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The 4^th edition of the Korean Popular Culture Workshop will take place on the 16^th of November 2022 between 4 and 6 pm CET. The event will be held online on Zoom with prior registration being required (registration link below). The workshop aims to shed light on the new developments in Korean cinema, dramas and music in the digital globalized world. This year the focus of the workshop will be the Korean film industry in the context of globalization and the changes in K-drama content and production generated by the emergence of streaming platforms like Netflix. The guest speakers are Jimmyn Parc, Associate Professor at the University of Malaya, Malaysia and Hyejung Ju, Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Claflin University in South Carolina, USA.

Registration Link

In cooperation and with the support of IZO, the Sinology department will offer an exceptional calligraphy class taught by Mr. Hu CHANG, an experienced professional calligrapher, in the winter semesters 2022/23.

The course will be taught in a biweekly format on Friday, 12-14 on Campus Westend. All material will be provided free of charge.

More information is available on the QIS course page.

Our annual bilingual report for the academic year 2021/22 has just been published and is freely available for download.

The difficult situation at the time of the pandemic has not prevented the IZO from continuing research and activities - albeit virtually - and the Center can look back on an eventful year. The following pages will give you an insight into the activities of the center under the difficult conditions of the pandemic.

In the course of 2021-22, the first steps have been taken at IZO towards a hopefully 'post-pandemic' future. Teaching is largely face-to-face again, and events organized by IZO have gradually been transferred back into the 'real' world.

A first high point, as early as October, was a discussion of experts with the economist Barry Naughton on the present state of the Chinese economy. This event, which took place under the auspices of the guest professorship funded by the Deutsche Bank Stiftung in the summer of 2021, was held at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. It was complemented by a meeting organized by the Early Career Researchers Network in which junior academics had an opportunity to speak to Professor Naughton and exchange their views on the future of Chinese and Asian Studies and on their own career perspectives.

Another major event in the year under review was the lecture on 'The Moral Duties of Art' with Yang Lian, the Chinese writer in exile and first laureate of the newly established IZO Fellowship (see below the poem he wrote in Frankfurt), and the writer Yan Geling. With an audience of 160 and the subsequent broadcasting of the video recording, this event reached an audience well beyond the boundaries of Frankfurt.

On the administrative level we have completely revised the IZO website, giving it a more modern appearance. It is now more up to date and highlights our research activities. Also, IZO has begun to significantly expand the sponsorship available to young researchers. We are pleased to announce that, in addition to the existing individual sponsorships, the newly created ECR Fund will offer up to 10.000 Euro per year to subsidise the independently organised activities of young researchers. This will also help to raise the profile of the University in the area of East Asia Studies.

In April 2022 another evaluation of IZO took place, the third since its inception. It is not yet known what the results and consequences will be. IZO continues to be committed to the study of the history of East Asia. In these turbulent times it also offers frameworks of reference and orientation in present-day East Asia. The most recent instance was a notable panel discussion in July of this year on Chinese-Russian relations in the context of the war in Ukraine.

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."

"True love or a political marriage of convenience? China-Russia relations in light of the Ukraine war"

As we are approaching the end of the summer semester, the IZO is looking forward to our last event before the summer break: On 19 July, 18.30-19.45 CET,  Marina Rudyak will join Maria Repnikova and Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova to look behind the curtains of the China-Russia partnership, which has been repeatedly celebrated diplomatically over the past months.

The entire online event was recorded and is available on Youtube.

Abstract

China and Russia have declared a friendship “without limits" and with “no forbidden areas". Chinese official rhetoric appears largely supportive of the Russian legitimisation of the war on Ukraine. But does China really support Russia unconditionally? What can we read between the lines, and how are Russia and the Russian-Ukrainian war discussed in inner-Chinese spaces (in Chinese, not directed at foreigners?) And what role is there to play for Europe?

The IZO is glad to host a virtual conversation on these questions between IZO member Marina Rudyak (Goethe University Frankfurt/Heidelberg University), Maria Repnikova (Georgia State University) and Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova (Riga Stradins University). While observing China-Russia relations from Western Europe, the United States and Eastern Europe, respectively, what all three have in common is that they were born in the former Soviet Union. Their knowledge of both Chinese and Russian political discourses gives them a rare and unique perspective on analysing current China-Russia dynamics.

About the speakers

Maria Repnikova is an Associate Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on China's political communication, Chinese soft power, China-Africa relations and China-Russia comparisons. She is the author of two books, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (2017) and Chinese Soft Power (2022). Since the eruption of the Russia-Ukraine war, she has been a regular commentator on China-Russia relations.

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a political scientist, China scholar, Head of Riga Stradins University China Studies Centre and Head of the Asia program at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs. Her research focuses on PRC political discourse, contemporary Chinese ideology, EU-China relations, as well as Belt and Road and other transcontinental interconnectivity initiatives. She is the author of the book Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia (2022).

Marina Rudyak is an Interim Professor for Chinese Politics at Goethe University Frankfurt and Assistant Professor for Chinese Cultural Studies at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on China's international development cooperation and the Chinese foreign policy discourse. Her 2020 completed doctoral Dissertation Becoming a Donor traced the formation of China's foreign aid policy. She is the co-creator of the Decoding China Dictionary.

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The discussion will take place virtually via Zoom. We kindly ask for registration in advance.

Image credit: Reuters, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meet in Denpasar, Indonesia (G20, July 5, 2022)