Speaker: Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University
Respondents:
Loretta Kim, Associate Professor and Head, School of Modern Languages and Culture, HKU
Ji Li, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, HKU
Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, October 4, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
This event will take the form of a seminar/discussion with Professor Nianshen Song (宋念申) of Tsinghua University (清華大學人文社會科學高等研究院), about his new book project, The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City. Select chapters will be sent to registered HKU participants. The discussion will be led by Professors Loretta Kim and Li Ji of HKU (SMLC), and moderated by Professor Dan Vukovich (SoH).
The Neighborhood is a nearly-400-year history of a small urban space, which examines the trans-regional political, religious, and economic forces that shaped and reshaped a frontier city and people’s life. Xita (West Stupa) is a thriving commercial neighborhood in Shenyang, the largest city in Northeast China. Its story began in 1643 when the Qing emperor erected a Tibetan-Buddhist stupa in the old city’s western suburb. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), Xita was a landmark of the political/spiritual alliance between the Manchu, Mongols, and Tibetans. In the early twentieth century, colonial powers (first Russia then Japan) and local warlords constructed competing railways that intersected in Xita, turning it into an urban center which manifested the intensified cross-continental geopolitical competition. During the Japanese colonial period, Xita was a symbol of Japan’s pan-Asianist empire, while it at the same time developed into one of the largest Korean diasporic enclaves in urban China. In the 1990s, when Shenyang, socialist China’s capital of heavy industry, turned into a “rust city,” Xita surprisingly flourished. Due to Korean investment and government propagation, it transformed into a peculiar consumerist and entertainment quarter in a largely de-industrialized metropolis. The story of Xita unfolds the nuanced interactions between state, people, and urban space in imperial, colonial, nationalist, socialist, and post-socialist contexts.
Nianshen Song is Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, affiliated with the Department of History, Tsinghua University. Before returning to Beijing in 2021, he taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and teaching focus on late imperial and modern China from global and regional perspectives, with special interests in China’s ethnic frontiers, East Asian trans-regional networks, historical geography, urban studies, and historical geography. He is the author of Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018 and Zhizao Yazhou [制造亚洲 Mapping Asia] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2024). His journal articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Inner Asia, Geopolitics, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science), and Kaifang shidai, among others.
This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.
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