News​​ – Current Research

Link to the anthology

Contributors/Authors: Helen Kim, Yonson Ahn, Jaok Kwon, Jihye Kim, Jan Creutzenberg, Katharina Süberkrüb, Yuri Ko, Jin-Wook Shin, Boyeong Jeong, Hannes B. Mosler, Yvonne Schulz Zinda, Yonsuk Chae

Citation: Yonson Ahn and Jihye Kim eds. 2023. Cross-border Interactions and Encounters between Germany and Korea.  Lanham: Lexington Books.

Zhiyi Yang's new monograph on Wang Jingwei, Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times was published in November 2023 by the University of Michigan Press. 

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 of Wang'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.  

Link to the book

In this edited volume, China experts from Asia, the United States, Europe and Australia set out the future implications of trends in CPC ideology, politics and governance in Xi Jinping's “New Era." Published in September 2022, the collection offers clues on what the upcoming 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party will bring, what the next decade of party rule might look like, and what China's political elites do envision for the party's and the country's future. The book is distributed in Open Access.

Citation:

Holbig, Heike (2022). Canonising Xi Jinping Thought – Ideological engineering and its real-world relevance. In: Frank N. Pieke and Bert Hofman (eds.), CPC Futures. The New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Singapore: NUS Press, 41-46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.56159/eai.52060. 

Download: https://epress.nus.edu.sg/cpcfutures/9789811852060.pdf (Open Access).

Prof. Zhiyi Yang elaborates on the concept of "Sinophone Classicism" in a new article in the Journal of Asian Studies, published in online first format by Cambridge University Press in June 2022.

In recent decades, highly heterogeneous literary and artistic articulations harking back to China's classical past have gained increasing currency in the global Sinophone space and cyberspace. Instead of dismissing them as “fetishisms" or authenticating them as “Chinese traditions," I propose “Sinophone classicism" as a new critical expression for conceptualizing this diverse array of articulations. It refers to the appropriation, redeployment, and reconfiguration of cultural memories evoking Chinese aesthetic and intellectual traditions for local, contemporary, and vernacular uses, by agents identified or self-identified as Chinese. This essay proposes a subjective, intimate, and reflexive way to experience an individual's culturally acquired “Chineseness" that is temporal, mnemonic, and often mediated by digital media. It joins recent scholarly efforts to dismantle the view of “Chinese modernity" as a monocentric and homogenous experience by refocusing on classicism as a kind of “antimodern modernism." It also joins the post-Eurocentric turn in global academia by hinting at a future of “global classicisms."

Based on quantiative text analysis of 6,957 articles published on the topic in Chinese newspapers, Bertram Lang analyses the trajectory of Chinese anti-corruption policies and discourses since the late Hu-Wen era until today. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis, he shows how corruption was constructed as an existential crisis immediately before and after Xi's ascent to power and how domestic and international cases of corruption are treated in systematically different ways in Chinese media. At the same time, the analysis also elucidates the severe problems in framing anti-corruption during Xi's second term, where news reports strike and increasingly fragile balance between announcements of success and calls to persevere in a 'heroic' fight. Initially vocal voices calling for the institutionalisation of the anti-corruption struggle based on rule-of-law principles have been gradually muted over the past years.