He Junde

Background

He Junde graduated from Southeast Asian Culture Studies in the Southeast Asian Department of the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University. He is good at communicating with others and has a remarkable ability to adapt himself to the circumstances, showing his excellent capability in literature reviewing, analyzing, and critical thinking.

Junde became a student of the Comparative Asian Studies Programme in 2022 to continue his research on intellectuals within the Japanese colonial empire in East and Southeast Asia. He hopes to gain more knowledge about Asia, being more critical of the notion of “Asia” in NUS, which helps develop a more comprehensive perspective when talking about Asian history under the Japanese occupation in WWII.

Asian Languages

Junde is a native Chinese speaker and has learned Bahasa Indonesia for several years since undergraduate school and can speak, read, and write smoothly. At the same time, Junde also learned Japanese for two years in order to read Japanese during his undergraduate and postgraduate studies. He is now strengthening his Japanese language learning, striving to speak, listen, read, and write better.

Research Interests

Junde is interested in the history of Indonesia, especially as it relates to the Japanese occupation period in Southeast Asia. He has read a lot of research in this field and has finished his M.A. thesis on a comparative study investigating two young writers, Chairil Anwar and Rosihan Anwar, in Japanese occupied Indonesia. Now he continues his research in NUS on the young intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation as the topic for his future dissertation.