World Association for Chinese Studies

▶Anthropology of Hope: dreams of a better future and their limits in contemporary China

Organizer: Jaesok KIM (4 members)

In this panel, we discuss the conditions of hope in contemporary China, illuminating how people strive to realize their hope for a better future. Anthropologists have analyzed the objects of people’s hopes and their attempts to fulfill them. Our presenters will discuss the political, economic, and cultural conditions of (im)possibility of hoping, revealing the circumstances where hopefulness does or does not flourish. Our first presenter, Mengping LIU, examines the educational experiences of junior high school students from migrant families in Shenzhen. Liu focuses on why these students feel compelled to study intensively from an early age. Students and their parents often express their concern about the hukou-based public school system. Especially, in public high school admissions, students without a local (in this case, Shenzhen) hukou are required to achieve higher exam scores than local students to enter their target schools. Liu shows how this unequal threshold creates a strong sense of disadvantage and, sometimes, feeling of despair among the students, which consists of the (im)possibility of “climbing the social ladder” through education. Secondly, Yanchen JIN highlights the microprocesses through which abstract economic rationalities become embedded in lived common sense among employees of IT companies. These economic rationalities condition the employees vision for a better future, as they weather the highly competitive workplace situations. Focusing on Human Resources (HR) practitioners of such firms, Jin examines how HR craft and deliver persuasive explanations—routinized scripts, metaphors, and justificatory framings—that communicate corporate values and make outcomes seem “reasonable.” Yichi LIU, our third presenter, examines the social and cultural impacts of the development of the lab-grown diamond industry in Zhecheng, a small county in eastern Henan Province, China. Liu illuminates the everyday lives and value orientations of people who live in relatively underdeveloped small places in China. Following anthropology’s “material turn,” Liu also argues that lab-grown diamonds operate performatively, shaping local residents’ self-identities, regional persona, and value orientations across personal, communal, and national levels. Liu attempt to reposition new materialist frameworks through a grounded Chinese case, highlighting the mutual constitution of materiality, development, and political imagination. Finally, Jaesok KIM examines how the space of a specialty coffeehouse in a small provincial city expresses the yearnings for a better life, by offering “authentic” atmosphere of metropolitan life. Kim examines the marketing strategy of multiple reference adopted by Ounce Cafe, a specialty coffeehouse in Fuyang, a small, “backward” city of Guangdong Province. The residents of Fuyang’s New District—the rising middle-class of China—visited the cafe to feel the unique atmosphere, which generates the authentic experience of coffee consumption. The inner space of Ounce cafe displayed elements of the West and the Third World, designed to forge experiences of the Western metropolis and the coffee plantations of the Third World, making customers disembedded from the “slow and backward” living of the small provincial city. Kim reveals how Ounce cafe’s strong attachment to the authenticity of cafe space and experience of coffee consumption led to its overemphasis on foreignness.

▶China Narratives in Social Media, Education, Politics, Propaganda and Science

社交媒体、教育、政治、宣传与科学中的中国叙事

Organizer: Martin Woesler (3 members)

This panel examines how narratives about China are constructed, disseminated, and contested across diverse domains including social media platforms, educational curricula, political discourse, state propaganda, and scientific communication. As China's global presence continues to expand, the ways in which China is represented and perceived have become increasingly complex and polarized. Contributors to this panel analyze the mechanisms through which China narratives are shaped by different actors—governments, media organizations, educational institutions, and online communities—and how these narratives influence public opinion, policy-making, and cross-cultural understanding. The panel brings together perspectives from media studies, political science, education research, and science communication to offer a multidimensional analysis of contemporary China discourse.

▶Crisis and Renewal: Rethinking Tradition and Pathways of Practice in Contemporary Xiqu

危機與再生：當代戲曲的傳統再思與實踐路徑

Organizer: Li SIsi (2 members)

In today’s intertwined conditions of globalization and digitalization, Chinese xiqu (traditional theatre) stands at a pivotal moment of reinterpreting tradition and pursuing contemporary breakthroughs. It faces crises such as audience fragmentation, shifting media ecologies, and imbalances in cross-cultural discursive power, yet these ruptures also create openings for renewal. Under the theme “Rethinking Tradition and Artistic Practice in an Age of Crisis,” this panel examines how xiqu can reshape its aesthetic logic and cultural subjectivity through four approaches: theatrical experimentation, generative AI, online action, and cross-cultural circulation. The first paper proposes an “ancient–modern dialogue” framework for little-theatre xiqu, analyzing how reconfigurations of performance, directing, and audience relations create new pathways for the reception of classics. The second paper investigates prompts on the Jimeng AI platform; through text mining, it maps the symbolic imagination of xiqu imagery in digital space and identifies a dual tendency of “traditional representation” alongside “modern reconstruction.” The third paper focuses on professionally trained performers who move between institutional stages and livestream rooms, showing how digital media can become a site for revaluing their cultural labor and rebuilding self-identity. The fourth paper takes the “gaze of the Other” as its point of departure, revisiting the history of cross-cultural xiqu since Mei Lanfang. Drawing on a “starting from the Global South” perspective and the 2024–2025 China–Russia cultural exchange, it explores the possibility of reconstructing xiqu subjectivity through non-Western routes of dialogue. Together, the four studies are mutually illuminating, moving from theatre to digital space and from individual practice to cross-cultural exchange. The panel offers a systematic reflection on the mechanisms of xiqu transformation in an age of crisis and provides theoretical and practical insights for the global rearticulation of Eastern performance arts.

▶Cross-Cultural Regeneration and Textual Reinterpretation of Women in Dream of the Red Chamber

《紅樓夢》女性的跨文化再生與文本再詮釋

Organizer: Haihong (6 members)

This panel examines how female figures in Dream of the Red Chamber are continually regenerated and reconstituted across diverse cultural settings and interpretive traditions. Drawing on multiple research pathways, it highlights how “Red Chamber women” acquire renewed meanings through textual variation, interdisciplinary theorization, cross-media transformation, and transcultural circulation—thus underscoring their manifold afterlives in cross-cultural contexts. The panel traces the shifting configurations of female representation at the levels of text, culture, translation, and theory, while bringing into dialogue perspectives from language and discourse, ethical narration, translation studies, and institutional critique. In doing so, it foregrounds productive intersections between Red Chamber studies and the broader fields of comparative literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. From an integrated perspective that is cross-textual, cross-cultural, cross-theoretical, and cross-generational, the panel demonstrates how women in Dream of the Red Chamber are repeatedly reinterpreted and reproduced—both sustaining the cultural memory of a canonical work and opening new avenues for contemporary scholarship in gender studies and comparative literature.

▶Cultural Traditions of Altaic Peoples along the Silk Road: Chinese and Hungarian Perspectives

Organizer: Ildikó Gyöngyvér Sárközi (7 members)

Researchers from the Institute of Ethnic Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Institute of Ethnology of the ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities (MTA Centre of Excellence) have been conducting field research among Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, and Turkic-speaking peoples in China for over two decades. Their research focuses primarily on folklore and ethnology, addressing topics such as folk religiosity, epic traditions, and the intangible cultural heritage of the aforementioned ethnic groups. The presentations in this joint panel reflect these research areas and offer compelling examples of how Chinese and Hungarian scholars—drawing on distinct yet long-standing research traditions—integrate traditional and modern approaches within China studies, with the aim of achieving a deeper understanding of contemporary society.

▶Epistemological Convergence in Religions: Christian Encounters with East Asian Religions across Texts, Technologies, and Images, 1600-1950

基督教與東亞宗教的知識匯流：十七至二十世紀的文本、技術與視覺圖像

Organizer: Hu Hsu (5 members)

This panel examines how encounters between Christianity and East Asian religious traditions—including Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto—reshaped the epistemological foundations of each tradition from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. While the cross-cultural dialogue between Christianity and East Asian religions has received substantial scholarly attention, this panel departs from existing works in its analytical focus, source base, and temporal framing. First, by foregrounding epistemology, the panel investigates shifts in the fundamental ways through which religious actors understood the world, such as its origins, modes of operation, and historical trajectory. Epistemology thus serves as a critical leverage point for analyzing transformations in cosmology, eschatology, and social organization generated through religious encounters. Second, the panel expands the range of materials under consideration to include not only canonical texts, but also technological media, visual culture, and slogans used for social mobilization. This broader base of primary sources allows contributors to trace the theological, technological, and social consequences of changing epistemic frameworks. Third, the panel emphasizes the Sinosphere as a key site for the production or circulation of these texts, images, and symbols, thereby underscoring China’s central role in this epistemological convergence. Finally, by situating twentieth-century debates within the broader history of Christianity’s global expansion, this panel highlights continuities between the early modern and modern periods rather than treating them as discrete moments. Zhemeng Xu studies the Yuanxi qiqi tushuo luzui (first published in 1628), the earliest work in Chinese on Western mechanics, which emerged from the collaborative translation between a Jesuit and a Catholic Chinese literatus. By tracing shifts in textual genres and visual representations, she shows how European technical knowledge was reformulated within the late Ming intellectual current of “solid learning”, creating a blend of Western and Chinese knowledge traditions. Yaqiong Lyu reconsiders the Japanese “bull-and-egg” creation myth in Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis (1669), arguing that it emerged from transcultural exchanges involving the Chinese creation deity Pangu. By tracing visual motifs from South Asian Hindu iconography and narrative traditions circulating in China and Japan, it shows how early modern European knowledge of Japan was shaped through the convergence of multiple Asian religious traditions, with Chinese discourses serving as a crucial mediating link. Qiaoyu Han examines how Chinese-language Christian texts reshaped Hirata Atsutane’s epistemological understanding of death, the soul, and the afterlife. Through his reading of Jesuit works such as Matteo Ricci’s Jiren shipian and Giulio Aleni’s Sanshan lunxue ji, Atsutane encountered a linear, judgment-centered model of the soul articulated in Confucian idiom. He retranslated this framework into Shinto categories, transforming mythology into a moral cosmology linking human conduct, divine governance, and postmortem destiny. Hu Hsu examines how the epistemological foundations of Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucianism facilitate the promotion and transformation of Christianity and Buddhism in early twentieth-century China and Japan. In China, Taixu (1890-1947) integrated humanistic Buddhism with Wang’s thought to support the Nationalist political culture, which prioritizes earnest actions over ontological debates. In Japan, Uchimura Kanzō (1861-1930) also employed this learning to advance the non-church movement through its emphasis on individual agency.

▶Gendered Political Practices in Modern China: Making Knowledge, Institutions, and Everyday Life

Organizer: CAI YOUJIA (6 members)

Recent scholarship on the Chinese gender history have exhibited a broader tendency of narrating women’s everyday lived experiences and activities. This tendency was exemplified by historian Gail Hershatter’s (2011) discussion of rural women, and anthropologist Shuxuan Zhou’s recent book on female forest farmworkers (2024). This panel furthers the above scholarship and approach by examining how state projects in modern China were translated into everyday practices in the ground through gendered realms. Focusing on issues of memory, education, mass mobilization, and medical knowledge, this panel argues that political mobilization in modern China depended on gendered processes of implementation. This way, the panel highlights possible continuity behind the ambivalent relationship between women’s participation, state governance, and the reproduction of gendered social structures through different regimes in modern China. Spanning from the early 1900s (late Qing era) to the 1970s (the People’s Republic of China), the panel brings together four case studies. Cai’s paper reconsiders revolutionary memory by analyzing Feng Ziyou’s memoirs, showing how accusations concerning women’s private lives—particularly the gendered labeling of He Zhen—functioned as moralized and emotionally charged critiques within political conflict. Jin’s paper examines women’s education among Chinese students in Japan in the late Qing. She focuses on how gender knowledge was selectively translated, reorganized, and constrained through textbooks that simultaneously enabled women’s advancement and limited their participation in state-building. Xu’s paper explores women’s participation in early PRC literacy campaigns. She highlights the role of the All-China Women’s Federation in reconfiguring literacy practices to accommodate women’s everyday lives without fundamentally transforming existing gender hierarchies Zhou’s paper shifts attention to the 1970s, analyzing medical handbooks on birth control and their FAQ sections as quasi-catechisms. He contends that these sections facilitated the circulation of medical knowledge and the professionalization of grassroots practitioners.

▶Mentalities in Text Writing

文本书写中的心态

Organizer: Chen Yilu (2 members)

▶Nationalism and Memory Politics under Contestation: War Narratives, Museums, and Multilingual Textbooks

民族主義與記憶政治的博弈：戰爭敘事、博物館和多語種教科書

Organizer: Huimin Miao (4 members)

