Please join us for a conversation about China’s 99%, in partnership with the Dissent magazine.

Wednesday, May 22, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
The New School
55 W 13th St., 2nd Fl. (Dorothy Hirshon Suite)
New York, NY 10011

The latest issue of Dissent magazine offers a behind-the-headlines view of China, focusing on how those belonging to the country’s laobaixing (“the 99%”) have been responding to complex and challenging times. Edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the collection of articles overturns received wisdom in the U.S. about dissent within China—dissent about gender, labor, youth, and nationalism. Join us for an in-depth conversation about emerging currents of dissent in China.

Participants:

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine and a regular contributor to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and journals of opinion. He is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010), an updated edition of which will appear in June, and co-editor (with Angilee Shah) of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, 2012).

Ross Perlin is a writer and linguist based in Brooklyn. He has written on language, labor, and China for publications large and small. His first book, published in 2011, was Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham was editor of The China Beat from 2010 to 2012, and her writing has appeared at Forbes.com, Dissent, the Ms. Magazine blog, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Time Asia. She was the 2011-2012 ChinaFile Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York and is currently a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Megan Shank is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and translator of Chinese language materials who is co-editor of the Asia Section of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work has appeared in periodicals such as Ms., Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and Dissent, and is also featured in the books Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women (2010) and Chinese Characters (2012).

Mark Frazier is Professor of Politics and Co-Academic Director of the India China Institute. His research focus is on labor and social policies in China, and more broadly on state-society relations, urban politics, inequality, and public policy. He is the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press 2010) and The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press 2002).