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Past 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...
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...