A book talk with Chris Miller, Assoc. Professor of International History, Fletcher School, Tufts University

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

If you register for and attend a Burkle Center virtual event, you will not be seen or heard via video or audio. We will be live-streaming this event on the Burkle Center’s YouTube page. The YouTube livestream will be available below at the start of the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

"If you care about technology, or America’s future prosperity, or its continuing security, this is a book you have to read.”
—Lawrence H. Summers, 71st U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University

You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves—runs on chips, including cars, smartphones, the stock market, even the electric grid. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower, but America’s edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by players in Taiwan, Korea, and Europe taking over manufacturing. Now, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America’s military superiority and economic prosperity.

Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the technology works and why it’s so important, recounting the fascinating events that led to the United States perfecting the chip design, and to America’s victory in the Cold War by using faster chips to render the Soviet Union’s arsenal of precision-guided weapons obsolete. But lately, America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, leading to a worldwide chip shortage and a new war brewing with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.

Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.

ORDER THE BOOK

Order Chip War：The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology from Simon & Schuster.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Miller is Associate Professor of International History at The Fletcher School and author of Chip War：The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, a geopolitical history of the computer chip. He is the author of three other books on history and international affairs. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He received his PhD and MA from Yale University and his BA in history from Harvard University. For more information, see www.christophermiller.net.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Leslie Johns is a professor of political science and law at UCLA. She is also Associate Director of the Burkle Center for International Relations.

Her research focuses on international law, organizations, and political economy.

In 2022, Cambridge University Press published her newest book, Politics and International Law：Making, Breaking, and Upholding Global Rules. You can access related news stories on the book's Twitter account: @PoliticsIntlLaw

Her work appears in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Journal of Politics. Her first book–Strengthening International Courts：The Hidden Costs of Legalization–was published in 2015 by the University of Michigan Press. She received the Michael Wallerstein Award for political economy in 2017.

She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former research fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University（2012-2013 and 2021-2022）.

Sponsor（s）: Burkle Center for International Relations, Center for Chinese Studies, Political Science, UCLA Law, Institute for Technology, Law and Policy

Monday, November 28, 2022
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Live via Zoom

Register for Zoom link here

The Baltimore tycoon and art collector William Walters（1820-1894）found himself in the center of a publicity storm after he purchased the “peach blossom vase,” a piece of eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain in copper red glaze, from the auction of late Mary Morgan’s collection on March 8, 1886. He paid $18,000 for the vase and made it the most expensive Chinese porcelain in the country, but it left a permanent scar on the millionaire’s reputation. For several years the public debated over the actual value of the artifact and Walters’s judgment. As a result, the “peach blossom vase” was never featured in the Walters gallery, and its signature wooden stand was removed from the illustration of the vase in the catalogue of the Walters collection published in 1899.
This lecture uses the story of the peach blossom vase to contextualize the establishment and decline of the appreciation of China’s copper red glazed porcelains in the late nineteenth century. It first outlines the gendered dimension of ceramic collecting in the West, which began as an affluent women’s pastime in the seventeenth century and gradually evolved into an intellectual practice suitable for a gentleman in the nineteenth century. The transition curiously overlaps with the change of collecting taste from blue-and-white to monochrome porcelains. Among the various colors, copper red glaze stood out as a particularly gendered one for its rich association with a woman’s skin and makeup. As a result, regardless of its original function as stationary on a Chinese gentleman's desk, the “peach blossom vase” was assigned a new, feminine identity due to its color and female owner. The feminine label was deeply fixed into the public's minds that even a reputable male collector like William Walters had to concede. A series of glass wares and cosmetic products inspired by this vase in the following years that catered to female consumers further evidenced such gendered perception. Although the sensation of copper red glazed ware was short-lived, it is a critical example of the complex gender and racial factors in the historiography of Asian art collecting in the Gilded Age.

About the speaker:
Ying-chen Peng studies the gendered dimension of the making, moving, and collecting of objects and space through the global and intersectional lens. Before joining the American University, she worked at the National Palace Museum and the Academia Sinica, both in Taiwan, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a pre-doctoral research fellow and received her Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2014. Peng published extensively on imperial women’s engagement in late Qing court art. Her forthcoming book, Artful Subversion：Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making, will be published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2023. Currently, she is conducting research for two book-length projects. One investigates the gendered connoisseurship of Chinese porcelain in nineteenth-century U.S. and England. The other examines the history of jeans and the garment’s influence on the representation of femininity and masculinity across East Asia in the twentieth century.

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies