Mapping Modern Chinese Intellectual Life: A Roundtable Conversation with Tim Cheek

Event Details

Sponsors: Centre for Chinese Research, Institute of Asian Research
Speakers: Dr. Timothy Cheek (UBC), Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke (UBC), Dr. Timothy Brook (UBC), Dr. Jeremy Brown (SFU), Dr. Christopher Rea (Chair)

Mapping Modern Chinese Intellectual Life: A Roundtable Conversation with Tim Cheek
Book launch of The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History 

About the Event

This narrative history of Chinese intellectuals and public life provides a guide to making sense of China today. It offers a map and a method for understanding the intellectual in the long twentieth century, from China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 to the “Prosperous China” since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It surveys the changing terrain of intellectual life over this transformative century in Chinese history to enable readers to understand a particular figure, idea or debate. The map provides coordinates to track different times, different social worlds and key concepts. The historical method focuses on context and communities during six periods to make sense of ideas, institutions and individual thinkers across the century. Together they provide a memorable account of the scenes and protagonists, and arguments and ideas, of intellectuals and public life in modern China.

About the Author

Timothy Cheek is Professor and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research and Department of History at the University of British Columbia and Senior Fellow at St. John’s College. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. His other books include Living with Reform: China Since 1989 (2006), Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions (2002) and Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China (1997), as well as edited volumes, Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949, Vol. VIII with Stuart R. Schram (2015), A Critical Introduction to Mao (2010), New Perspectives on State Socialism in China (1997), with Tony Saich, The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (1989) translated and edited with Roderick MacFarquhar and Eugene Wu, and China’s Establishment Intellectuals (1986), edited with Carol Lee Hamrin. In recent years Cheek has been working with some Chinese intellectuals to explore avenues of collaborative research and translation.

The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2015) can be purchased at UBC Bookstore with 20% discount using provided sales form. The electronic version is also available in UBC Library.

Please RSVP here. Light refreshment is provided for registered participants. Book discount form can be downloaded here.