class mothers are keen in seeking a delicate balance between childrearing and their own work and life, their perception of good motherhood is shaped both by gender division within family and the dominant motherhood ideology outside the family. While the middle-class mothers tend to be alert to the media discourse of ‘super-moms’, their self-assessment of whether they are good mothers reflects their deliberate reflection of motherhood and internalization of the dominant repertoire of motherhood. This paper reveals the emergence of ‘knowledge and emotion intensitve motherhood’ in urban China. Nevertheless, it is worth noting how women claim their autonomy in their practice of motherhood.

ChinaTalks Lecture: Motherhood in Urban China - Q&A

ChinaTalks lecture on the emergence of Sino-American strategic competition in the Arctic by PhD Marc Lanteigne, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tromsø. 

The Arctic has begun to assume a higher place on the US security agenda, largely prompted by fears of being leverages out of the region by growing China-Russia cooperation in the far north. This situation, along with deepening Chinese economic interests in the Arctic, has led to the question of whether the Arctic Ocean is transforming from an area of ‘high north, low tension’ and a milieu of exceptionalism to one being marked by zero-sum thinking and more overt great power competition for regional influence.

ChinaTalks Lectures - Cold Game 2020 (Marc Lanteigne) Q&A

ChinaTalks lecture on the emergence of Sino-American strategic competition in the Arctic by PhD Marc Lanteigne, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tromsø.

The Arctic has begun to assume a higher place on the US security agenda, largely prompted by fears of being leverages out of the region by growing China-Russia cooperation in the far north. This situation, along with deepening Chinese economic interests in the Arctic, has led to the question of whether the Arctic Ocean is transforming from an area of ‘high north, low tension’ and a milieu of exceptionalism to one being marked by zero-sum thinking and more overt great power competition for regional influence.

ChinaTalks Lecture - Cold Games 2020 (Marc Lanteigne) Full Version

ChinaTalks Lecture - Cold Games 2020 (Marc Lanteigne) Digested Version

ChinaTalk Lecture about ritual traditions in China by Professor Michael Puett from Harvard University, Professor of Chinese history. 
Puett argues that we tend to believe that rituals are things that told people what to do in traditional societies, and rituals would socialise people into certain ways of being. On the contrary we tend to think that being sincere and authentic gives us freedom.
Puett challenges the way rituals are perceived by proposing the option that we have been misreading much of the religious history of humanity by taking ritual statements as belief statements. Furthermore he argues that if we have been misreading traditional cultures, perhaps we are misreading what came after, the so-called modern culture.

ThinkChina