Education

posts on educational issues in Greater China

BACS Best Doctoral Thesis Award 2025 — nominations

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2025 BACS Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis on China
Calls for Nominations:

The British Association of Chinese Studies invites nominations for the Best Doctoral Thesis Prize on China for 2025. Self-nominations are invited. To enter the competition:

  • A candidate must be a member of the British Association of Chinese Studies. If you are not a member and wish to be eligible, please find details on how to join BACS here: http://bacsuk.org.uk/about-us/membership
  • A candidate must have successfully passed their thesis at any point between 1st January 2024 and 31st December 2024.
  • The candidate must have completed their doctorate at a UK higher education institution OR else be based in the UK at the time of submitting their application.
  • Candidates can have completed their thesis on China in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary (e.g. area studies, development studies, gender studies, social policy studies, media studies) department and with reference to any time period.
  • Candidates should be available to attend the BACS annual conference.

To enter the prize competition, candidates need to email the following documents to the Administrative Chair of the BACS Doctoral Thesis Prize Panel, Chris Berry, (chris.berry@kcl.ac.uk) by 31 May 2025: Continue reading BACS Best Doctoral Thesis Award 2025 — nominations →

Early Chinese Film Scene Index, and Survey

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Dear MCLC list members,

The Chinese Film Classics Project needs your help! Since 2020, the Project (chinesefilmclassics.org) has translated over forty (40) early Chinese films into English and made them available to the public for free. New funding is required to sustain the project, and grant agencies like to see evidence of “impact.” As such, if you have used any CFC films, please complete this brief anonymous survey, so that your institution, course(s), and/or students can be counted!

Alternatively, you can email me at <chris.rea@ubc.ca>. Thank you!

Christopher Rea

You can find the films on the Chinese Film Classics website: https://chinesefilmclassics.org/films/

FILM SCENE INDEX

Curious about early Chinese films but unsure where to start? Browse this new index and click on the link to watch a sample scene from one of the dozens of films translated by the Chinese Film Classics Project. The goals of this index are to make these films more accessible, to highlight some of their special features, to facilitate self-guided discovery, and to provide a resource for learners and educators. I make additions to this list periodically, so check back for updates.

https://chinesefilmclassics.org/index/ Continue reading Early Chinese Film Scene Index, and Survey →

AI pedagogy workshop

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PedAIgogy: Teaching Chinese Language, Literature & Culture in the Age of AI
Date: Saturday, May 3, 2025
Time: 9:30am – 4:00pm
Location: Founders Room, Claremont Colleges Library
800 N Dartmouth Ave., Claremont, CA 91711

The integration of AI into higher education presents both challenges and unprecedented opportunities. This interdisciplinary workshop provides a collaborative space for instructors in Chinese language, literature, and culture to share insights, strategies, and experiences in integrating AI into their teaching, learning, and research.

Click here for more information.

Registration (due 4/10/2025 PST)   Please register here to attend.

Posted by: Eileen Cheng <eileen.cheng@pomona.edu>

Hollywood in China summer course

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Colleagues,

I’ll be offering a course on the relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry at Columbia University this summer. Pls pass along info to students and colleagues who might be interested in the topic.

Hollywood in China: A Course on the Relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese Film Industry.

Come tease out a cluster of issues concerning the politics, economy, and culture of transnational entertainment and media practices — all at the heart of one of the most vibrant artistic and international cities in the world.

Admissions are open to all who would like to study with us this summer – – Go to arts.columbia.edu/summer for application details and deadlines.

All the best,

Ying ZHU

Shrinking the humanities to make way for AI

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Source: China Media Project (3/19/25)
Shrinking Humanities for AI
As China makes a national push toward technology-driven ‘new productive forces,’ Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University pivots from humanities to artificial intelligence. Is this the right move?
By Alex Colville

The main gate of Fudan University.

Shanghai’s Fudan University (复旦大学) is one of China’s most prestigious universities, with a raison d’etre unchanged, it claims, since the institution was founded in 1905: improving China’s position in the world through education. As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm — and becomes a crucial priority from top to bottom in China — the means of achieving that mission is changing, according to the university’s president, Jin Li (金力).

On February 25, Jin announced that Fudan would drastically reduce its course offerings in the humanities, instead focusing on AI training. In an interview with Guangzhou’s Southern Weekly (南方周末) on March 6, Jin said the university wanted to cultivate students that “can cope with the uncertainty of the future.” For Li, cutting the liberal arts cohort by as much as 20 percent is a social necessity. As he asked rhetorically in the interview: “How many liberal arts undergraduates will be needed in the current era?” (当前时代需要多少文科本科生?).

At present, courses related to artificial intelligence at Fudan are at 116 — and counting. And the university isn’t alone in downsizing the arts. Combing through Ministry of Education statistics on university courses cancelled in 2024, the commercial newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) noted that the majority were for liberal arts degrees, with some universities even abolishing their humanities colleges altogether. Continue reading Shrinking the humanities to make way for AI →

Call for article retraction

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Greetings and Happy New Year. We write to bring to your attention a recent article on Tibetan children and “racial empathy bias” that was published in the US psychology journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (the journal of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race), by a pair of Han Chinese psychology scholars (Jing Sheng and Li Wang) and their graduate students at South China Normal University. In their article, they claimed that their research in the TAR among Tibetan “primary school” students received the approval of their university’s “human ethics” board, but we and others think the scholarship is deeply suspect both ethically and theoretically, in that they make racist claims about Tibetan children’s alleged “racial empathy bias” toward Han Chinese.

The scholars’ claims were so explicitly racist that the journal received complaints after it was published. To their credit, the editors published an apology, and required the authors to strike the most egregious statements (see below). However, the article was NOT retracted, and remains published in the journal. Given recent Chinese state efforts to shape scholarly discourse on Tibet abroad, we feel strongly that this article needs to be completely retracted and that the continued presence of this article and others like it in US academic journals threatens the credibility of these journals and the well-known scholars on their editorial boards (this journal seems to have a huge editorial board, as well as a large list of “editorial consultants,” scholars from major colleges and universities across the U.S.).

Please support our call to the journal editors to retract this article by signing the open letter (see below) to the editors through the Google Form link at the top of the letter. Your name and affiliation will be automatically added to the letter. Continue reading Call for article retraction →

Soup dumplings

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Source: The Guardian (11/10/24)
100,000 Chinese students join 50km night-time bike ride in search of good soup dumplings
Authorities impose restrictions on bike hire after huge group blocks a highway between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in China, as night biking trend takes off
By  in Taipei

College students from Zhengzhou cycle to Kaifeng.

College students from Zhengzhou cycle to Kaifeng. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

A night-time cycling trend that started with four Chinese students riding 50km for dumplings blew out to a reported 100,000 people on Friday, jamming major roads, overwhelming a small tourist city and drawing the attention of authorities.

The pack of students, mostly on public share bikes, rode several hours through Henan province from their campuses in Zhengzhou to the ancient city of Kaifeng.

“People sang together and cheered for each other while climbing uphill together,” Liu Lulu, a student at Henan University, told China Daily. “I could feel the passion of the young people. And it was much more than a bike ride.”

But Kaifeng quickly reached capacity, with accommodation, restaurants and public spaces packed to bursting, officials said. Video circulating online shows tens of thousands of cyclists filling the six-lane Zhengkai avenue, the expressway between Zhengzhou and the streets of the much smaller Kaifeng, as police used loudhailers to ask students to leave, by bike or on a free bus.

To prevent a repeat of Friday’s event, authorities announced temporary restrictions on roads and cycle paths for the weekend, and bike share apps warned they would remotely lock any bikes taken out of designated zones in Zhengzhou.

Some Zhengzhou universities also enacted measures including banning bicycles on campuses and requiring students to apply for passes to leave the grounds. Continue reading Soup dumplings →

Georgia Tech MS in Global Media and Cultures

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Dear Colleagues,

Georgia Institute of Technology invites applicants to an exciting master’s degree program in cultural studies, media studies, intercultural communication, and language acquisition, our M.S. in Global Media and Cultures. Please find descriptions of the programs below. For further information, please see the websites below or e-mail grad@modlangs.gatech.edu. Thank you for sharing with interested students and colleagues!

Best,

Paul Foster

M.S. in Global Media and Cultures

The Master of Science in Global Media and Cultures is a joint program between the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech. This unique humanities program merges curricular offerings from both Schools and gives students the opportunity to engage in advanced research and training that combines cross-cultural competence, language acquisition, and media and communications expertise with global and cultural research.

Our 30-credit hour program combines a strong foundation in media and cultural studies with advanced training in a critical global language. Through graduate assistantships, internships, a final project, and a career portfolio, students can customize their experience to their own career goals.  Students can choose one out of seven possible language concentrations including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. GRE is not required. The application deadline is February 18, 2025.

Website: https://gmc.iac.gatech.edu

U of Nottingham censorship

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University of Nottingham censorship — is it linked to fears over the Ningbo campus, and Gui Minhai’s case?  On the occasion of Norway’s PM Jonas Gahr Støre traveling to China recently to make new business deals, I wanted to re-up my piece on Norway’s indifference to China’s ongoing genocide and how they censored their own king, when he spoke out about it on his visit:

“Of Kings and Concentration Camps: Xinjiang and Norway,” in Asia Dialogue, the online magazine of the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute, which is listed online as “a world leading centre for expertise on the Asia-Pacific region.”

I then discovered that the Nottingham magazine has deleted my article — without notice! Luckily it can still be read at a Taiwan site under a different title: “Norway, China and the Deep Hypocrisy of the ‘Human Rights Dialogue’ Ritual.”

Then I discovered that another Nottingham article of mine was also deleted without notice, namely this: “The Xinjiang camps as a ‘Stanford Prison Experiment.'” Being very proud of that piece, I now reposted it here: https://www.academia.edu/37656489/ (and also on ResearchGate.net), to make it accessible again.

The question remains:

Why this censorship by Nottingham university?  In fact, I have learned that it is not just me: Several other scholars have had their published scholarship deleted by Nottingham. Continue reading U of Nottingham censorship →

Fighting sexual temptation in HK

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Source: NYT (8/26/24)
Fighting Sexual Temptation? Play Badminton, Hong Kong Tells Teenagers.
Top officials in the Chinese territory have defended new sex education guidance that critics call regressive. Young people are amused.
By Olivia Wang and Mike Ives, Olivia Wang reported from Hong Kong.

People playing badminton in a gym.

Playing badminton in Hong Kong. Credit…Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

In Hong Kong, the authorities advise the young man to continue studying or to seek a diversion, including badminton, to avoid premarital sex and other “intimate behaviors.”

Critics, including lawmakers and sex educators, say that the Chinese territory’s new sex education materials are regressive. But top officials are not backing down, and the standoff is getting kind of awkward.

“Is badminton the Hong Kong answer to sexual impulses in schoolchildren?” the South China Morning Post newspaper asked in a headline over the weekend.

Hong Kong teenagers find it all pretty amusing. A few said on social media that the officials behind the policy have their “heads in the clouds.” Others have worked it into sexual slang, talking about “friends with badminton” instead of “friends with benefits.”

The sex ed materials were published last week by the Education Bureau in a 70-page document that includes worksheets for adolescents and guidance for their teachers. The document emphasizes that the lessons are not designed to encourage students to “start dating or having sexual behaviors early in life.” It also advises people in a “love relationship” to fill out a form setting the limits of their intimacy. Continue reading Fighting sexual temptation in HK →

Beyond Citizenship review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Frederik H. Green’s review of Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, by Di Luo. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/green3/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and
Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945

By Di Luo

Reviewed by Frederik H. Green

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xviii + 282 pp. ISBN 9789004524736 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004524743 (eBook).

Di Luo’s highly engaging monograph Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, explores the intricate relationship between literacy and the rise of the nation state in Republican-period China. Luo does not focus on the means through which gains in literacy were achieved or the tangible and intangible benefits improved literacy rates presented to the newly educated citizens or the nation state. Rather, Luo’s interest lies in the question of how the practice of literacy training in itself shaped the relationship between the state and the various actors involved in literacy training, including administrators, policy makers, local cadres, teachers, and students. Literacy training remained high on the agenda of both the GMD (KMT) and the CCP throughout the first part of the twentieth century, yet there existed distinct differences in each party’s respective discourse regarding the form and purpose of literacy training as well as in the ways each party named and presented illiteracy. Luo’s intention is not to demonstrate whether the GMD’s or the CCP’s strategies for literacy training were more successful. Instead, she illustrates through a number of fascinating case studies how the various actors involved perceived the role and value of those efforts and what differences existed in the way success was recorded, measured, and presented differently by the GMD and CCP. By putting the training process at the center of her analysis, as the reader is informed in the introduction, Luo highlights the “agentive role of historical actors and their participatory experience in meaning-making, rather than literacy per se” (18). To Luo, literacy training is a social process the importance of which to the making of modern China does not rest on the practice of learning alone, but equally “on the practices of sponsoring, managing, teaching, and representing” (20). In order to document this social process and the multi-dimensional practices the GMD and CCP engaged in, Luo carefully studied government and other official records in over a dozen major libraries and archives in China and the US. The result is an eye-opening study that captivates its reader through both its depths and breath and that spans from the late Qing until the first years of the People’s Republic. Continue reading Beyond Citizenship review →

A disappearance in Xinjiang

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Did not see this gripping feature on our imprisoned anthropologist colleague Rahile Dawut, until today. It says her elderly 80+ mother was allowed a prison visit, only through a screen. Unclear when. The Chinese Communist regime is so profoundly cowardly, it is hard to grasp, no-one can make sense of it. –Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Financial Times (4/26/24)
A Disappearance in Xinjiang
By Edward White

© Iris Legendre. Based on a portrait by Lisa Ross

A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.”

Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions. Continue reading A disappearance in Xinjiang →

China warns students about anti-China rhetoric

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Source: China Digital Times (8/14/24)
China’s Spy Agency Warns Students Against Anti-China Rhetoric In College Application Essays
By 

China’s Ministry of State Security has issued a warning to students seeking to study abroad: don’t cast yourself as a regime opponent in your college application essay. An article shared by the WeChat account of the Ministry of Public Security, a top domestic policing body, but attributed to the powerful intelligence service the Ministry of State Security, warned about the alleged risk college consultancies pose to national security. In the MSS’ telling, college consulting services are illegally inserting “anti-China prejudices” into students’ application essays to make them more attractive to foreign universities. Specifically, the article claims that foreign universities want essays with “run” flavor to them, a reference to content encouraging emigration from China. The essay further claims that negative information about China is a result of the infiltration of “hostile foreign forces.” It offered an anonymized retelling of a purportedly true story, in which a young person named Zhang was tricked into including “false reactionary political speech” in his college application by an unscrupulous college consultancy:

In order to realize his dream of studying abroad, a student named Zhang purchased the VIP services of a study abroad consultancy, hiring a team of professionals to help him develop an optimized study abroad plan. The head of the consultancy, “Little Rui,” told Zhang that one foreign university had rolled out the red carpet for Chinese students, with their odds of acceptance greatly increased if their application essay had a sufficiently “run” flavor to it. Under the consultancy’s guidance, a great deal of rhetoric pandering to anti-China prejudices—including false reactionary political speech—was grafted onto Zhang’s essay. Zhang had unknowingly transformed from a young student with a simple background into an anti-China “crusader” in the blink of an eye. Zhang is a victim of the college consultancy’s illegal behavior. [Chinese] Continue reading China warns students about anti-China rhetoric →

Taiwan’s declining birthrate forces schools to close

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Source: The Guardian (6/14/24)
Empty classrooms, silent halls: Taiwan’s declining birthrate forces schools to close
Authorities fear looming economic crises caused by an expanding elderly population without enough workers to support them
By and Lin Chi-hui in Taipei

Chung Hsing private high school in Taipei, Taiwan, which closed in 2019 due to low enrolment. Dozens of schools, colleges and universities are closing their doors due to population decline. Photograph: Helen Davidson/The Guardian

In the courtyard of the Chung Hsing private high school, desks and chairs are piled high like a monument or an unlit bonfire. Mounds of debris cover the play area, as two construction workers pull more broken furniture from empty classrooms, throwing them towards a pickup truck.

The central Taipei private school closed in 2019 after failing to reverse financial problems caused by low enrolment, and was sold to developers. The school was an early victim of a problem now sweeping across Taiwan’s educational institutions: decades of declining births mean there are no longer enough students to fill classrooms.

Like much of east Asia, Taiwan is struggling to achieve the “replacement rate” needed to maintain a stable population. That rate is 2.1 babies per woman, but Taiwan hasn’t hit that number since the mid-80s. In 2023, the rate was 0.865.

Demographers and governments fear looming economic crises caused by a growing elderly population without enough working taxpayers to support them. In Taiwan, the impact of shrinking generations has already started affecting military recruitment, and now is flowing on to enrolments at schools and universities. Continue reading Taiwan’s declining birthrate forces schools to close →

Gaokao security

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Source: SCMP (6/11/24)
Why armed China police and extraordinary security surround key national gaokao exam
Teachers are kept under watch in secure facilities as they draft national test and exam papers are printed in designated prisons
By Alice Yan in Shanghai

China’s most important examination for the future career prospects of students is subject to unprecedented levels of security. The Post explains why. Photo: SCMP composite/Baidu/Sohu

Mainland social media has hailed the fact that test papers for China’s most important examination – known on the mainland as gaokao – are drafted under strict security and printed in designated prisons.

The university entrance examination enjoys the highest security classification in the country to ensure fairness and justice for every person who takes the test, the state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Success or failure in the test is widely recognised as being a key factor in deciding a young person’s future.

More than 13 million people, the majority of whom were secondary school graduates, took the examination this year, the highest number in China’s history, making the competition more intense than before.

The importance of the landmark exam is underlined by the measures in place to protect its integrity. Continue reading Gaokao security →