How are data technologies affecting Chinese society and politics—and how is Chinese tech affecting the rest of the world? This panel features Fei Liu and Jing Tsu in conversation with Julian Gewirtz, co-editor of Logic Magazine’s China Issue.
The discussion covers the long history of the Chinese government’s uses and misuses of information technology and the unlikely viral paths of memes across the Pacific.
Fei Liu (TRYTOBEGOOD) is a designer, artist, educator, and writer investigating the opposing realities of our techno-social everyday. Her work questions how digital interfaces and networked technologies construct new futures, facilitate and fragment intimacy, and create opportunities while maintaining inequality. Currently Fei is exploring robotics and the automation of care as an artist-in-residence at NOKIA Bell Lab’s Experiments in Art and Technology program. In 2014, Fei received an MFA from Parson’s Design and Technology, where she currently teaches. Previous residencies include researcher-in-residence at NEW INC and the Digital Solitude fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
Jing Tsu is a literary scholar and cultural historian of modern China at Yale University. She is the first person to be tenured and become Professor of Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale, and author of four books (two co-edited). She is currently writing a new book about how China entered the IT era, The Kingdom of Characters: Language Wars and China’s Rise to Global Power, a remarkable tale that uncovers what happened to the Chinese script in the age of the Western alphabet (under contract with Riverhead at Penguin Random House).
Julian Gewirtz is an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and lecturer on History at Harvard University. He is the author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2017). His research has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, The American Scholar, and Foreign Affairs, and his poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and PEN America. He is a co-editor of the Logic China issue.