情动于「中」：当代中国的思想争鸣与情感政治
Organised by the Department of Chinese Studies and the Wan Boo Sow Research Centre for Chinese Culture.
Please note that the session will be conducted in Mandarin. Admission is free.
Programme
| 1:45pm | Registration |
| 2:00pm | Welcome Remarks & Introduction by Chair, Prof Ong Chang Woei 王昌伟教授 |
| 2:10pm | Presentation by Author, Dr Tu Hang 涂航助理教授 |
| 2:45pm | Comments by Discussant, Ms Lee Huay Leng 李慧玲女士 |
| 3:15pm | Q & A and Discussion, Moderated by Prof Ong Chang Woei 王昌伟教授 |
| 3:30pm | Refreshments |
Please register for the event here!
About the book
How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In An Emotional State, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.
This book chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of cultural wars about the Maoist past. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, and anger, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.