Workshop Details: China, Humanities, & Global Studies: Towards the Conjuncture

For the full Workshop program, click here.

Workshop Introduction

This workshop is meant to introduce and kickstart a humanities research hub to be based in the Arts Faculty (but inclusive of other humanities scholars working in the social sciences). The particular, nonexclusive focus is the question of China and critical or interpretive global studies, particularly as this relates to the new global ‘conjuncture’ or theatre.¹ It focuses on the rise and reality of China as an economic, cultural, and geo-political power; but, moreover, as an important and compelling intellectual, theoretical, and humanistic object of inquiry. How should we understand modern and contemporary China from global perspectives, and how should we understand “globality” from the perspectives of China? Likewise for non- or pre-modern China: how do, or how might these inheritances inform the global present? We seek to examine not just the venerable topic of “China and the world,’ but also the world in China (and vice versa). We aim further to better describe, understand, and produce knowledge about the new global situation or conjuncture that characterizes our historical present.

This is not just an empirical, factual, or data- driven project. If we can all agree that it is a brute fact that China is a major ‘player’ and constituent part of contemporary globalization, how should we interpret and evaluate and theorize this new reality? This is precisely the purpose of the hub and its future activities. And it is, as well, the traditional role and function of the humanities, criticism, and the interpretive social sciences.

It would be a mistake to limit – even if unintentionally – such a project primarily to scholars working outside of China and the immediate region. This has often been the practical reality, even for “global academe.” We are committed to engaging and working with scholars based in the mainland in particular, to establish lines of dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration between ourselves and our peers across the border and in the Asian region. This initial workshop will bring together scholars working at HKU, to present their past and current work on “China and global studies” and to reflect on what they take to be some of its chief, inter-related aspects. It will also bring in scholars working in the mainland, or whom have extensive experience working there, who likewise work on China in/and globalization. Part of our conversation, which will continue in the months ahead, will turn on what forms, what questions, and what topics our research hub about “China, Humanities, and Global Studies” can take.

Prof. Daniel Vukovich, Arts Faculty, School of Humanities & Comp Lit Program.

¹ ‘Conjunctural’ analysis stems from Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall amongst others, but it can also stand here as simply a new period of global history, a fresh outcome of the forces and relations at work between China, the West, the South, and Asia. We are in a period of ‘new times.’

Speaker Bios

Panel 1 (9:20–10:25am) Keynote
Prof. Lu Xinyu (吕新雨), East China Normal University

Lu Xinyu is Zijiang Chair Professor and Dean of the School of Communication at East China Normal University. She earned her degrees from Anhui University, Zhejiang University, and Fudan University. Her research spans media studies and visual culture, rural-urban iniquities, sociology, philosophy, and politically-grounded readings of history. She is the author of many books, including the influential The Countryside and Revolution (2013), Scholarship, Media, and the Public (2014), and Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (2003), and the forthcoming Neoliberalism or Neocollective Rural China: A Critique and Prospect (Palgrave 2024).

Panel 2 (10:30–11:45am): Theory/Ideology/Discourse

Prof. Liu Kang (刘康), Duke University & Visiting Prof., School of Chinese, HKU

Liu Kang is Professor of Chinese Studies, and Director of Duke Program of Research on China at Duke University. Professor Liu is Elected Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) since 2015. He is the author of twelve books, and written widely in scholarly journals in both English and Chinese. In addition, He frequently contributes in the form of op-eds, interviews, reviews, to American and Chinese print media and the internet media, on issues ranging from contemporary Chinese media and culture, globalization, to Marxism and aesthetics. His research covers Chinese Studies, cultural and media studies, comparative literature, political science, and international relations.

Prof. Zhiguang Yin (殷之光), Fudan University

Zhiguang Yin is a Professor in international politics at the Fudan University. His research interest lies mainly in the area of Chinese modern intellectual and legal history, ethnic minority policy, 19-20 century history of international relations, imperial history, and Sino-Middle Eastern relations. His research and teaching centre on a theoretical interests in understanding the making of the modern world order through the dynamic tension between domination and resistance. His current projects include studies of liberal imperialism and Afro-Asian solidarity movements with a particular interests in Sino-African, Sino-Middle Eastern relations and pan-Africanism. His most recent monographs include: A New World: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the PRC’s Imagination of Global Order (Chinese, 2022), and Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014). His articles appear in English and Chinese academic journals such as European Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, History, Turkish Journal of Sociology, Shehui Kexue (Social Sciences), and Kaifang Shidai (Open Times).

Prof. Dan Vukovich (胡德), HKU, School of Humanities

Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of colonialism/imperialism and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political history of the “China-West” relationship. He has worked in Hong Kong since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program at HKU and has been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these three books and in numerous articles he is concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge (and ‘real’ politics), and the dialectics of difference and universality.

