The Chinese Cultural Revolution discourse in Ming Pao
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
- Venue
- Virtual event
About this event
Recent studies marked the 1967 riots as a watershed in Hong Kong’s subsequent identity formation, which was based on a dichotomy between a benevolent British colonial administration and a hostile socialist China.
However, this prevailing view overlooks the complexity of Chinese nationalism and the role of the Cultural Revolution (CR) in forming a local consciousness. In the process of structuring its local/national identity discourse, Ming Pao, a neutral newspaper, took a strategically ambiguous approach, rather than a definite political position involving factional leftism, Communist nationalism, Trotskyism, cultural nationalism, and pro-KMT ultra-rightism.
The aim of this investigation of Ming Pao’s CR discourse is to reveal how its intellectual tropes—“stability and prosperity,” “three-in-one combination” (i.e., socialist equality, capitalist economy’s freedom, and Confucian benevolence), and “the concepts of everyday and labor”—helped to cultivate a local identity for the Chinese during the CR.
Ming Pao’s nationalist discourse demonstrated an alternative way to understand the formation of the popular identity discourse of Hong Kong, which transcended the traditional Cold War dichotomy between communism and capitalism and the pro-colonial identity discourse.
About the speaker
Leung Shuk Man (PhD, SOAS, London, 2013) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining HKU in 2018, she taught at the Department of Chinese in Lingnan University and the Department of Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction, Hong Kong literature, and print media in Hong Kong’s cultural Cold War.
Her first book Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture, and Knowledge Formation, 1902–1912 was published by Brill in 2023. Her second book project, titled Identities in the Cold War: The Cultural Revolution Discourse in Hong Kong Print Media, 1966–1977, received funding from the Early Career Scheme (2017–2020) and the General Research Fund (2022–2024). Her major publications appear in Modern China, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Studies Review, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Cultural Studies, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese and Comparative Literature Studies, together with Chinese articles published in top-tier CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index) and THCI (Taiwan Humanities Core Index) indexed journals.
She won the Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards and received funding from the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust in 2021. She was elected as Early Career Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and won the 2023 Wang Gungwu Best Article Prize in 2024.
Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, SOAS School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
Registration
This webinar will take place online via Zoom. This webinar will not be recorded.
Organiser
Contact
- Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
Photo credit: Mark Hang Fung So via Unsplash
