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Current and Showcase Projects

The Social Lives of Dead Bodies: Technologies of Identifications and the Politics of Memorialization in China

Principal Investigator: Professor LIN Zhenru
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2022
Brief Introduction: “The Social Lives of Dead Bodies” is a preliminary study of the transnational commemoration of the Second World War in Asia. In this project, I interrogate the role of dead bodies in facilitating commercial, religious, political, and cultural interactions between the Chinese diaspora in Myanmar and Chinese activist networks in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I closely examine the cooperation and contention behind efforts to repatriate the remains of Chinese soldiers who died in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theatre during the Second World War (1937-45). Combining ethnographic fieldwork with textual analysis and online social participation, it examines one crucial yet often neglected aspect in the recent studies of war memories—the border-crossing cooperation between non-state actors in memorization. 

Development Banking and Industrial Policies in China

Principal Investigator: Professor LI Chen
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2022

The Transformation of Local Religion in Rural Central China under Maoism, 1949-1976

Principal Investigator: Professor Jan KIELY
Fund Source: RGC General Research Fund
Year of Award: 2020
Brief Introduction: This study examines village religious culture in relation to local people’s existential concerns about sustenance, health and security from the 1950s through the early 1970s. The focus is on particular regions in the central provinces of Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu where rural people’s struggles for basic survival and security had long been acute and remained so, well after 1949.

‘A community of shared future’: ideas, debates and innovations in China’s global vision

Principal Investigator: Professor Tim SUMMERS
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2020
Brief Introduction: This project will examine the ideas and debates which have influenced the Chinese leadership’s development of “A community of shared future for (hu)mankind” as an innovation in its foreign policy discourse and global vision over recent years. As well as contextualising this in Chinese views about the world, the research will position this concept in the ongoing intellectual debates in the PRC, thus bringing together domestic and externally-oriented discussions of China’s place in the world.

Food Consumption of Left-behind Children and Rural Transformation in Post-reform China

Principal Investigator: Professor LING Minhua
Fund Source: RGC General Research Fund
Year of Award: 2019
Brief Introduction: This project situates left-behind children’s daily life, especially foodways and health consequences, within both individual households and rural communities at large, to reveal in ethnographic details the effects of parents’ migration upon their children’s wellbeing in the context of local economic conditions, socio ecological systems, and cultural values that have also been undergoing modifications due to migration and industrialization. Doing so will allow this research to illuminate how familial bonds and socioecological relations in rural communities have been changing, in terms of the ways they affect and are affected by dietary practices, under the sustained pressure of rural-to-urban migration.

The Hong Kong Crime Film

Principal Investigator: Professor Kristof VAN DEN TROOST
Fund Source: RGC Early Career Scheme
Year of Award: 2019
Brief Introduction: The aim of this project is to write a history of the Hong Kong crime film genre from the late 1940s to the present. The resulting book will place the genre in its political, social and cultural contexts—all the while keeping in mind that genre categories themselves are constructed in discourse. The book’s central argument is that in a highly commercialized and politically censored environment, Hong Kong crime films have historically been one of the few venues in which social and political issues could be addressed and negotiated.

Dialect Writing and Identity Formation from Late Qing to Contemporary Shanghai

Principal Investigator: Professor GAO Yunwen
Fund Source: RGC Early Career Scheme
Year of Award: 2019
Brief Introduction: This project examines the changing discourse and cultural significance of Wu dialect writing in the history of Shanghai literature and culture from the late Qing period (1849-1911) to the present. Dialect was a vital source in the formation of a new vernacular in late imperial and early Republican China. The Wu dialect region, now called the lower Yangtze River region, boasts a vibrant storytelling tradition. Many regional practices found their way into magazines and newspapers as a result of the flowering of Shanghai’s print culture. Despite various national language movements in Republican and Communist periods that suppressed dialects, dialect writing continues to persist in contemporary Shanghai and overseas Shanghainese-speaking communities. By tracing the historical trajectory of Wu dialect literature in the forms of serialized novel, short story, folk song, and poetry in Shanghai, this research posits oral traditions and narrative strategies from late imperial China continue to shape cultural identity beyond the regional level.

Tracing the history of Chinese immigrants in Cuba through Cantonese Opera in Havana during the 1920s-1940s

Principal Investigator: Professor GAO Yunwen
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2018
Brief Introduction: This project examines the operatic tradition and identity formation in the Chinese immigrant communities in Havana during the 1920s to 1940s. I analyze findings from archival research of Chinatown Opera theatre in the Americas and Southeast Asia, as well as contemporary records of Chinese immigrants in Cuba reported and aestheticized in documentary films and oral histories in order to explore the significance of Cantonese opera as a vehicle of the trans-Pacific trade and cultural exchange. Overall, this project contributes to the studies of Cantonese opera and cultural identity in overseas Chinese communities.

Hybrid Regulatory Regime and the Role of State in China’s Stock Market Crisis 2014-2015

Principal Investigator: Professor LI Chen
Fund Source: RGC Early Career Scheme
Year of Award: 2018

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Provincial Policy Responses in Yunnan

Principal Investigator: Professor Tim SUMMERS
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2018

Eating Junk: Consumption of Packaged Food among Left-behind Children in Rural China
食”垃圾”︰中國農村留守兒童的包裝食品消費

Principal Investigator: Professor LING Minhua
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2018

Political Censorship of Films in Pre-1997 Hong Kong: The 1988 Film Censorship Ordinance
九七回歸前香港電影的政治審查︰1988年電影檢查條例

Principal Investigator: Professor Kristof VAN DEN TROOST
Fund Source: Direct Grant for Research
Year of Award: 2018
Brief Introduction: This project revisited the introduction of the 1988 Film Censorship Ordinance in Hong Kong, including the societal debates about censorship in the years before and after the law was passed. Given the anxiety surrounding the survival of freedom of expression and of the press in the territory following the 1997 Handover, the discussion around film censorship assumed an unusual urgency and importance during this period. The project also assessed the impact of the new censorship legislation on local film genres, especially on so-called “Category III films”.

China in the Twentieth Century, An Additional Focus to “The Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society”

Principal Investigator: Professor David FAURE
Fund Source: The Vice-Chancellor’s One-off Discretionary Fund
Year of Award: 2014
Research Group Members: Click here
Related Activities:

• Twentieth Century China through Historical Anthropology Workshop
• Open Seminar: “War and Ecology in China: Henan, the Yellow River and Beyond, 1938-1950” (Presented by Dr. Micah Muscolino of Oxford University, 1 January 2016)
• Workshop on Research Methodology for the Historical Anthropology of Researching Twentieth Century China
• Workshop on Historical Anthropological perspective on the Production, Pastoralism and History in Hulunbuir
• Workshop on Ethnicity, Local Society and Religious Life from an Historical Anthropological Perspective
• Workshop on Soil and Society in Shaanxi
• International Conference on Historical Anthropology and Twentieth Century China

Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society

Principal Investigator: Professor David FAURE
Fund Source: RGC Fifth Round of Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme
Year of Award: 2010
For related activities please refer to the The Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society website.

Past Projects