Panel 3 (11:50am–1:10pm) Back to the Future: Traditions & the Contemporary

Prof. Daniel Bell (貝淡寧), HKU, Faculty of Law

Daniel A. Bell (貝淡寧) is Professor, Chair of Political Theory with the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He served as Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) from 2017 to 2022. His books include The Dean of Shandong (2023), Just Hierarchy (co-authored with Wang Pei, 2020), The China Model (2015), The Spirit of Cities (co-authored with Avner de-Shalit, 2012), China’s New Confucianism (2008), Beyond Liberal Democracy (2007), and East Meets West (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is founding editor of the Princeton-China series (Princeton University Press) which translates and publishes original and influential academic works from China. His works have been translated in 23 languages. He has been interviewed in English, Chinese, and French. In 2018, he was awarded the Huilin Prize and was honored as a “Cultural Leader” by the World Economic Forum.

Prof. Wang Pei (汪沛), HKU, School of Chinese

Wang Pei, Assistant professor at the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong. She completed her PhD thesis on phenomenology at department of philosophy of Tsinghua University and was a joint PhD. student in Université Paris 1. She was a post-doc fellow in Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Science. She is the co-author (with Daniel. A. Bell) of Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World, published by Princeton University Press in 2020. She has authored academic articles in English, Chinese, and French, mainly on phenomenology and comparative philosophy. She is currently writing a book titled “The Power of Calligraphy: A Political History of Calligraphy in China.”

Prof. Lili Yang (杨力苈), HKU, Faculty of Education

Lili Yang is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. She has strong interests in Eastern-Western comparison in higher education, especially how higher education (including the epistemic practices of intellectuals, the position of the university in society, the individualized and collective good of universities) are shaped by Eastern and Western intellectual traditions, and social, political, and educational cultures. Lili is interested in drawing on traditional Chinese ideas and thoughts to inform contemporary (global) higher educational practices. She also conducts research on global science. More broadly, her interests include higher education, comparative education, and educational and political philosophy. Previously, Lili was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, where she also received her Ph.D. in Education. She is the author of Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Prof. Beth Harper, HKU, Comparative Literature – Chair

Beth Harper is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her interests span premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with a particular focus on tragedy, lyric, comparative east-west poetics, ecocriticism and the intersection of literature and philosophy.

Panel 4 (2:30–3:45pm): Borders, “Ethnics,” Diasporas, Citizens

Prof. Enze Han (韓恩澤), HKU, Department of Politics & Public Administration

Enze Han is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong. He is an expert on international relations of Southeast Asia and China’s foreign policy towards Southeast Asia. His recent publications include The Ripple Effect: China’s Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2024), Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019), Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013), and more than 30 academic articles appearing in Journal of Politics, International Affairs, Review of International Studies, World Development, The China Quarterly, Security Studies, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies among many others. Dr. Han was awarded Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University during 2021-2022. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders’ Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States. Dr. Han received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University, and he was also a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University.

Prof. Zhengxu Wang, (王正绪), Zhejiang University

Zhengxu Wang is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Political Science, School of Public Affairs of Zhejiang University in China. Before joining Zhejiang University, he was Distinguished Professor at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs, research fellow at the East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore, and Associate Professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at UK’s University of Nottingham, where he also served as Acting Director of the university’s China Policy Institute. His research interests are in comparative politics, Chinese politics, and empirical political science theories. His publications have appeared in Governance, International Review of Sociology, Political Research Quarterly, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and others.

Prof. Loretta Kim [金由美], HKU, School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Loretta Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. She is a historian of late imperial and modern China, focusing on the comparative history of borderlands and frontiers, regional identities and histories of China, and Chinese ethnic minority languages and literatures. Her most recent publications include Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (2019) and The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong: Religion, Ethnicity, and Intercultural Relations (2021).

Panel 5 (3:50–5:05pm) Culture in Globalization: Ways of Seeing, Feeling, & Being

Prof. Alvin K. Wong (黃家軒), HKU, Comparative Literature

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans across the fields of Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. Wong’s book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has published in journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, JCMS, and Interventions and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, Sinophone Utopias, and Queer TV China. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020).

Prof. Geng Song (宋耕), HKU, School of Chinese

Geng Song is a Professor in the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. He has written extensively on topics such as men and masculinities in East Asia, Chinese television, and Chinese nationalism. Among his publications are Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity (2022), Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China(co-author, 2014), Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (co-editor, 2015), The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age (co-editor, 2018), and The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (2004). He also co-edits a book series on “Transnational Asian Masculinities” for Hong Kong University Press.

Prof. Wei Yan Vivien (魏艷), HKU, School of Chinese

Wei Yan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of two books, including Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896-1949) (Brill, 2020) and The Transculturation of Judge Dee Stories: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Routledge, 2022). Her current GRF project focuses on Radio Drama in Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s.