Skip to main content

China and the World Seminar Series

This seminar series brings together leading academics to discuss issues of public policy research across China and other countries.

These seminars are open to LSE staff and students only.

Subversive Circulation: Songs of the “Streets and Alleyways” in urban Jiangnan

Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 22 October 2025

Abstract: This seminar examines the commoner verse (folksongs, in other words) that pervaded the urban spaces of 16th and 17th century Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing. It uses these sung poems, some of which have been recorded and continue to be sung in variant forms today, to present an alternative view of where politically worthy speech might have been situated in premodern China. Although later 20th and 21st century examinations of folksongs in China tended to reproduce the same problematic binaries driving European folksong collecting, such as urban/rural and folk/elite, these early modern songs broke through north/south, urban/rural, and public/private divides. In doing so, their circulation challenges elite dominance of two interrelated practices meant to induce moral and political regulation: “literature” (wen) and “custom” (fengsu). By turns boisterous, sexy, and mournful, the songs coming out of commoner mouths disrupted the harmonious workings of an ideal city, and brought to elite attention those features of commoner life they found at odds with ritual orthodoxy. The conclusion of my talk gestures toward the contemporary relevance of my findings, noting Xi Jinping’s own interest in the folksongs of this region and their relationship to his “Global Civilization Initiative.”

Speaker: Leigh Jenco (Department of Government. LSE)

Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).

Book your place to attend this seminar here.

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Lunch and refreshments will be served before the seminar.

Embedded networks of Chinese private capital internationalisation

Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 3 December 2025

Abstract: China-Africa economic engagement has entered a new phase centred around the internationalisation of private capital. Private businesses are not only seemingly ubiquitous in African markets, but also deeply embedded in the African political economies in which they operate. This paper foregrounds the centrality of embeddedness to firm internationalisation by introducing a typology of embedded networks – defined as the configurations of firms’ (in)formal linkages with different actors in a particular operational context. It outlines how the modalities of Chinese private capital internationalisation are mediated by different network configurations and how these translate in varied development outcomes.

Speaker: Elisa Gambino (Global Development Institute University of Manchester, UK)

Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy)

Book your place to attend the seminar here.

This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.

Lunch and refreshments will be served before the seminar.

Past Seminars