Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue reexamination ofWang’s impact on cultural memory of WWII in China.
In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.
Nineteenth century China Trade painting, gouache on paper, Clipper Eagle Wing (built by James O. Curtis at Medford, Massachusetts in 1853), off Hong Kong. Artist unknown.
Taking The 70’s Biweekly—an independent youth publication in the 1970s’ Hong Kong—as the main thread, this edited volume investigates an unexplored trajectory of Hong Kong’s cultural and art production in the 1970s that represents the making of a dissent space by independent press and activist groups in the city. The 70’s Biweekly stands out from many other independent magazines with its unique blending of radical political theories, social activism, avant-garde art, and local art and literature creations. By taking the magazine as a nodal point of social and cultural activism from and around which actions, debates, community, and artistic practices are formed and generated, this book fills gaps in studies on how young Hong Kong cultural producers carved out an alternative creative and political space to speak against established authorities.
Split into three parts, this book provides readers with a panoramic view of the political and cultural activisms in Hong Kong during the 1970s, writings on art and film, and crucially, interviews with former founders and contributors that reflect on how their participation led them to engage ideologically with their activism and community that extended far beyond the temporal and physical bounds of the magazine.
Lu Pan is associate professor in the Department of Chinese History and Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Hong Kong University Press was at the 2023 Beijing Book Fair and among their offerings was the new translation of my biography of Carl Crow (here in English) now published by Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press in Chinese (links at bottom of post)
Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:00 – Frontline Club, Paddington
Mark O’Neill’s latest book, Out Of Ireland, describes his search, through more than 40 years of international postings, to find and explore his own Irish roots. The journey takes him from England to Scotland, three years in Belfast during the Troubles and, since 1978, in China, Hong Kong and Japan. He found the small town in Manchuria where his grandfather served as a missionary for 45 years: the Columban Sister doctor who cured Hong Kong of tuberculosis: and the replica of the Titanic being built in Sichuan. The last chapter describes the migration the other way – Chinese settling in Ireland, including Dublin Mayor Hazel Chu and a shipyard worker from Shenyang who learns Gaelic and moves to Ireland to practice his new language.
Mark was born in London, England and educated at Marlborough College and New College, Oxford. He worked in Washington D.C., Manchester and Belfast before moving to Asia in 1978. He has lived here ever since. After a long journalistic career, in 2006 he turned to writing books and has completed 12 so far in English. Seven have been translated into traditional Chinese and three into simplified Chinese. He speaks French, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese and lives in Hong Kong with his wife.
Mark joins Lynne O’Donnell (columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author) at 7pm on June 30 to talk about his journey.
What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.
Thomas Manning (1772-1840) was one of England’s first scholars of Chinese. In his youth, Manning was a brilliant mathematician at Cambridge, and befriended Romantic authors such as Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inspired by the French Revolution to search for new ideas to shape society, Manning turned not to the English countryside or poetic imagination like other English Romantics, but to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. China being poorly understood within Britain, Manning arrived in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1807 to try and learn Chinese, hoping eventually to explore the interior of the country, which was closed to Europeans. He joined the Amherst Embassy to Peking in 1816, and undertook a trek through the Himalayas to Lhasa, capital of Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama; while his travels also saw him face-to-face with Napoleon, detained as a prisoner of war, and shipwrecked in the Java Sea. This talk will explore how Manning’s extraordinary story helps us re-interpret English Romanticism, and understand the significance of China within British culture at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
