The Modern Chinese Culture Seminar, sponsored by the CCK-IUC, is a collective project to promote the study of modern Chinese culture since the 19th century. The Seminar invites leading scholars and cultural figures to conceptualize new directions for the field of modern Chinese cultural studies, and to discuss these ideas in seminars, workshops, lectures, and other public forums. The seminar is convened by Christopher Rea. ​

“Mars over America: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction,” Lecture by Mingwei Song, January 11, 2017

​On January 11, 2017, Professor Mingwei Song of Wellesley College delivered a lecture about new wave Chinese science fiction to an audience of over forty at UBC’s St. John’s College. Professor Song explained how the contemporary new wave of Chinese science fiction presents a subversive vision of China’s pursuit of power and wealth, a dystopian counterpart to the government-promoted “Chinese dream.” He reviewed the cutting-edge literary experiments that characterize the new wave, which evoke sensations ranging from the uncanny to the sublime, from the corporeal to the virtual, and from the post-human to the transcendent, covering novels such as Mars over America (Han Song, 2000), The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin, 2006) and The Waste Tide (Chen Qiufan, 2013).

As part of his visit to UBC, Professor Mingwei Song led a seminar for faculty and graduate students on January 13, 2017 on contemporary Chinese science fiction. He argued that just as the Chinese government is dreaming a “Chinese dream,” the new wave has unleashed a nightmarish unconscious. This dark and subversive side speaks either to the “invisible” dimensions of the reality, or simply the impossibility of representing a certain “reality” dictated by the discourse of the national “dream.” The new wave of Chinese science fiction has thrived on an avant-garde cultural spirit that encourages one to think beyond the conventional ways of perceiving reality and challenge the commonly accepted ideas about what constitutes the existence and self-identity of a person surrounded by technologies of self, society, and governance.

“Laughing in the Year of the Chicken: The Past and Future of Chinese Humor,” Comedian Jesse Appell in conversation with Christopher Rea, January 26, 2017
Chinese comedians should have a lot to crow about during this Year of the Rooster. But will Chinese humor in 2017 be defined by wit, satire, parody, farce, or just cockiness? On January 26, 2017, Jesse Appell, a practicing comedian based in Beijing, swapped perspectives with literary and cultural historian Christopher Rea on the past, present, and future of Chinese humor. Speaking at UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research, Mr. Appell, founder of both Laugh Beijing and the US-China Comedy Center, and Professor Rea, author of a history of laughter in China, shared examples of their favorite types of modern Chinese humor, and their experiences with Chinese humor in the club, on the street, and in the archive.

​On January 27, 2017, Jesse Appell performed for students, faculty, and community members at UBC Asian Studies’s Lunar New Year Gala. Mr. Appell spoke about studying Chinese comic performance in Beijing with xiangsheng master Ding Guangquan and the experience of living in an emptied capital during the Spring Festival, gave a virtuoso performance of tongue-twisters, and got a crowd of over 150 people on its feet with his own brand of hybrid live-video comic performance. 

On March 20, 2017, Dr. David Moser gave a riveting talk at UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research about the history of Putonghua, China’s official language. Drawing on his new book, A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016), Dr. Moser discussed how since the turn of the twentieth century a host of linguists and political leaders, from the radical intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement, to leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, all fought linguistic wars to establish a national language for a linguistically fractured China. In the process, many radical proposals were put forth, such as abolishing the Chinese language itself and replacing it with Esperanto, and eradicating the Chinese characters in favor of an alphabetic script. This talk traced the story of China's language unification project, the current language policy in China, and the pedagogical issues of teaching Chinese language and script in the 21st century era of cyberspace and the Internet. 

