Upcoming Events
The Institutionalized Hypocrisy of Qing Government
Kaisa Group Lecture Theater (IAS LT), Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST
Qing statecraft was characterized by a kind of institutionalized hypocrisy. Many aspects of Qing governance have been condemned – both during the dynasty and since – as irrational, aberrant, or corrupt. But these very aspects were key to how that government actually worked. The land tax and other official revenue sources were insufficient to finance operations; nor did nominal salaries cover more than a fraction of officials’ real incomes and expenses. For this reason, Qing government at all levels depended on informal sources of revenue, as well as informal personnel employed in excess of centrally mandated quotas, even though most of this technically constituted “corruption.” Similarly, much of the judicial system was outsourced to private parties who operated in a gray zone to advise both litigants and magistrates and even to publish the law; and given the limited reach of the state, social order depended in practice on the extra-judicial community regulation of a wide range of transactions and relationships, many of which were nominally prohibited. Emperors and officials alike employed a pious, self-serving discourse to condemn what actually constituted routine features of the system upon which they all depended, while corruption laws were enforced only occasionally, when an emperor decided to assert himself arbitrarily in order to cow his subordinates. Far from dysfunctional, however, the Qing government worked quite well until the late nineteenth century, when it finally faced unprecedented problems that it could not solve. READ MORE...
Past Events
西伯利亞的紅巫女 Red Witches in Siberia
張安德講堂 (LT-E)
氣候變遷和全球暖化在西伯利亞引發的許多症候，包括巨型野火和永久凍土層解凍，帶來許多後果尚難預料的新發展，歷史學家由此可以反思許多時間深處的問題，例如沉睡的病毒和細菌。 READ MORE...
H. G. Wells in search of China: Chinese intellectuals and the making of a universal history, 1919-1935
Room 3401 (Lift 2 / Lift 17-18)
The Outline of History by the English writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in 1920, was a bestseller and a cultural phenomenon during the interwar period. As a disciple of Thomas Huxley and Darwinism, Wells narrates a universal history from the origin and evolution of life and mankind to the aftermath of the Great War. The popularity of the Outline was not only a Western phenomenon. It also received widespread attention and popularity among Chinese readers. Although Wells had never been to China, he acquainted and interacted with several Chinese intellectuals, including Liang Qichao, Ding Wenjiang, Fu Ssunien and Chen Yuan, during his writing. They criticized, helped, and influenced Wells’s writing about China in the bestseller. In this presentation, I will use archival materials from the University of Illinois Library collections, such as correspondence between Chinese intellectuals and Wells, to reconstruct the details of interactions between Wells and his Chinese friends. They also reveal Well’s evolutionary epic of human history and cultural legacy in a wider global context. READ MORE...