Our fall semester started last week. What did I do this summer? Among other things, I gave a few Zoom lectures to students of journalism and communication in the cities of Jinan, Guangzhou, and Changchun. All the lectures were in Chinese except one. The one in English was entitled "All Communication Is Translation." I don't know who did it, but the lecture is now available on bilibili. If you think bilibili is a platform for commercial influencers, you will be surprised (as I am) to find many academic lectures there and even more surprised to see that the popular lectures easily get tens of thousands of views (not mine, though).
9.04.2022
1.14.2022
Talks and resources about my new book The Wuhan Lockdown
Very excited to share that The Wuhan Lockdown will be officially released on Feb 15, 2022. Please enter promo code CUP20 for 20% discount on the Columbia University Press website. I will use this space to list book talks and other information/resources related to The Wuhan Lockdown.
Excerpts, Interviews, Reviews, and Commentaries
January 23, 2023. "Covid's legacy: how will China remember the pandemic?" Chinese Whispers (podcast hosted by Cindy Yu of The Spectator).
December 2022. The Wuhan Lockdown reviewed by Michael Sheringham in Asian Affairs. See: Michael Sheringham (2022) The Wuhan Lockdown, Asian Affairs, DOI:10.1080/03068374.2022.2151278
November 2022. The Wuhan Lockdown reviewed in Choice, Nov 2022 vol. 60, no. 3.
November 2022. The Wuhan Lockdown selected as Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 and The Top 75 Community College Titles, November 2022 Edition.
August 1, 2022, "Pandemic Diaries Under the Lens," book review in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
June 14, 2022. "Frontline Voices from the Pandemic's Early Days" (an excerpt from The Wuhan Lockdown). Penn Today.
May 11, 2022. Review of The Wuhan Lockdown. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
May 9, 2022. Read an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Wuhan Lockdown, HarperCollins India.
April 29, 2022. "Shanghai's Lockdown: A ChinaFile Conversation" includes my short commentary.
April 6, 2022. Karen Brooks, "Locked Down and Opening Up." Omnia, University of Pennsylvania.
October 30, 2021, Starred review in Kirkus Reviews.
Feb 9, 2022, "Viral Stories: On Guobin Yang's The Wuhan Lockdown," by Yangyang Cheng, in Los Angeles Review of Books.
Feb. 13, 2022, The Page 99 Test applied to The Wuhan Lockdown.
March 4, 2022, Undark Magazine publishes an excerpt from the book - the story about a delivery driver.
Sept. 24, 2020, "In China, Pandemic Diaries Unite, and Divide, a Nation." Social Science Research Council, Items.
Feb. 3, 2020. "The Digital Radicals of Wuhan." Center on Digital Culture and Society, University of Pennsylvania.
(Columbia University Press)
(HarperCollins India edition)
7.22.2020
Summer Institutes in Communication & Journalism Thrive in China
Given the pandemic situation and all the problems it has created, I'm amazed at the energy of Chinese colleagues in communication studies in organizing summer institutes and workshops. Just as amazing is the enthusiasm of graduate students and emerging scholars in attending these programs - often hundreds of them if not more.
Recently I gave two virtual talks at two of these summer institutes - one for the College of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, the other for the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou. One thing I like about these events is that the organizers would usually prepare news releases with summaries of the main points of the lectures and discussions. These news releases are published on their Schools' WeChat accounts, which are then shared quite widely. Some of the summaries are detailed enough I don't feel I need to write up the stuff for further publication.
Here is the link to one of the news releases for the "Advanced Summer Training Institute" organized by the College of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin at Madison and our own Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at Penn: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2c66buzGP0SPQ7zcODYNaQ
This is the 12th consecutive year colleagues at Zhejiang University have done this and the pandemic did not stop them. I talked about the descriptive turn in contemporary social sciences. My great colleague Victor Pickard talked about his book Democracy Without Journalism (which he held up for the audience to see in the inserted image). Other speakers included Seth Lewis (Oregon), David Ryfe (Iowa), Mike Ananny (USC), Yu HONG (ZhejiangU), Ye LU (FudanU), Hongtao LI (ZhejiangU), and Yanhong LI (Sun Yat-senU), Haiyan WANG (JinanU), Lu WEI (ZhejiangU), and Zhongdang Pan (Madison). Pan chaired a roundtable discussion. A number of students attending the Institute presented their own work as well.
Victor is as much of a celebrity in China as elsewhere. The academic journal Shanghai Journalism Review recently ran a wonderful (and long) interview with him here, in Chinese, of course. The same issue of the journal also ran an interview with me, where I introduced our CDCS and discussed digital culture, cultural sociology, and more.
