Speaker: Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, March 28, 2025 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building examines how cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities are related to China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. The representations of ethnic minorities, created by both Han and non-Han filmmakers, are grasped as part of an ecosystem in which the cultures, values, and life practices of non-Han ethnic minorities are closely entwined with environmental issues and politics. These representations became a site in which state authorities, Han and non-Han communities, and foreign agencies compete and interact under the context of building and imagining the Chinese nation-state.
Kwai-Cheung Lo is Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. His latest publications include Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and the edited volume Entangled Waterscapes in Asia (Brill, 2025).
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Speakers: Wang Hui (汪晖), Professor in the Department of Chinese and Department of History, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University Huang Ping (黃平), Director of the Centre for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Executive Vice President of the Chinese Institute of Hong Kong (a CASS think tank based in the SAR) Wang Pei (汪沛), Assistant Professor, History and Culture Program, School of Chinese, HKU Daniel Vukovich (胡德), Professor (cultural studies) and Chair of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025 Time: 4:00–6:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This symposium-discussion will turn on recent work by Wang Hui (汪晖) of Tsinghua University, who is visiting HKU as a Distinguished Professor in the School of Chinese and as an external, advisory board member for CHAGS. We’ll discuss his recent work on politics, economics, history, and ‘theory’ as well as some of the many issues it (along with others’ work) raises for the analysis of modern and contemporary China from a global perspective. Professor Wang’s work, itself globally recognized and debated, lies at the heart of the four basic research themes of our research hub: The Conjuncture: The World in/and China; Tradition and Contemporary China; Borders, Identities, Citizens; and Global Culture (culture defined broadly, as ‘thought’ or 文化 or 人文). More specifically, his work helps us think through the ‘ends’ of revolution as well as empire; of politics and related theory after the 1990s (and the 20th century); of the new and old global conjuncture (including hot and cold wars); the fate of political representation; and the challenge of producing knowledge about ‘China and the world’ whilst outflanking a too-easy universalism or exceptionalism.
Selected texts and bios are available beforehand for discussion and dialogue at [https://csgchku.wordpress.com/2024/12/31/selected-texts-by-wang-hui/]. Participants are expected to have read some or all of them (or related works). The symposium will begin with some remarks from Professor Wang followed by brief commentaries from Professor Vukovich, Professor Huang Ping (黃平), Professor Wang Pei (汪沛), and others.
This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub, the School of Chinese, and the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.
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Their friendship was a bond forged in The University of Hong Kong. Fatima Mohideen and Eileen Chang were inseparable friends at the height of Chang’s early career in Shanghai. Vividly portrayed and rechristened by Chang as Yanying (炎樱), the vivacious Fatima became a character, as well as a media personality, who was just as, if not more captivating than any of Chang’s renowned fictional characters. However, this changed when they grew apart after moving to the US. Fatima vanished from Chang’s writings, like a character the writer had abandoned. Whatever happened to Fatima? Through meticulous investigation, researcher Lim Fong Wei continued Fatima’s “legend” and found a satisfying closure for one of Chang’s most beloved “characters”.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 林方偉，新加坡《聯合早報》高級資深記者，業餘文學偵探（“張探社探長”）、譯者、編者、小說作者與編劇，近年鉤沉、挖掘張愛玲與劉以鬯不為人知的事蹟。自2019年起，解碼一系列張愛玲母親黃逸梵的事蹟後，“張探社”便蒸蒸日上。張愛玲故事未完——完不了。
Lim Fong Wei is a senior correspondent at Singapore’s national Chinese newspaper Lianhe Zaobao. He is also a translator, editor, fiction and screenplay writer, and a literary sleuth most interested in the lives and works of Eileen Chang and Liu Yichang, particularly seen through the lens of Malaya. In 2019, his “sleuthing” achieved a breakthrough after a series of discovery of Chang’s mother, Yvonne Whang’s late years in Malaya and the UK.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Speaker:Yang Yao (姚洋), Liberal Arts Chair Professor at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University
Moderator:Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, March 21, 2025 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (4.30), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Political meritocracy guided China’s bureaucratic monarchy in the past and is still the main institution for the CCP’s personnel management today. The existing studies resort to history to defend it. In this talk, Professor Yang Yao, based on his book Good Governance: Insights from the Confucian State (coauthored with Zizhong Qin), will present his construction of a philosophical foundation for political meritocracy. For Confucians, human nature is diverse, fluid, and moldable, and it critically depends on one’s own perfection as to which stage of the sagehood one can achieve. In addition, hierarchies are necessary for state governance and higher positions need to be filled by people with higher levels of qualification. This approach enlarges the potential for political meritocracy to provide universal values for state governance in other parts of the world.
Yang Yao (姚洋) is a Liberal Arts Chair Professor at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University. He currently serves as the editor of CCER’s house journal “China Economic Quarterly.” He was the dean of the NSD from November 2012 to January 2024. He chairs the China Economic Annual Conference, the Foundation of Modern Economics, and the supervision committee of CF40, and is a member of China Economist 50 Forum. His research interests include new political economy, economic transition and development in China and political philosophy. He has published more than a hundred research papers in international and domestic journals including China Social Sciences, the American Economic Review, and the American Political Science Review. He has published or edited more than a dozen books on political economy and philosophy, and economic development in China. He is also a prolific writer for magazines and newspapers, including the Financial Times and the Project Syndicate.
Professor Yao was awarded the 2008 and 2014 Sun Yefang Award in Economic Science, the 2008 and 2010 Pu Shan Award in International Economics, and the 2008 Zhang Peigang Award in Development Economics. He was named the Best Teacher by the PKU Student Union in 2006 and the Best Advisor by the PKU Graduate Students Union in 2017. He is a fellow of the International Economic Association (2024).
