Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education

2026-04-01 - 2026-06-30

Nicholas Bartlett (Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, Barnard College, Columbia University)

Online Speech (the meeting link will be sent to you by email after registration)

Event Title
Toward an Understanding of “Release” (Fangkai): Labor, Minerals, and the Transformation of a Mountain Region in China's Long 1980s

Date & Time: May 28, 2026 (Thu.) 20:00-22:00 (GMT+8, Taiwan Time)
Format：Online Speech (the meeting link will be sent to you by email after registration)

Speaker: Nicholas Bartlett (Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, Barnard College, Columbia University)
Moderator: I-Yi Hsieh（Assistant Prof., Institute of Visual Studies, Taiwan Yang Ming Chiao Tung University; ICCS-Subproject IV Principal Investigator）

Registration Link：https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXItxnLDsM4hex5ZL8a7ZiaQ7XJxYLTJBJezefpBrHJ9skoQ/viewform
Please complete the registration before May 26th.

* The event will be conducted in English.

Abstract:
In 1985, Hu Yaobang gave a speech in Gejiu urging local officials to follow national efforts to “release” nearby minerals. Tens of thousands of workers who had previously been excluded from the industry subsequently flocked to the nearby mountains to aid in extraction efforts. Tin outputs surged over the next decade. This essay explores the opening of the mining sector in this period by attending to how competition among different groups gave new meanings to the government's categories of Big and Small. 
Common since the early 1980s, these designations could refer to the quality of ore in the earth's crust, the scale of extraction efforts, as well as the types of organizations authorized to mine. Reforming this sector in the mountains of southern Yunnan required local actors to pioneer new ways of both recruiting and repelling workers of various backgrounds, foster mountainside relationships between long-standing SOE miners and newcomers, and innovate extraction practices that further transformed state, collective, and privately run organizations. Crucial debates about scale, government oversight, hierarchies of labor, ownership, the fate of Maoist infrastructures, and, most fundamentally, if and how the “masses” (qunzhong) could be integrated into the opening economy came to be adjudicated on and in the mountains around Gejiu.  This talk will offer a discussion of the broader context within which I undertook this research and a critical assessment of the legacies of this Reform era set of experiments.

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Organizer

Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education
International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Sub-Project Ⅳ: Environmental Crises and Multi-species Justice in the 21st Century: Toward Decolonization Beyond the Human

Co-organizer
Institute of Visual Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University