Databite No. 120: Chinese Tech: The New Global Map | Logic Magazine

How are data technologies affecting Chinese society and politics—and how is Chinese tech affecting the rest of the world? Join us on May 29 for this panel featuring Christina Larson, Fei Liu, and Jing Tsu in conversation with Julian Gewirtz, co-editor of Logic Magazine’s China Issue. The discussion will cover the long history of the Chinese government’s uses and misuses of information technology and the unlikely viral paths of memes across the Pacific. A reception will follow with copies of Logic’s latest issue: China available for purchase.

5:30pm Doors open.

6-7pm Public talk + Q&A.

7-8pm Magazine sale and reception: snacks and sips provided.

RSVP is required to attend. Watch the live stream here.

About the Panelists

Christina Larson is an award-winning foreign correspondent and science & technology journalist. She focuses on technology in China and on global environmental issues. Now Global Science & Environment Correspondent for the Associated Press, previously she was a Beijing-based China technology reporter for Bloomberg and China correspondent for Science magazine. She has written about everything from animal intelligence to artificial intelligence — and using science to solve historical mysteries. In 2016, Christina was awarded the Overseas Press Club of America’s Morton Frank Award for “best magazine international business news reporting,” for a Foreign Policy profile of a young Chinese scientist-turned-entrepreneur.

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.

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Data & Society's “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.

Questions about Databite No. 120? Contact events(at)datasociety.net.