Mary Farquhar, Griffith University
Stephen Teo, Nanyang Technical University
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at UC Irvine and is the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (1991), China's Brave New World (2007) and Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2008). He has also edited, co-edited, or co-authored several other books, including Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (1992 and 1994) and China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (due out in March). In addition to contributing to academic journals, he's written for many general interest publications, including the Australian Financial Review. He edits the Journal of Asian Studies, has consulted on two Long Bow films ("The Gate of Heavenly Peace" and "Morning Sun," and blogs at "China Beat" (http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com).
Abstract: ‘The Missing May 4th and the Eclipsed Eighty-Nines’
The student-led mass movements of 1919 and 1989 have both assumed iconic status and are routinely treated as watershed events in modern Chinese history. There is also a tight relationship between them, due to the importance that memories of (or, more properly, received ideas about) the former struggle had for participants in the latter one. The connection between the two movements was symbolized in 1989 texts in which the protesters claimed that they, not the government, were carrying forward the sacred May 4th spirit. And it was symbolized in 1989 actions: most notably, rallies held near a frieze portraying the heroism of the 1919 generation. Taking that frieze as a starting point, I will look at the aspects of the May 4th Movement that the monument draws attention to and also the aspect of it that this work of representation ignores. Focusing on some things that are overlooked or willfully brushed aside in many discussions of 1919, I will argue for the need to keep in mind not just the "revolutionary May 4th," the "patriotic May 4th," and the "enlightened May 4th," but also a "bureaucratic May 4th" (students ran some aspects of the movement in a very rigid way) and even a "xenophobic May 4th" (there was this side to it at times as well). This will be linked to a consideration of the aspects of 1989 that have been forgotten or downplayed: without denying that the biggest narrative divide is between the government's version (that denies a massacre took place) and the standard one that has taken hold in the West (in which the state's brutality on June 4th looms large), I will look at other kinds of fissures in the way the tale of Tiananmen has been and continues to be told. Finally, I will suggest that thinking in terms of a messier May 4th and a more multi-faceted Tiananmen can alter our vision of continuities and ruptures between the events of 1919 and 1989, on the one hand, and the anti-NATO demonstrations of 1999 and even the student nationalism of 2009, on the other.
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Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Co-ordinator of Asian Studies Research at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. She has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexuality in China in journals and edited volumes, and is author of Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity Press, 1997), and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). She co-edited (with Stephanie Donald) Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China; Posters of the Cultural Revolution (1999). She is currently working on an oral and photographic history of revolution and urban transformation in central Beijing over the past fifty years. Evans was President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (2002-2005).
Abstract: ‘Lens on loss of a neighbourhood: a photographer’s record of the transformation of “old Beijing”’
China’s urban transformation is widely represented as a teleological process of material, spatial and social advance in which differences of advantage and disadvantage, exclusion and inclusion, are inevitable and necessary. The divergent temporalities of the urban spaces shaped by the political economy are marshalled into a two-way differentiation between the hegemonic rhythms of the architects/beneficiaries and the fading traces of history’s losers. Yet, the memories and experiences of the present that residents of an ‘old Beijing’ neighbourhood narrate suggest a multitude of positionings and interests that rarely match the simple divide between the them and the us, ‘higher authority’ and the subaltern, the future of the planners and the pasts and presents of ordinary urban residents. While their memories and accounts of living in the present indicate a yearning for the past and for recognition of their status as ‘old Beijingers’, their day-to-day practices often suggest a tactical accommodation of conflicting temporalities, always played out in space and place, which confound the two-way division in current mainstream accounts of China’s planned future. This paper examines the notion of the loss of ‘old Beijing’ through the story and lens of a photographer who has been systematically documenting the spatial and social transformation of his neighbourhood since the late 1980s. In his own terms, his photography is to preserve a record for history; once the places are gone, there is nothing of history left. However, alongside his personal story of growing up and becoming a wealthy entrepreneur in the neighbourhood, the record that he has been making is much more complex than this; the past, present and future invoked in the redevelopment of ‘old Beijing’ emerge in his visual framing of place and space as temporalities where conflicting and compatible forces and interests meet.
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Mary Farquhar is Professor of Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. She was the founding director of the Australia-wide China Law Network and a former President of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia. As President, she convened the biennial Chinese Studies Association of Australia conference in 2007, which celebrated Australians' China scholarship. She is also a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts. Her publications include the international award-winning book, Children's Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (1999). Her recent work on Chinese cinema includes a book (with Chris Berry) China Onscreen: Cinema and Nation (2006), a journal special issue on Chinese stars (2008) and a forthcoming edited book (with Yingjin Zhang) on the same topic.
Abstract: ‘Celebrating the Centenary of Hong Kong Cinema (1909-2009) Adolescent Stars of the Hong Kong cinema: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li’
This keynote address reflects on stardom and adolescence in Hong Kong cinema through cult stars. The specific claim is that the ‘adolescent’ stardom of Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong), Jackie Chan (Cheng Long) and Jet Li (Li Lianjie) is a neglected feature of postwar Hong Kong cinema?and beyond to Hong Kong-Chinese and global cinema?even though each star is much studied in their own right. In star scholarship, a star is constructed, projecting a public persona beyond his or her screen image. The star captures a public’s imagination by representing social groups and, through them, by personifying?and perhaps resolving?current social tension and trauma onscreen. Whether martial arts prodigy or Bruce Lee’s ‘kid,’ boy stardom across films embodies ways of maturing into manhood that resonate with film audiences in particular societies at particular times. As such, adolescent mega-stardom in Hong Kong cinema is a local phenomenon. But it is also a very modern passion play, a space in which combat resolves an ongoing contest between individual autonomy, social acknowledgement and obedience to family, community and nation.