The one-and-a-half-day workshop, “Reading Gender: Blood, Body, and Ritual Violence in Chinese Religions,” was held on February 4 and 5, 2017, at George Washington University, with the support of the CCK-IUC. The workshop brought together 9 US scholars who are currently working on gender and Chinese religions. The purpose of the workshop was to advance the newly established sub-field of gender and religion in the China field by addressing the issue of how to read primary texts in Chinese religions from gender perspectives. The conference participants discussed a great variety of key primary texts, ranging from Buddhist and Daoist scriptures on the blood lake and blood bowl, male and female inner alchemical practices, to Chinese creation myth, literati writings on popular religious practices and courtesans’ deification, and Communist anti-shaman propaganda literature. The participants concluded the workshop on the following three points: first, the gendered reading of these texts proposes new ways to study Chinese religions; second, it would be great to have another workshop next year to deepen and expand the scope of examination from mere textual to visual materials and ethnographical reports; third, we should look for more resources to explore the possibility of propagating critical approaches to these primary texts through digital databases and online exposure. 

On April 19, 2017 at George Washington University, the CCK-IUC co-sponsored the Department of Religion’s annual Berz Lecture featuring a one-day symposium on “Religion and the Environment: Old Frontiers and New Directions.” It brought the renowned Professor Mayfair Yang of the University of California at Santa Barbara to join a group of six scholars and activists to discuss the intersection of religion and ecology. The other five speakers covered Christian, Jewish, Hindu, American Indian, and Islamic texts and practices. Professor Yang offered Chinese perspectives in a talk entitled “Environmentalism through Religious Discourse and Practice: Examples from Small-Town Wenzhou, China.” She pointed out the severe environmental challenges China faces today, and how local Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious initiatives may offer alternative solutions to China’s environmental crisis. 

CCK-IUC sponsored the recent publication of Remains of Life, a novel by Wu He and translated by Michael Berry. This work is part of the “Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan” series, of which David Der-wei Wang serves as the editor. Chen Guocheng, also known as Wu He, or “Dancing Crane,” investigates the Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. Remains of Life, a milestone of Chinese experimental literature, is a fictionalized account of the writer’s experiences among the people who live their lives in the aftermath of this history. Shifting among observations about the people, philosophical musings, and fantastical leaps of imagination, Remains of Life is a powerful literary reckoning with one of the darkest chapters in Taiwan’s colonial history. The translator, Michael Berry, is professor of modern Chinese literature and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

​On September 22-23, 2016, a multi-generational group of scholars gathered for an interdisciplinary workshop on material culture in early modern China.  The program, “Thinking Through Things in Qing China,” featured historical, literary, and art historical approaches to objects ranging from used clothing to jade chimes to steppe mushrooms. Several papers dealt specifically with lens technology; others treated questions of craftsmanship, rulership, and ethnic identity as expressed in material culture. Some papers dealt with things-as-objects; others dealt with representations of things in text. Thus, in some papers, the authors “thought through things” in order to draw conclusions about Qing society; whereas in others, the authors reflected on how people in the past used representations of things to comment on their lived experience. Dorothy Ko of Barnard College set the stage by highlighting the contributions of the papers that followed—framing the contributions by way of the children’s game rock (material), paper (text), and scissors (craft/skills). Her introduction was followed by panels titled: “Things in the World,” “The Stuff of Empire,” “Quotidian Things,” “Efficacious Things,” and “Seeing Things.” The workshop is the second in a series of three annual programs on late imperial Chinese culture and society supported by a grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and to be held at Johns Hopkins University.
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​“Sinophone” is arguably one of the most provocative concepts of world literary studies since the turn of the new millennium. The Sinophone Studies: New Directions International Conference, held at Harvard University on October 14-15, 2016, was co-organized by Professor Jing Tsu of Yale University and Professor David Der-wei Wang of Harvard University, following their joint effort on the same subject matter in 2007. The conference focused on four themes: site and sight, sound and script, roots and routes, history and potentiality. Professor Shu-mei Shih of UCLA and Professor Ng Kim Chew from Taiwan were the two keynote speakers. The two-day program was packed with more than 40 presentations by scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America, including two young scholars’ panels featuring a total of 12 Ph.D. students from America, Taiwan, and Singapore. The program also included a writers’ forum, which gathered renowned writers from all over the Sinophone world including Ng Kim Chew, Lo Yi-chin, Shih Shu Ching, Ha Jin, Ge Fei and the publisher of Linking, Woo Kamloon. The conference drew a sizable audience, including not only faculties, graduate students, and visiting scholars at Harvard but also graduate students from Yale and UCLA. The latest publication by Linking, Hua yi feng: Huayu yuxi wenxue duben (Sinophone/Xenophone: Contemporary Sinophone Literature Reader), co-edited by David Der-wei Wang, Ko Chia-cian, and Woo Kamloon made its debut at the conference and was highly commended by scholars in the field of Sinophone studies.
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​The Modern Chinese Culture Seminar, sponsored by the CCK-IUC, is a collective project to promote the study of modern Chinese culture since the 19th century. The Seminar invites leading scholars and cultural figures to conceptualize new directions for the field of modern Chinese cultural studies, and to discuss these ideas in seminars, workshops, lectures, and other public forums. The seminar is convened by Professor Christopher Rea.
 
