Guobin Yang's Blog

Can't believe I haven't updated this blog for almost three years! Here are a few updates about recent publications, in reverse chronological order: 1. The May 2025 issue of Foreign Literature (外国文学) just published a special section in commemoration of Professor Wang Zuoliang (王佐良), who passed away 30 years ago in 1995. I contributed an article on Professor Wang's views about how to develop a Chinese paradigm of writing foreign literary histories. My piece discusses how Prof. Wang's work speaks to contemporary academic scholarship in both the humanities and the social sciences. If you don't read Chinese, you will find that the online platform where the journal is published has instant AI translation of Chinese texts into English. It's amazing, and certainly very convenient. The multilingual platform is called HSS Online and was launched last year by Foreign Language & Teaching Press in Beijing.  2. I'm extremely pleased to have an interview about Chin...

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).

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 Th...

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. 

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 unite...

Written for Issue No. 6 of Berggruen Insights, October 21, 2016 On January 13, 2008,  Southern Metropolis Daily  in the southern city of Guangzhou, China carried a story titled “The Rise of Internet Citizens: Don’t Even Think about Duping Netizens.” Referring to the many online protests in 2007, the story noted that in the internet age, netizens could no longer be hoodwinked by anyone. They would use online forums and blogs to voice their concerns and fight for social justice.  The word “netizens” in the title of the story, as was in public discourse at that time, carried a sense of solidarity.  Wangmin , or netizenry, had taken on the meanings of a collective identity in Chinese society. No matter how different they might be in other ways, netizens shared one distinct trait. Champions of marginal social groups, they were vociferous on issues of social injustice.  “Netizens” became a powerful collective identity through frequent netizen action – or what...

On Friday, October 7, 2016, I'll be giving a keynote speech at the workshop on " Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China ," organized by the Asian Studies Center, the China Council, and the Film Studies Program of the University of Pittsburgh. The title of the talk is: "Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China." On September 29, 2016, I gave a talk at the East Asia Center of the University of Virginia on " A Structural Transformation of the Chinese Virtual Sphere? Emotion, Reason, and Perverse Publicity ." Abstract:  This talk examines the hypothesis that the virtual sphere in Chinese cyberspace is undergoing a structural transformation in a perverted Habermasian sense. Whereas Habermas holds rational critical discourse to be the ideal in a democratic public sphere, in China today reason is mobilized as the main rhetorical resource for harnessing an emotional internet.  The transformation of the Chinese...