Using excerpts, I explore these ideas through the earliest star vehicles of Lee, Chan and Li: respectively, The Kid (Xilu Xiang 1950), Drunken Master (Zuiquan 1978) and Shaolin Temple (Shaolinsi 1980). These films share elements in their portrayal of boy heroes even though they cross decades, genres, classes and national borders. Extending my work on Chinese childhood to film studies, I suggest that Chinese adolescence (and, as a corollary, adolescent stardom) is neither a Western ‘discovery,’ as suggested in much of the literature, or a clear reversal of pre-modern Chinese generational hierarchies of power. Chinese have had sophisticated views on childhood and, by extension, adolescence for centuries. Rather, these categories attract a decidedly modern emphasis and variously play out bourgeois, Confucian and revolutionary modes of feeling in Hong Kong cinema?appropriated into mainland portrayals of adolescence through Jet Li in the immediate post-Mao period.
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Stephen Teo is currently associate professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before joining NTU he was a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore from 2005-2008. He has had extensive work experience in the Hong Kong International Film Festival and in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, researching and writing about Hong Kong Cinema and other Asian cinemas. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), Wong Kar-wai (London: BFI, 2005), King Hu's A Touch of Zen (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Cinema (HKU Press, 2007), and The Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
Abstract: ‘The Father and Son Cycle and the Brotherhood-Patriarchy Theme in the Hong Kong-China Film Relationship.’
Twelve years after Hong Kong was reabsorbed into Mainland China, the Hong Kong Cinema has gone through a period of declining prosperity and is now forging closer ties with the Mainland Chinese Cinema through co-productions and economic interdependency. Will Hong Kong Cinema maintain its independent identity or will it be reintegrated into the wider Chinese cinematic mainstream, increasingly focused on the huge Mainland market? The paper will investigate the nature of the relationship through two major cinematic themes. Firstly, the author will revisit the Father and Son cycle in the Hong Kong Cinema by assessing Patrick Tam’s most recent film After This Our Exile (2006) as a way of marking the 30th anniversary of the Hong Kong New Wave this year as well as to pay a nod to Hong Kong Cinema’s 100th birthday. Tam, known as a rigorous formalist (and for his mentorship of Wong Kar-wai) has revived a particular strain of family melodrama to acknowledge the New Wave’s continuing debt to Cantonese cinematic tradition. Interestingly, Tam has set his film in Malaysia – and he has adopted the Father and Son theme as a kind of progressive historical idea to suggest continuity as well as break with the development of the Hong Kong Cinema. On the Brotherhood-Patriarchy theme, Hong Kong’s subaltern role vis-à-vis the Mainland will be examined – as reflected in certain gangster films as well as the tendency towards the so-called “big film” (blockbuster) dealing with historical subjects and martial arts action. I will evaluate recent epics by John Woo, Zhang Yimou, Peter Chan, and others, all of whose films feature male brotherhood- patriarchal figures as nationhood symbols which I will then elaborate upon to deal with how history or historicism is treated in Chinese cinema and where notions of personal space can fit in. The Hong Kong and Chinese films address history as an eternal theme (the notion of jiu), that is to say, the history of fathers and sons and the longstanding bias of the patriarchal mode in historical relationships.
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David S G Goodman is Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney, where he is also Director of the Institute of Social Sciences. Educated at the University of Manchester, Peking University and the London School of Oriental & African Studies, his research is concerned with social and political change in China. Recent publications include China's Campaign to ‘Open Up the West' (2004) and The New Rich in China: Future rulers, present lives (2008). He is currently engaged in projects to examine the social basis of local politics in contemporary China (with Dr Beatriz Carrillo Garcia and Dr Chen Minglu); and the social history of Germans in China 1870-1937 (with Dr Yixu Lu).
Abstract: ‘The Revolution of 1939 in North China: The Sino-Japanese War and the Origins of the People’s Republic of China’
The War of Resistance to Japan (1937-1945) has long been recognized regarded as the most important stage in the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949. The Chinese Communist Party is usually portrayed as having pursued moderate, inclusive, and mobilisatory tactics, particularly in its North China base areas, during the war years to build a movement for national salvation from the bottom up. There is though the possibility of another contrasting history, masked by current interpretations, in which 1939 was the crucial turning point in that process. Starting in September 1939 the Chinese Communist Party in the Taihang Base Area adopted a more explicitly revolutionary strategy. It seized power locally from its allies and destroyed the opposition; it engaged in land reform and wealth redistribution; and it attempted to proletarianise itself. Understanding these phenomena and their consequences provides new perspectives on the Chinese Communist Party’s eventual success.
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Prasenjit Duara is Stamford Raffles Chair of Humanities at the National University of Singapore and emeritus professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on Chinese and East Asian history including Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS. His other books are Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003), Rescuing History from the Nation (1995) and most recently, The Global and the Regional in China's Nation-Formation, (Routledge 2009). He has also edited a volume on Decolonization (Routledge, 2004). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Abstract: ‘Turning Points in Chinese ideas of the Multi-national State.’
The paper seeks to grasp the conditions under which the idea of the multi-national state spread in the twentieth century in China both with reference to imperial Chinese traditions and to international, including the Soviet, state ideal. The shadow idea of the multi-national state, which has been little understood in international political theory generally, emerged earlier in China than most writers have acknowledged. It appeared first in the debates for parliamentary reform of the late 1900s, culminating in the 1909 national assembly under the Qing. In 1949, it underwent another transformation as the PRC instituted another iteration of it based partly on the Soviet model. How and why did the idea take root that the territorial state could encompass different nationalities when the idea of “one nation, one state” was passionately advocated at the same time? To what extent did the new state form conform to the criterion of a single “imagined community”? I will conclude with some comments on the relationship between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and China.
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