Category: Past Events

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.

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.

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.

娜拉做母親後怎樣？——缺位的“新母親”

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Prof. LIN Zheng 林崢 (Sun Yat-sen University)

主持人 Moderator: Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村(Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: March 6, 2025 (Thu) 14:30-16:00pm (HKT)
語言 Language: Putonghua 普通話 
地點 Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU 
香港大學百周年校園逸夫教學樓4樓436室（文學院會議室）

摘要 Abstract:
“五四”以降，易卜生的“娜拉”成為獨立自主的“新女性”範本。但五四中國對“娜拉”的接受是有意錯位的，易卜生的娜拉是一位出走丈夫之家的妻子和母親，而五四中國召喚的娜拉則是出走父親之家的女兒和戀人。縱觀新文學的創作與實踐，無論在文本內外，對“新女性”的表現所在多有，對“新母親”的想像卻付之闕如。包括領風氣之先的女作家自身，廬隱、蕭紅、丁玲、林徽因、張愛玲等，對於作為母親的身份和身體，往往持排斥或困擾的態度，甚至激烈到墮胎、棄子。

魯迅曾在《娜拉走後怎樣》中點出娜拉的困境，而看似對五四傳統漠然的張愛玲在《走！走到樓上去》、《雷峰塔》、《小團圓》中多次隱晦地呼應和延續了魯迅提出的娜拉命題。張愛玲終其一生愛恨交織、反復書寫的母親黃逸梵，就是一個最生動也最複雜的中國娜拉，一個新文學史上缺位的、卻又曖昧不明的“新母親”。在這一背景下，講者將細緻考察張愛玲有關母親的一系列書寫，囊括早年的《流言》以及晚年的《雷峰塔》、《易經》、《小團圓》、《對照記》等。

張愛玲筆下的黃逸梵，是傳統文學和現代文學中都罕見的母親形象，她既有“神仙教母”的一面，是品味時髦、環球旅行、以三寸金蓮在瑞士滑雪、“重女輕男”支持女兒受教育的第一代獨立女性；卻又有“失職”的母親的一面，對女兒的苛刻、冷漠，厭棄自身作為母親的身份，並毫不避諱自我驚世駭俗的情欲享樂。借張愛玲自己的話，“鏈子斷了”，這是新舊倫理斷裂之下全新的母女關係。中國娜拉，如何平衡作為“新母親”的身份和作為“新女性”的自我？“新女性”是否也能是好母親？這是迄今為止仍橫亙在所有女性面前的艱難而真實的命題。

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)

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.

Speaker: Chris Hanscom, Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Moderator: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, The University of Hong Kong

Date: 21 FEB 2025 (FRI)
Time: 4:30–6:00 pm (HKT)
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Using examples from fiction and photography this talk will explore the relationship between art and politics, particularly regarding the aesthetic representation of atrocity. What kind of remembering is adequate to the traumatic event, and can how the representation of such memory avoid both the cycle of endless melancholic return and the forgetting that accompanies the “memorization” of that past? Where politics is defined as the struggle over the propriety of language, it is the work of art, not the archival document, that stands at the juncture of the imperative to remember and the prohibition against making sense of the inexplicable.

Chris Hanscom is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, where he teaches courses on Korean literature and film and is director of the UCLA Korean Humanities Initiative.

This event is presented by the Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster. The seminar series is coordinated by Professor Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Professor Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Professor Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. For more information, please visit www.meal.hku.hk

Speaker: Mimi Thi Nguyen, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 17, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (8:00 pm/16 Feb/Chicago)
Venue: On Zoom

The historical present is often perceived through the presence or absence of beauty, such that distinct personal, social, and political projects unfold through disputes about the beauty we deserve – which is to say, the life worth living. How might affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity, and uncertainty, drawn from the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession, help us to understand the promise of beauty as a world-building engagement? This talk considers how the promise of beauty is so usable across a spectrum of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, and how these claims delineate what forms of life are valuable, and for whom.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty. With Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong, she is a coeditor for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.

Speaker: Cai Yuqian, Predoctoral Fellow, Centre on Contemporary China and the World, HKU

Respondent: John Carroll, Principal Lecturer, Department of History, HKU
Moderator: Alvin K Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, February 13, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room LE7, Library Extension Building, Main Campus, HKU

“Hong Kong exceptionalism” has been discussed by writers and intellectuals (such as Chan Koon-chung, Anthony Cheung, and Rey Chow) in its various forms—including historical, institutional, developmental, and cultural—since at least the 1990s. It is shaped by the city’s past experience under British rule and current status as a Special Administrative Region of the P.R.C., but it is also informed by the ideas of liberal and American exceptionalism, calling attention to the transnational history of the concept.

“Singapore exceptionalism” has also evolved since the 1990s, notably manifesting in the “Asian values” debate, and has become a prominent element in official discourse, endorsed by leaders and diplomats (such as Chan Heng Chee, Lee Hsien Loong, and Lawrence Wong). It reflects the city-state’s strategic, political, economic, and social uniqueness, as well as its global activism aimed at ensuring international relevance and competitiveness. Nevertheless, while transnational in origin and substance, the meanings of exceptionalism in Singapore differ strikingly from those in Hong Kong.

Evaluating exceptionalism as an identity-cum-justification narrative, this seminar will explore the two cities as comparable sites for understanding the transnational histories and various forms of exceptionalism within and beyond their immediate contexts.

Cai Yuqian is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW) at HKU and a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals across disciplines and languages, including International Studies Review, Cold War International History Studies, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Il Tolomeo. 

Speakers and Editors of Transpacific, Undisciplined:
Lily Wong, American University
Christopher B. Patterson, University of British Columbia
Chien-ting Lin, National Central University in Taiwan

Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, February 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm / Feb 6 / Washington DC)
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU and on Zoom

Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art illuminating everyday convergences between migrant workers in Hawai‘i’s hospitality industry. By foregrounding such complex entanglements within, across, and beyond the Pacific, Transpacific, Undisciplined (2024, University of Washington Press) activates generative, if obscured, connections against fixed national and methodological boundaries and reveals how an undisciplined approach can reconfigure itself in relation to unequal exchanges among Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.

With lucid contributions and a rich theoretical framework, this groundbreaking book mobilizes the dynamic energy of the transpacific as an analytic, and brings together seemingly unrelated intellectual fields to trace across empires, local struggles, and inter-imperial intimacies.

Lily Wong is associate professor in the departments of Literature and Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies at American University. She is author of Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness.

Christopher B. Patterson is associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games.

Chien-ting Lin is associate professor in the English Department and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies graduate program at National Central University in Taiwan.

危機時刻的欲望書寫：以許地山和更敦群培為對照的闡釋

Speaker:
Yang Qu, PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Respondents:
Nicole Huang, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, January 17, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 417, 4/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU

The concept of kāma, or desire, as one of the four aims of human life (puruṣārtha) and the central focus of the Indian science of sensual pleasure (kāmaśāstra), was conceptualized and developed in medieval India. But how did this concept find its way into the intellectual circles of twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan literati? Moreover, how did their writings—through textual translations, literary compositions, and generic transcreations—give rise to a complex intertextuality that uncovers the under-examined dimensions of desire in modern China?

This talk explores the works of key intellectuals from the broader Sinophone world, including Xu Dishan (許地山, 1894–1941) and Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950), in parallel with notable figures from the Tibetophone world, such as Ju Mipham (’Ju mi pham, 1846–1912) and Gendün Chöpel (Dge ’dun chos ’phel, 1903–1951). Despite their distinct cultural and historical contexts, these figures share a common fascination with desire, which they approach in various ways: as an intellectual pursuit, a cultural taboo, a commercial commodity, and, at times, a forbidden path to spiritual liberation. These diverse dimensions extend far beyond conventional understandings of sexuality and erotic love, particularly in times of crisis—including social upheaval, war, and personal spiritual dilemmas. Their intellectual engagements with desire thus expand the “kāma world” beyond the South Asian subcontinent, offering a lens through which to imagine a place for Indian erotics in modern China.

Yang Qu (曲洋) is a PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, under the mentorship of Professor David Der-wei Wang. His dissertation project, “Obsession with India: Literature, Travels, and the Quest for Alternative Modernity in Modern China,” examines the complex engagement with India in early twentieth-century Chinese intellectual thought, exploring themes of national rejuvenation, spirituality, revolution, eroticism, and literary subjectivity. His research has been recognized with several awards, including the Lo Chia-luen International Sinology Scholarship (National Chengchi University, 2023), the “Ms. Yu Tsai Yuhui Special Award” from the China Times Cultural Foundation, and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCKF, 2024).