Lecture by Xue Yiwei, October 17, 2016
 
On October 17, the Montreal-based author Xue Yiwei spoke at UBC about “New Directions in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” Hailed by Ha Jin as “a maverick in contemporary Chinese literature,” Xue discussed recent shifts in focus in the Chinese literary field, including the role of periodical editors, the China Writers’ Association, translators, and literary prizes. He also shared an outline of his own acclaimed literary career, including his experience in the literary fields of China and Canada. He also read the short story “The Peddler,” from his first book to be translated into English, Shenzheners (2016).
 
Lecture by Joan Judge, October 28, 2016
 
On October 28, Professor Joan Judge of the York University Department of History gave a lecture at the UBC Department of Asian Studies on her new research project, “In Search of the Chinese Common Reader: Usable Knowledge and Wondrous Ignorance in the Age of Global Science.” Professor Judge’s presentation offered an ethnography of Chinese readers of the late Qing and Republican periods, focusing on the genre of daily-use encyclopedias known as “complete compendia of myriad treasures” (wanbao quanshu) and the street side bookstalls which proffered avidly consumed—and widely condemned—cheap reading material. Her talk covered questions such as: Who were the common readers of this period? What information did they consider useful? And where did they turn to find it? Professor Judge also led a graduate methodology seminar for students of literature, cinema, and history on “horizontal reading,” drawing examples from her most recent book, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (California, 2015).
 
Lectures by Darryl Sterk, October 31 - November 2
 
From October 31 to November 2, the Modern Chinese Culture Seminar hosted Professor Darryl Sterk, an acclaimed translator and faculty member in the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan University, for a series of events at UBC. On October 31, Professor Sterk spoke to 70 undergraduate students in Professor Alison Bailey’s course “Fiction and Film from Modern Taiwan” about a novel he translated, Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes. The following day he offered a graduate seminar on English-Chinese literary translation, discussing both how to translate and how to bring a translation to market. On November 2, Professor Sterk spoke at the UBC First Nations Longhouse about the state of indigenous filmmaking in Taiwan, followed by a screening of LOKAH LAQI: Hang in There, Kids! (2016), the most recent feature film by director Laha Mebow.

​In the fall of 1948, a young woman in Shanghai left behind her high school Chinese literature textbook just as Communist forces made their way into the city and the Nationalists beat a hasty retreat to Taiwan. In 2011, Professor Joseph R. Allen chanced upon the textbook at the Shanghai Library, when he was collecting materials related to middle school Chinese literature textbooks in the Republican period. During his visit to Harvard University on November 18, 2016, Professor Allen, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota, shared with a roomful of faculties, graduate students, and visiting scholars how he came to discover the erstwhile owner of that textbook, Ms. Nana Hsu. The textbook was filled with Nana’s numerous jottings, including the name of “Wang Yunwu.” It turned out that Nana Hsu was the niece of Wang Yunwu, publisher and former Nationalist minister of finance. More surprisingly, Professor Allen found Nana Hsu and they established contact in 2014. The audience enjoyed Professor Allen’s talk, which was like a detective story imbued with personal imagination.