Fall 2017 Events

Killing Time: The Hong Kong Handover and its Afterlives

​On August 31, the Modern Chinese Culture Seminar hosted Professor Carlos Rojas of Duke University, who spoke about “Killing Time: The Hong Kong Handover and its Afterlives.” Speaking to an audience of thirty at UBC’s Department of Asian Studies, Prof. Rojas used Fruit Chan’s 2016 film Kill Time as a starting point to reflect on the legacy of the Handover, and on the significance of its twentieth—and fiftieth—anniversaries. Although Chan’s film is set in contemporary Beijing, based on a novel by a Mainland Chinese author, and at first glance appears to have little to do with Hong Kong, Prof. Rojas argued that the work explores concerns relevant to the Handover and its legacies, and particularly the sense of anticipation and anxiety that the Handover has generated, as well as the sense of potentiality and foreboding contained in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Agreement’s guarantee that Hong Kong would enjoy a post-Handover moratorium of “fifty years without change.”

Professor Carlos Rojas lectures on “Killing Time: The Hong Kong Handover and its Afterlives,” at the University of British Columbia, on August 31, 2017.