HKUST Global China Center

Rearticulation: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan
Date: 11 May 2026 (Mon)
Time: 4:00 PM
Venue: Room 4502 (Lift 25-26), HKUST

Speaker: Prof. Chih-ming Wang 王智明, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract
This talk features the theme of return in Chinese diasporic narratives since the late 1970s when China began its post-socialist transformation. Ranging from films, autobiographies, and fictions written by diasporic Chinese authors, including Peter Wang’s 1986 film A Great Wall, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 2011 memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Gish Jen’s 2022 collection of stories Thank You, Mr. Nixon, among others, these narratives present and embody a complex structure of feeling about the opening of China, about being Chinese overseas in the era of China’s rise, and about diverse and sometimes conflicting aspirations for and experiences of returning to China. Against the campaign to tell the China Story well, these stories of diasporic returning--with an emphasis on the problematic of trans/national relations--offer a different approach to the discussion of Global China by shedding new light on how the China Dream is understood beyond China.


Bio
Chih-ming Wang is research fellow and deputy director at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and the Chair of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (2023-2027). He is the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013) and Rearticulation: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan (Linking, 2021; in Chinese). He co-edited a special issue with Yu-Fang Cho for American Quarterly on “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies” (June 2017) and with Daniel Goh on Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017). He is currently working on two projects: one on Asian American return stories and post/cold war entanglements and the other on the idea of extraterritory and the history of US imperialism in Taiwan.

【Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China】
Time: 12 May 2026, TUE, 10:00 AM (HKT)
11 May 2026, MON, 7 PM (PDT)
Format: Online via Zoom
Speaker: Yan LONG, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Moderator: Yue HOU, Associate Director, Global China Center, Associate Professor of Social Science, HKUST

Abstract
This talk examines how China rebuilt its pandemic response system through the country’s anti-HIV/AIDS efforts from 1978 to 2018. Rather than focusing only on domestic developments, it traces how foreign interventions—challenging the post-socialist state’s initial inexperience with infectious disease—helped push China toward professionalizing public health bureaucracy and adopting more liberal, globally aligned technocratic approaches.
This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state's domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China's AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems.

The talk also highlights the role of Chinese bureaucrats, who leveraged these dynamics by incorporating certain AIDS activist subgroups—especially urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained skills and technical competencies into state institutions. Ultimately, this absorption allowed bureaucrats to broaden systems of bodily surveillance while maintaining a liberal-looking public posture for international audiences.

【Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation】
Speaker: Prof. Jessica Tsui-yan Li, York University
Moderator: Prof. Xiaolu Ma, HKUST
Date: April 28, 2026 (Tue)
Time: 8:00 pm - 10: pm
Venue: Zoom (Online Talk)
Registration: https://ust.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_72tIKFAfUD0a2Gi

Abstract
Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation by Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li focuses on the self-translation of Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Although self-translation is overlooked in most studies of her work, Chang’s literary achievements are attributed in part to her lifelong self-translation of her lived experiences and family sagas, as well as her bilingualism. This book enriches current studies of self-translation by proposing a new hypothesis of theorizing self-translation as a performative act, characterized by its in-betweenness and the aesthetic freedom that the self-translator enjoys, contextualized within larger debates about translation and the specific practice of self-translation in Chinese history in comparison to its Western counterpart.

Bio
Prof. Jessica Tsui-yan Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. She is Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film, Chinese Canadian literature, and comparative literature. She is the author of Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self Translation (Brill, 2025), the chief editor of The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities (McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2019), and the guest editor of special issues of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature: “Engaging Communities in Comparative Literature” (June 2017, 44.2) and “Garnering Diversities in Comparative Literature” (June 2018, 45.2). Her work has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.