A poster for a Chinese high-speed train at the construction site for a bridge over the Mekong River in Laos
Upcoming Events
Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past
LSK 1033, HKUST
How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. READ MORE...
Past Events
Seditious Voices: Revolution and Information in the Korean War Campaign, 1950-1953
Room 4502 (Lift 25-26), HKUST
To date, historians in China and the West were drawn to studying the Korean War largely because it is the first foreign war the communist revolutionary state fought under the mantle of internationalism and the first hot war during the Cold War that inaugurated the US-China confrontation for more than two decades. They have shown convincingly that China’s entrance into the Korean conflict signified a critical turning point in China’s foreign policy and domestic politics. Yet, few seem to have thought to ask how the government sold such a complex war to the public and how the public reacted to the top-down effort intended to win their hearts and minds, a mere eight months after the Communists won the national victory and seventeen months after Beijing came under Communist rule. This talk, built upon Ma's forthcoming book, intends to move beyond the sort of “history of the headquarters” by exploring connections between the official and grassroots levels, and between political rhetoric and quotidian effects, to uncover the social meaning of the war. READ MORE...
Research and Writing at the Intersection of Diplomatic and Legal History
Room 3401 (Lift 2 / Lift 17-18), HKUST
Historians construct narratives from fragmented and often contradictory sources — but in an era of digital archives, online databases, and growing restriction on archival access, the process of research and writing history can look and feel quite different from just a decade or two ago. In this session, Professor Jenny Huangfu Day reflects on the intellectual and practical challenges and opportunities of archival research, especially at the intersection of diplomatic and legal history. Drawing from case studies in her forthcoming book, she shares how research questions take shape in response to conflicting sources, and how archival work, particularly in diplomatic and legal contexts, demands both interpretive rigor and interdisciplinary methodology. READ MORE...
Patriarchy Falling Short: Gender Failure and Suicide in Qing Law
Room 4504 (Lift 25-26), HKUST
This talk, drawn from Wang's ongoing research, focuses on several examples of male suicide from Qing period legal archives across the 18th & 19th centuries. Unlike early modern European societies, suicide was not inherently sinful or criminal in China, creating a unique suicidal "necropolitics." Furthermore, in this era, there was unprecedentedly widespread positive state recognition of female suicide for “chastity” as analogy to men's heroic self-sacrifice for the state, especially on the battlefield. Arguably, chastity became the main, if not the only, measure for proper femininity. What did this context mean for boys and men who attempted and completed suicide not linked to war? Wang will put forward an interpretation of these deaths as the result of “gender failure”: when men fall short of externally enforced & personally internalized gender norms, one way “out” was to end their lives. READ MORE...
Revolution, History and Time
Revolution is a time of history, and it is thus a narrated time. This talk attempts to explore historical temporality and revolutionary narrative as central problems in modern Chinese history. It derives from two separate sources. One is a dialogue held a couple of years ago with the Taiwan-based historian, Yang Rubin, whose mode of conventional conservative history is methodologically useful for thinking about texts and history. The second source is the speaker's 2020 Verso book, China's Revolutions in the Modern World, which re-centers the radicalism of revolution in China's and the world's modern history. The talk interweaves narrative concerns with paradigmatic questions. READ MORE...
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...
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...
現代中國留美學人歷史研究 & 第三次留美回國浪潮
3401室 (2號/ 17-18號電梯)
在中國現代留學歷史上，二十世紀1950年代存在著兩個趨向：留美歸國與走向蘇聯；在1970年代末期，重啓留學運動成為改革開放的重要起點和標誌，特別是到美國留學成為主要趨向。留學史是理解中國近現代歷史變遷的重要鎖鑰，是理解中國社會、政治、經濟與文化變革的獨特視角；留學生是中國現代化的基本推動力量，對於推進知識流動、國際交流與文化溝通有著獨特的作用。 中國近現代留學歷史研究中，特別是對1930年代以來留學美國的研究，佔據了重要位置。這次報告將闡述留美浪潮的分期和留學生的分類，概述五次留美浪潮，敘述第三次留美浪潮的出洋和回國的歷史，介紹廣義留學的非學位留學，包括工程技術人員赴美實習受訓，軍人赴美培訓參戰技術技能的情況，展示留美學生在美國的學習生活史料，回溯留學生回國後對建設中國的貢獻，論述歸國或移民與家國情懷的關係。 READ MORE...
日記美學：日常敘事的技術含量
Zoom
文學史往往充斥著偏見。它們的最大偏見是，大書特書虛構文學，淡然漠視紀實文學。詩歌、戲劇、小說，一統天下，儼然正統；傳記、遊記、日記，打入冷宮，不見天日。虛構文學主打的文學史，充其量只能算半部文學史。日記美學，試圖糾偏，將探討日常敘事的技術含量，以期匡正傳統的文學史觀。講座的剖析文本為蒲寧、胡適、吳宓等人的日記，特別聚焦其中的敘事特征與美學價值。 READ MORE...
中國影像史的全球文獻匯集與研究
1104室 (LT-A旁)
講座將介紹中國攝影史和關於中國的影像所涉及的文獻在世界範圍內的分布、研究的進展與方法，中國攝影的美術館館藏的建立方式和研究性策展在這一計劃中所發揮的作用。 READ MORE...