In March I’ll be going to the Netherlands for five days to talk about my favorite topics: Unofficial History, but with an interesting spin: is some version of the Cultural Revolution happening in the West today?

My trip will start on March 12 at 15:15 at Leiden University, where I’ll talk about underground histories with Svetlana Kharchenkova, a cultural sociologist, Bo Wang, a researcher, filmmaker and artist, with the session chaired by  Ying Zhang, a historian at the university. Register here!

After a talk at a class on the 13th, I’ll go to The Hague on the 14th to speak at the Nowhere Bookstore, which is part of a growing diasporic civil society movement outside of China. The bookstore is one of three run by Annie Zhang Jieping, who will moderate. We’ll talk about the link between resistance now and in the past. Registration here.

After  down day on the 15th, I’ll join Annie again on the 16th along with Yuan Li on her Bumingbai podcast for a live recording in Amsterdam. Our topic: why do some Chinese compare events in the United States to China’s Cultural Revolution? That event is unfortunately already sold out but the podcast will air soon after. 

Overall, it will be great to talk to more people from the diaspora and get their feedback on the China Unofficial Archives. We’re looking for more constructive criticism and this will be a great chance. For reasons I don’t entirely get right now, the Netherlands has become a center for Chinese NGO activity–maybe I’ll know more by late March…

The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) cordially invites you to a public panel discussion and book presentation:

What the Struggle for Hong Kong Tells Us About Growing Authoritarianism in China

Under President Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has charted a path toward greater authoritarian rule. Looking at developments within the PRC and in Hong Kong provides insight into how China’s slide toward authoritarianism is actually occurring. It also reveals how citizens or visitors might experience this slide firsthand.

In this discussion, our experts will analyze the receding freedoms of Hong Kongers, the role of underground historians in China who challenge the party line, and how the art world in Hong Kong is navigating censorship to survive and even flourish in the once open, cosmopolitan city. They will also evaluate the role of technology in codifying and entrenching Beijing’s grip over the lives of Chinese people – those who live within the borders of the PRC and beyond them. In doing so, they will assess what these changes mean for Germany’s policy toward China and how Germany’s scholars, business community, and civil society actors should engage with the more authoritarian China of today.

This discussion is based on Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s upcoming book Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, an updated edition of his earlier work Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, which will be released in January 2025 by Bui Jones.

Speakers: 
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine 
Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher with a focus on China 
Minh An Szabó de Buca, cultural journalist and documentary filmmaker 
Shi Ming, Chinese-German journalist and publicist

Moderator: 
Michael Laha, Senior Research Fellow for China and Technology Policy, DGAP

This event will be held in English.

Please register for the event at events@dgap.org.

Link: 

https://dgap.org/en/events/what-struggle-hong-kong-tells-us-about-growing-authoritarianism-china 

Thanks to Italian publisher Neri Pozza, Sparks is coming out in Italian and thanks to two Italy-based academics I’ll be on a four-day seven-lecture tour of the country from Rome to Naples to Milan to Pavia to Florence. 

I’ve put all the details of the tour on the usual speaking/media page but I thought I’d mention how I like the way the book is being presented. First, the subtitle is pretty grabby–“Clandestine Stories from China.” These are indeed clandestine stories, not only in the sense of them being secret but also because the term has a whiff of the conspiratorial, the dangerous, and the underground.

The talks themselves are also cleverly framed for a general audience. Many of them play on the concept of China being a “vulnerable superpower,” which I think is useful, especially because we’re bombarded with hype about China being on the march forward. It is, but it’s also fragile, in part because of the underground historians’ “clandestine stories,” which undermine CCP rule. 

It’s also nice to be speaking at such a variety of  venues: universities, think tanks, and even in a Florentine villa. I’m especially grateful to Enrico Fardella at the University of Naples for organizing the Rome/Naples leg and Axel Berkofsky of the University of Pavia and ISPI in Milan.