Professor Yao obtained a BS in geography in 1986 and an MS in economics in 1989, both from Peking University, and his PhD in development economics from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1996.
This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.
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Speaker: Laia Ventayol, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025 Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue:KK202, 2/F, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU
The ultimate negotiations on the Law of the Sea took place from 1973 to 1982 in New York. Within the research group Ocean Crime Narratives (PI Marta Puxan-Oliva), based at the University of the Balearic Islands, we take an interdisciplinary perspective on ocean environmental harm and crime narratives emerging since this historical event. How do discourses in the cultural and scientific arenas jointly create conceptions, arguments and ideas underpinning current international policies and policy negotiations around environmental crime and harm at sea?
With a background in visual arts, my focus within the group is on materiality at sea. How is materiality framed in Western epistemology? Does object theory apply to plastic pollution? Is noise pollution seen as materiality at sea? Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s acclaimed 2011 work The Man with the Compound Eyes narrates a contemporary fiction around the Pacific Garbage Patch. Accompanying the novel, this talk relates to waste management research and ecology policy making in Hong Kong.
Laia Ventayol is a visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Ventayol studied Fine Arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg in Germany and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. In constant tandem with her research, she works as a visual artist mostly between Spain and Germany. Among different acknowledgments, she participated in the 2022 International AIR Program at the Seoul Museum of Art.
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Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University
Moderator:Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
While both feminism and pacifism may appear to have stagnated in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.
Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, USA. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.
This event is co-organised by the Korean Studies Programme, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Women’s Studies Research Centre (WSRC), and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, at the University of Hong Kong.
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Since the May Fourth Movement, Ibsen’s “Nora” has become an icon of independent “New Woman”. However, the reception of “Nora” in May Fourth China was intentionally misplaced. Ibsen’s Nora was a wife and mother who ran away from her husband’s home, while the Nora summoned by May Fourth China was a daughter and girlfriend who ran away from her father’s home. Throughout the creation and practice of new literature, there are many expressions of the “New Woman” both inside and outside the literary text, but there is a lack of imagination about the “New Mother”. Including the leading female writers themselves, such as Lu Yin, Xiao Hong, Ding Ling, Lin Huiyin, Eileen Chang, etc., they often rejected or were bothered by their identities and bodies as mothers, sometimes even went to the extent of abortion or abandoning their children.
Lu Xun once pointed out the dilemma of Nora in “What Happens After Nora Running Away”, while Eileen Chang, who seemed indifferent to the May Fourth tradition, subtly echoed Lu Xun’s question of Nora in her works such as “Go! Up to the Tower”, The Fall of the Pagoda, and Little Reunion.
The image of Yvonne Huang, the mother of Eileen Chang, portrayed with a mixture of obsession and hatred in her daughter’s repeated writings, is the most vivid and intricate Chinese “Nora”, a missing yet ambiguous “New Mother” in the history of new literature. This talk will delve into Eileen Chang’s extensive writings about her mother, spanning her early works such as Rumors to later ones such as The Fall of the Pagoda, The Book of Change, Little Reunion, Duizhao Ji, etc.
Yvonne Huang, as delineated by Eileen Chang, is a unique maternal figure in both traditional and modern literature. She has both sides: a “fairy godmother” who represents the first generation of independent and stylish women with refined tastes, traveling around the world and skiing in Switzerland with her “pair of three-inch golden lotus,” choosing to fund her daughter’s education over her son’s. But there is also the side of an “inadequate” mother, harsh and indifferent to her daughter, despising her own maternal identity, and indulging in shocking sexual pleasure. To borrow Eileen Chang’s own words, “the chain breaks”, this signifies a novel mother-daughter relationship amidst the breakdown of the old and new ethics. How can China’s Nora balance her identity as a “New Mother” with her self as a “New Woman”? Can ‘New Women’ also be good mothers? This remains a challenging and real question that confronts all women to this day.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 林崢，中山大學人文高等研究院副院長、中文系副教授，北京大學學士、博士。曾赴哈佛大學、劍橋大學、柏林洪堡大學、臺灣清華大學等高校訪問。長期致力於城市文化研究、中國現當代文學研究。著有《公園北京：文化生產與文學想像（1860-1937）》（北京大學出版社）。
Zheng LIN holds the position of Vice Deputy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities within Sun Yat-Sen University, while also serving as Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature. She received both her Bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Peking University, and has visited prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Cambridge University, Humboldt University and National Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on urban cultural studies and modern Chinese literature. In 2022, She published her groundbreaking book Park Beijing: Cultural Production and Literary Imagination (1860-1937) through Peking University Press.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
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Speakers: Yoshiko Nakano, Professor, Department of International Design Management, Tokyo University of Science Georgina Challen, CSGC Research Assistant, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent:John M. Carroll, Principal Lecturer, Department of History, HKU Moderator:Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, March 3, 2025 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
The Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley is home to over 470 graves connected to the city’s Japanese population. Most of these graves belong to individuals who died during the Meiji era (1868–1912), a remarkable period of modernisation and opening up of Japan that saw thousands of its inhabitants travel to other parts of the world to study, work, and settle. Who were these people? What were they doing in Hong Kong? And why were unbaptised Japanese buried in what was called at one time the ‘Protestant Cemetery’?
These are the questions that Meiji Graves in Happy Valley (2024, HKU Press) seeks to answer. By revealing the personal journeys of these mostly forgotten Japanese, the authors aim to add to transnational perspectives on Hong Kong and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong from 2000 to 2022.
Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. She is currently a Research Assistant in the Department of Comparative Literature’s Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures.
HKU Press is offering a 20% discount (code 20CP2025) for online orders of the book up to April 5, 2025. For details, visit https://hkupress.hku.hk/Meiji_Graves.
This event is co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Japanese Studies, and Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.
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