7.21.2020
Call for Abstracts: Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World
This call will be posted on the website of CDCS soon, but here is an early peep at an important new project of our Center.
Call for Abstracts:
Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and poses multiple crises to nations and humanity, our previous assumptions of community, mobility, personhood, and even society itself are called into question. Widespread border closure and travel disruptions have rendered conventional forms of sociality difficult. Lockdown, social distancing and work-from-home orders have affected different social groups in vastly different ways, with clear adverse impact on women, racial minorities, and the working poor. Pandemic narratives proliferate on social media and news networks. Individuals in different world regions articulate different if not conflictual meanings of self, community, justice, and the nation in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political elites in some nations propagate narratives of virus nationalism and populism and violently exclude and stigmatize certain social groups.
In a world troubled by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative for researchers to rework our theoretical assumptions and frameworks as we embark on new empirical and theoretical inquiries. The Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to bring together a group of scholars for an interdisciplinary workshop to examine these important issues and explore new research agendas. We particularly welcome empirical research which takes historical, critical, cultural, and political-economic approaches to the study of the following topics:
-New and radical practices and visions of technologies in the COVID-19 pandemic
-Changing narratives of borders, communities, and mobility
-The resurgence of racism and right-wing nationalism
-Gender and the crisis of social reproduction
-Evolving patterns of media/tech activism and surveillance, and their implications for future social movements
-Narratives of identity, solidarity, emotions, personhood, social justice, and nationalism
-Artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies in economic, political and social processes
-Comparative studies of risks, vulnerabilities, and pandemic narratives across time and space
Please submit extended paper abstracts of 500-800 words in English to cdcs@asc.upenn.edu before September 1, 2020 with “COVID Workshop” in the subject line. The authors of accepted proposals will be invited to present the full paper at a workshop on March 19, 2021 hosted by the Center on Digital Culture and Society. Depending on the pandemic situation, the workshop may be virtual or in-person. If in-person, the workshop will be held at the University of Pennsylvania and organizers will cover the invited authors’ travel and accommodation. If the workshop is held virtually, organizers will pay an honorarium to invited speakers. Presented papers will be published in a special journal issue and/or as an edited book. The workshop will be co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania.
-New and radical practices and visions of technologies in the COVID-19 pandemic
-Changing narratives of borders, communities, and mobility
-The resurgence of racism and right-wing nationalism
-Gender and the crisis of social reproduction
-Evolving patterns of media/tech activism and surveillance, and their implications for future social movements
-Narratives of identity, solidarity, emotions, personhood, social justice, and nationalism
-Artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies in economic, political and social processes
-Comparative studies of risks, vulnerabilities, and pandemic narratives across time and space
Please submit extended paper abstracts of 500-800 words in English to cdcs@asc.upenn.edu before September 1, 2020 with “COVID Workshop” in the subject line. The authors of accepted proposals will be invited to present the full paper at a workshop on March 19, 2021 hosted by the Center on Digital Culture and Society. Depending on the pandemic situation, the workshop may be virtual or in-person. If in-person, the workshop will be held at the University of Pennsylvania and organizers will cover the invited authors’ travel and accommodation. If the workshop is held virtually, organizers will pay an honorarium to invited speakers. Presented papers will be published in a special journal issue and/or as an edited book. The workshop will be co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania.
First blog since 2017
I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I'm going to try to pick up blogging again. Last time I posted anything here was in 2017. Things have changed a little since then.
I guess part of the reason I'm switching back to good-old blogging is I'm spending less time on Twitter and even less on Facebook. I use Weibo and WeChat more, but that's in Chinese.
I don't know exactly what I'll blog about. Mostly about research, reading, writing, conferencing, and such. And my next post will be a "Call for Abstracts" for a workshop on "Narratives of COVID-19" we at the Center for Digital Culture and Society will be organizing.
I guess part of the reason I'm switching back to good-old blogging is I'm spending less time on Twitter and even less on Facebook. I use Weibo and WeChat more, but that's in Chinese.
I don't know exactly what I'll blog about. Mostly about research, reading, writing, conferencing, and such. And my next post will be a "Call for Abstracts" for a workshop on "Narratives of COVID-19" we at the Center for Digital Culture and Society will be organizing.
1.25.2017
“1919 • 1989 • 2009”
This essay was written in 2009 to introduce “Results: 0," an exhibition of photographs
of the Chinese student movement in 1989 curated by the Visual Studies Workshop, in Rochester,
New York. The original website where it was published has undergone several migrations. So I've decided to repost it here just so that it doesn't get lost.
***
***
The 20th anniversary of the Chinese pro-democracy movement has been commemorated around the world. This exhibition of Khiang Hei’s photographs is unique for the powerful visual records it presents. Hei was a witness to history. His photographs covered the main course of the movement in Beijing in the spring of 1989. They captured the epic drama in Tiananmen Square—the million-strong street demonstrations, the hunger strikers, and students huddling in colorful tents determined to reclaim Tiananmen as a space of the people. There were moments of quietness and silence, as well as scenes of passionate speech-making, flag-waving crowds, and beautiful children looking on with wide-open eyes. As the protests escalated, bright portraits of solidarity, hope, and revolutionary festivity gave way to dark images of pain and exhaustion until ghastly pictures of desolate streets, abandoned bicycles, burning tanks, and death marked the terrible ending of that short but singular moment in Chinese history. Hei’s photographs take viewers back to the joys and sorrows of that extraordinary time.
Inside China, there have been no official commemorations of this event. June Fourth, 1989 remains a forbidden topic in public discourse. Images, videos, and publications about the movement are unavailable in the Chinese market and are filtered on Chinese web sites. A search for images of “Tiananmen” in Google China yields no results about tanks or student protests. The generation that has come of age after 1989 knows little about it. A movement that shook the world twenty years ago is shrouded in darkness in its home country.
Yet despite an officially instituted amnesia, the movement has not been forgotten in China. A Tiananmen Mothers movement, organized by parents whose loved ones were killed or wounded on June Fourth, 1989, has been pressing the Chinese government to publicly acknowledge its culpability and apologize to the victims and their families. Original participants have formed communities of memory. Intellectuals have never ceased reflecting on the meaning of the movement.
From a longer historical perspective, the popular movement in 1989 marked the peak of the enlightenment project in modern China. Chinese struggles for enlightenment started in the iconic May Fourth movement in 1919. Like the movement in 1989, it was led by students and it started in Tiananmen Square. It celebrated the European Enlightenment ideals of democracy and science, even as it attacked western imperialism and Confucian culture. The protesters in 1989 proclaimed themselves true heirs of the May Fourth spirit and fought for the same ideals.
The military crackdown on June Fourth, 1989, shattered their dreams. Disillusionment and cynicism permeated Chinese society in the wake of the repression. For the sake of self-redemption if nothing else, the senior Communist party leader Deng Xiaoping pushed forward the party’s reform agenda in 1992. China has since rapidly transformed into a market economy. In recent years, a “China miracle” is suddenly all the buzz in the mass media.
It is a miracle with severe costs, however. As China maintains high levels of economic growth, it faces problems of social polarization, corruption, and environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale. In response, a new wave of popular protest and social activism is sweeping across China. Tens of thousands of protests and petitions happen every year, involving people from all walks of life.
Compared with the protests in 1989, however, the goals of this new activism are more concrete and down to earth, the means are more moderate, and the issues are more diverse. Many new issues have taken center stage, ranging from environmental protection and HIV/AIDS to marginalized social groups, alternative lifestyles, anti-discrimination, legal aid, education for migrants and their children, and domestic violence. Freedom and democracy are still inspiring ideals, yet activists begin to use more moderate tactics. They invoke the law in their struggles to protect citizens’ rights, adopt non-confrontational forms of action, make skilful use of the Internet, and emphasize the building of an organizational base.
The most important forms of China’s new citizen activism are probably new types of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and online activism. NGOs first appeared in the mid-1990s. Now numbering in the thousands, they conduct public forums, undertake community projects, and launch media campaigns, but rarely organize street protests. To maintain a legitimate status and some degree of independence, they avoid direct confrontations with government authorities and cultivate cooperative ties with state officials.
Online activism is primarily discursive and symbolic, involving verbal protest in online forums, the hosting of campaign websites, and online signature petitions. Speed and ease of access make the Internet an especially effective forum for exposing corruption and airing grievances. Cartoons, online videos, digital images, and other artistic forms are used to mock power and authority or express dissent. Despite (and often in response to) government censorship of the Internet, the most creative and penetrating of these cultural forms spread online like wildfire and become national media events. Many cases have shown unequivocally that Chinese citizens are effectively tapping the power of the Internet to achieve popular contention.
Thus in the two decades since 1989, protests have increased in frequency, but have assumed new forms. Large-scale mobilization of the 1989 style has not been repeated. In urban China, moderation, flexibility, and non-confrontation are the dominant style of the new citizen activism. This seemingly prosaic style of activism, however, is effective in its own ways. It has led to changes and shifts in government behavior and policies. Perhaps more importantly, the flourishing of this new activism both reflects and raises people’s consciousness about what they can do and must do to defend their rights. China’s political environment continues to constrain activism. Although Chinese society is more open than ever before, public discussions about many issues (such as the history of June Fourth) are still off limits. NGOs may be forced to close down for political reasons. But the flexible style of the new citizen activism means that it is here to stay.
How to account for the rise of this new citizen activism in China? One obvious reason is that Chinese society and politics have undergone profound change since 1989. In the middle of economic growth, the rural population is left behind. And because of unsustainable approaches to development, the environment is seriously damaged. The privatization of large state-owned enterprises has caused serious unemployment and led to frequent labor strikes. Even the increasing size of the urban middle class is a mixed blessing. With growing private ownership of houses, apartments, and automobiles, the middle class is raising its demand for the rule of law and the protection of their property and civil rights. The urban middle class is the main force in NGO-led activism.
The development of the Internet and mobile phones facilitates citizen activism. China established Internet connectivity in 1994. Since then, the number of Internet users has increased dramatically, exceeding 300 million by July 2009. This is the largest Internet population in the world. A crucial factor underlying the rapid development of the Internet in China is that the Internet meets urgent social needs—the needs for information, communication, social connection, and civic organizing. The growth of the Internet in China has paralleled the growth of civil society.
Globalization is another important factor. The interactions between globalization and local cultures are complex, often involving mutual learning. In the field of citizen activism, the influences of international NGOs on indigenous citizen groups are evident. Hundreds of international NGOs have set up offices or run projects in China. Like domestic NGOs, they work on a broad range of issues. Greenpeace, for example, has an active office in Beijing and has waged several successful media campaigns. These international NGOs collaborate with Chinese NGOs, offer grants to them, and provide training workshops and other forms of capacity building. They introduce global discourses of citizen action and international cultures of civic organizing.
Members of the Tiananmen generation are active in this new wave of activism. The fateful experiences in 1989 gave the participants the collective identity of a new political generation—the Tiananmen generation. This generational identity carries with it the historical consciousness of a repressed revolutionary movement and helps to sustain a level of civic participation. The political experiences people gained and the social ties they forged in 1989 serve them well as some of them assume new roles as environmentalists, human rights activists, legal activists, organizers of home-owner associations, and internet activists. Naturally, the vast majority of the generation have settled back to the routines of ordinary life, but in China today, everyday life is no less a site of political activism than Tiananmen Square. Much like the global 1960s generation, the Tiananmen generation has not relinquished its political passions, but has transformed them into new forms.
As China’s post-1989 cohort comes of age, a process of generational learning is taking place. Due to the lack of history education, the 1990s cohort may know little about what transpired in 1989. But many young people are eager to learn that history. They are not as politically cynical or indifferent to social justice as they are sometimes made to appear. This new generation proved itself capable of civic engagement and activism in the outpouring of volunteerism after the earthquakes in Sichuan province last year. Some of them are consciously learning from the political experiences of their parents’ generation.
The same conditions that give rise to the new citizen activism explain its relationship to 1989. The rise of a middle class, the Internet, the cultures of globalization, the coming-of-age of a younger generation—all these shape contemporary activism. Adapting to new conditions, Chinese activists have fashioned new identities and new forms of action. In the age of the Internet, they are both organized and scattered, both connected and decentralized. In dispersion as in solidarity, they are a formidable force of social change. Fighting for small gains in everyday struggles, they have not lost sight of the bigger visions of the pro-democracy movement in 1989, just as the generation of 1989 had upheld the visions of their May Fourth predecessors.
By paying tribute to the heroes of 1989 and to the Tiananmen generation, this exhibition commemorates a great tradition and celebrates the courage of the common people in their struggles for a better world. The use of multi-media formats, including an exhibition web site, is the most fitting expression of the creativity of the new citizen activism that has emerged in China since 1989.
12.14.2016
Book description for paperback of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China
Excited to know
that the paperback of my book The Red
Guard Generation and Political Activism in China will be out in March,
2017. I had to come up with a very condensed version of the book description,
and here it is:
Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth performed
an imagined revolution from 1966 to 1968 in order to prove their revolutionary
credentials and enact a hallowed political mythology. As sent-down youth in the
1970s, they rejected their revolutionary idealism and embraced self-interest
and the values of ordinary life, paving the way for the cultural and political
movements of the 1980s. Yang shows that contemporary memories of the Cultural
Revolution are contested and often fall along the lines of political division
that formed fifty years ago.
The book description on Amazon
and on the web site of the press is like this:
Raised to be
"flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding
of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at
first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring
factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that
Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a
political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's
revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the
Red Guard against the communist government.
Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
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Very excited to share that The Wuhan Lockdown will be officially released on Feb 15, 2022. Please enter promo code CUP20 for 20% discount o... -
Our fall semester started last week. What did I do this summer? Among other things, I gave a few Zoom lectures to students of journalism and...
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Because of its convenience, I might occasionally use this space for pedagogical purposes, as I'm doing now. If so, I won't be twee...