This panel examines nationalism and memory politics as dynamic and contested processes through which modern societies interpret crisis, construct collective identity, and negotiate political authority. Rather than treating nationalism as a fixed ideology, the panel highlights how national meanings are produced and reworked through memory practices embedded in intellectual discourse, cultural institutions, and educational infrastructures. The first paper foregrounds “memory of the Other” by examining how late Qing and Republican Chinese intellectuals interpreted a distant colonial war in Africa. Through fragmented news, misrecognition, and imaginative projection, these intellectuals transformed the Boer War into an ethical narrative of anti-imperial resistance, using the experience of a perceived “other” to articulate an early form of anti-colonial nationalism and a vision of global equality among weak nations. The second paper analyzes how different nation-states mobilize war memory to shape their respective nationalisms. Through a comparative study of war museums in China and Australia, it demonstrates how institutionalized commemorative practices stabilize the moral ambiguity of violence by privileging distinct narrative strategies—ranging from heroic sacrifice and historical inevitability to ritualized mourning and ethical reflection—thereby producing divergent nationalist meanings. The third paper examines multilingual textbooks as key instruments of nation-building, focusing on language policy and educational practice in China’s multi-ethnic borderlands. It reveals how textbooks became sites of ideological contestation where unificationist linguistic nationalism confronted pluralist or composite visions of nationhood, under conditions of intense party rivalry and shifting political circumstances. The study highlights the structural tensions and limits inherent in nation-building projects that seek to reconcile cultural diversity with political unity. Together, the panel argues that nationalism and memory politics are not merely ideological outcomes but adaptive processes through which states and intellectuals manage uncertainty, negotiate difference, and recalibrate national identity in moments of crisis.

▶The Fragility of Difference: Empire, Ideology and Unipolarity in East Asia

差异的脆弱性：东亚的帝国、意识形态与单极秩序

Organizer: Ye Lin (4 members)

Empires and hegemonies have often been described as flexible political forms–systems that rule through the incorporation of differences. Recent scholarship, including the work of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, has emphasized that empires thrived not through uniformity, but by accommodating plural practices. Yet such plurality has always been precarious. This panel foregrounds the fragility of difference under unipolar political orders—whether imperial, ideological, or Cold War hegemonic—by examining how East Asian regimes sought to incorporate and subordinate internal heterogeneity in the name of coherence. This panel comprises four papers: the first two emphasize the integration of diversity into uniformity, while the latter two illustrate how heterogeneity struggles within hegemonic structures. Cai Yixuan explores evolving narratives of the Spring and Autumn statesman Zichan, demonstrating how originally diverse portrayals were eventually “harmonized” into a standardized moral hierarchy serving imperial legitimacy. Zhang Zhirui traces successive empire-building efforts that contested the pluralist tianxia ideal, revealing the persistent fragility of diversity under statist centralization. Sun Danni examines Manchukuo’s cultural censorship regime, where attempts at aesthetic uniformity inadvertently generated new forms of heterogeneity. Lin Ye investigates how right-wing socialists in Taiwan and Japan imagined alternative socialist futures that were ultimately neutralized by Cold War liberal hegemony. Together, these papers argue that while empires and hegemonies could tolerate difference, they worked to co-opt its implications in service of centralized control. The drive to subsume competing visions reveals not only the contradictions of unipolarity, but also the vulnerability of difference itself under projects of unity. By tracing how political orders attempted to domesticate plurality, this panel contributes to scholarly debates on identity, legitimacy, and the shifting boundaries of political imagination.

▶Themes, Perspectives, and Methods: Research on the Compilation of Overseas Chinese Literary History

主题、视角与方法：海外中国文学史编纂研究

Organizer: Xing Gao (4 members)

▶“To Hear with Eyes”: Contemporary Chinese Literature and Sound Studies

“用眼倾听”：当代华语文学与声音研究

Organizer: zhijing wang (3 members)

Modern psycholinguistics and synesthetic research have confirmed that reading can activate the brain’s speech-processing mechanisms, enabling people to "hear with eyes." However, the experiences of sound created by literature go far beyond this. Whether through narrative simulations of acoustic perception, historical imagination of ethnic sounds, or the gradually unfolding rhythms of poetry, what our eyes can "hear" in literature is a more immersive and multi-layered beautiful soundscape. How does literature create rich sound experiences through semantic description and syntactic transformation? What kinds of symbolism does sound carry across different historical contexts and genres? To address these questions, our panel takes contemporary Chinese literature as an example, focusing on the rich intersections between literature and sound studies: Gao Xiang delves into the "simulation" techniques of Dung Kai-cheung's novella Congming Shijie, showcasing how the author portrays the experience of "hearing impairment," thereby establishing a connection between sound and subjectivity; Wang Zhijing examines poetry performances in mainland China and Taiwan, investigating how poets explore the expressive possibilities of voice within poetic form and how poetic voice is ultimately conveyed in the performance, thus creating the new conceptions of phonic poetics; focusing on Ng Kim Chew's short story collection Rain, Li Yuetong examines how to reimagine the historical scenes of Malaysia by constructing natural soundscapes and audionarratives. Through the analysis of sound expression across literary genres such as fiction and poetry, this panel will present a diverse soundscape of Chinese literature spanning mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia.