Dear List Members,

The 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference was successfully held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on June 24-25, with six keynote speeches, sixty-five panels, and nearly 400 participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. I am very grateful to the support of the HKUST faculty, students, and staff, particularly Professor Jianmei Liu and her students. My gratitude also goes to all conference participants and the audiences. The conference program can be found here.

As the current president of the ACCL, my last job is to announce that the election for the next president is now open. We have two excellent candidates. They are:

Luo Liang (University of Kentucky)
Zhu Ping (UCSD)

Their statements can be found here.

If you would like to cast your vote, please click this link, fill in the relevant information and make your choice.

​I am thankful to two former presidents, who will supervise the election and count the votes. Please cast your vote before November 10. Thank you very much!

Yours sincerely,

Mingwei Song msong2@wellesley.edu

Source: Focus Taiwan (10/22/24)
Author, int’l writing program founder Hualing Nieh Engle dies at 99
By Yeh Kuan-yin, Wang Pao-er and Matthew Mazzetta

Novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature

Taipei, Oct. 22 (CNA) Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), a Chinese-language novelist and co-founder of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, has died at the age of 99.

Nieh’s death on Oct. 20 was confirmed to CNA by the poet Lin Chi-yang (林淇瀁), known by the pen name Xiang Yang (向陽), who received the news in a text message from Nieh’s daughter Lan-Lan Wang (王曉藍).

Hualing Nieh was born in 1925 in Wuhan, China. She came to Taiwan with her family in 1949, and later began publishing books while holding teaching positions at National Taiwan University and Tunghai University.

In 1964, Nieh moved to the United States after accepting a position as a visiting writer at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Three years later, Nieh, along with her future husband, the poet Paul Engle, co-founded the university’s International Writing Program.

In the nearly 40 years since then, the program has offered writing residencies for over 1,600 writers from 160 countries, including Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇) and Taiwanese poets Xiang Yang, Wu Sheng (吳晟) and Cheng Chou-yu (鄭愁予). Continue reading Nieh Hualing Engle dies at 99 →

It is with great sadness that I must share the news that Stefan Landsberger has unexpectedly passed away. Our Chinese Studies community here at Leiden University is still shell-shocked by this tragic loss. Stefan had not only a huge influence on the study of contemporary Chinese propaganda and media, but he was also a close and trusted friend.

Our institute has now published an obituary I wrote, along with several anecdotes and recollections that students, colleagues, and friends were so kind to share. These are, of course, only a small slice of the compassionate and heart-warming comments we’ve received this past week. I nevertheless hope these vignettes and thoughts will offer a small impression of how much Stefan meant to us.

Florian Schneider <f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl>

In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024)

Published on 17 October 2024

My colleagues and I have been devastated to learn that our good colleague and friend Stefan Landsberger (born 1955) passed away unexpectedly, on 26 September 2024. Stefan had been a fixture of China Studies in the Netherlands, where he had been Associate Professor of contemporary Chinese History and Society at Leiden University, and Emeritus Olfert Dapper Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

Text by Florian Schneider

Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024).

I first encountered Stefan in 1999, though not in person. His beautiful book Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization (The Pepin Press, 1995) was a constant feature at the street book stalls outside Hamburg Uni where I studied, and it became one of the first books about China that made it onto my student shelf. My teachers would also mention him frequently, as an example of what good hermeneutic research about contemporary China looked like. Much of my own fascination with propaganda and political communication was shaped by these early impressions of Stefan’s work.

My second encounter with Stefan was twenty years later, when I found myself sitting across from him during my job interview in Leiden. I must admit I was awestruck, not to mention a bit intimidated, to be asked sharp questions by this famous scholar of Chinese iconography. And it was only much later that I learned how instrumental Stefan had been in hiring me that day: fortunately for me, the idiosyncratic ways in which my background combined traditional philology and contemporary interests spoke to Stefan, who was a staunch defender of the humanities and area studies ethos. For Stefan, scholarship deserved to be societally relevant, but it also needed to keep sight of the complex, deep cultural and linguistic contexts in which people do things with media and communication, in diverse places around the world. Continue reading In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger →

Source: NYT (12/16/23)
Merle Goldman, a Leading Expert on Communist China, Dies at 92
A lifelong academic, she stood apart in her ability to communicate her insights about the country to nonacademic readers.
By Clay Risen

Merle Goldman explaining the Chinese characters for the word China. She was far from the only prominent China scholar of her generation, but she stood apart in her ability to communicate her insights to the nonacademic public.Credit…via the Goldman family

In November 1974, a small group of American college presidents spent three weeks traveling through China, visiting universities, communes, factories and even the office of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was still four years away from taking over as Communist Party leader.

Though the United States had recently re-established relations with China, it was an insular, even forbidding place, utterly foreign to these Western visitors. Fortunately, the delegation had a famed Sinologist as a guide: Merle Goldman.

A historian at Boston University, Dr. Goldman was still relatively early in her career but was already widely considered one of the world’s leading analysts of Chinese politics. She was far from the only prominent China scholar of her generation, but she stood apart in her ability to communicate her insights to the nonacademic public.

She wrote opinion articles and book reviews for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, and her reports from her trips to China were required reading for government and business leaders.

Just weeks after returning from that trip to China, she wrote a probing analysis of the country’s defense strategy for The Times. Continue reading Merle Goldman dies at 92 →

The ACLS report blames US and US media for a souring US-China relationship that “has had a chilling effect on academic exchanges” …

Hey, what’s been the chilling effect of:

The Chinese government’s massive genocide against the Uyghurs?
China’s treaty breach & destruction of Hong Kong?
China’s kidnappings of citizens of Sweden, Canada, Australia etc?
etc etc.

Any chilling effect of that … or is it just “US media” as the ACLS suggests?

I find it appalling that the report leaves out what the CCP has done, and tries to write off legitimate criticism as “China-Bashing.” For God’s sake, they are running a genocide. Put the blame where the blame belongs.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu

Source: ACLS

From 2021-2023 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), in conjunction with the Henry Luce Foundation, worked with fellows, grantees, advisors, and institutions in rethinking its Program in China Studies in light of the many challenges currently facing scholars of China.

Building on the results of the survey report published in 2021, the new report, China Studies in an Uncertain Age provides a deeper understanding of the individual experiences of China studies scholars through in-depth interviews with 14 scholars conducted by faculty advisors, Emily Baum (University of California, Irvine) and Yingyi Ma (Syracuse University) during the 2022-23 academic year.

Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 80 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS utilizes its $155+ million endowment and $37 million annual operating budget to expand the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting our commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship. In all aspects of our work, ACLS is committed to principles and practices in support of racial and social justice.

The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to deepen knowledge and understanding in pursuit of a more democratic and just world.  It does so by nurturing knowledge communities and institutions, fostering dialogue across divides, enriching public discourse, amplifying diverse voices, and investing in leadership development.