The Modern China Lecture Series will feature two events this week at Cal State San Bernardino, both taking place in the university’s John M. Pfau Library, room PL 4005.
“What Is the Chinese Cultural Revolution? From Secret Archives of the Revolution in Guangxi Province,” presented by Yongyi Song of Cal State Los Angeles, is the first scheduled program, set for 2 p.m. Tuesday, April 18.
“Sympathetic Views of Japan in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ‘Café Lumière’ & Zhang Yimou’s ‘Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,’” presented by James Wicks of Point Loma Nazarene University, is the second program, scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday, April 20.
Both lectures are free and open to the public; parking at CSUSB is $6.
Song is a librarian faculty at full-professor level at Cal State Los Angeles, and a renowned scholar of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a native of Shanghai, China, he was twice jailed by the Chinese authorities — once during the Cultural Revolution for organizing an underground reading club and again in 1999 for collecting primary sources on the revolution. He has long devoted himself to preserving the true history of contemporary China, especially the Cultural Revolution and combating government censorship through his myriad publications.
Those works include “The Cultural Revolution Database (2002-2016),” “The Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign Database (2010),” “The Chinese Great Leap Forward and Great Famine Database, 1958-1962 (2013),” “The Database of the Chinese Political Campaigns in the 1950s: From Land Reform to State-Private Partnership, 1949-1956 (2015),” “The Historical Dictionary of the Cultural Revolution (2006-2016); The Cultural Revolution & Heterodox Thoughts I & II (2001),” and “The Cultural Revolution: A Bibliography, 1966-1996 (1998).”
Recently, his new publication, “Secret Archives about the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, Classified Documents, 36 Volumes (2016),” was highly reviewed by international media and academia. He also published about 100 research papers in both English and Chinese in peer-review journals.
James Wicks, the speaker for the April 20 program, is an associate professor of literature and film studies at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. In a synopsis of his talk, Wicks wrote, “In this presentation I intend to show how a close comparison of ‘Café Lumière’ with Zhang Yimou’s ‘Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Qian li zou dan qi, 2005)’ helps uncover ‘the ambivalent nature of Taiwanese postcoloniality,’ as Liao Ping-Hui has written, and additionally, how this ‘ambivalent nature’ may shed light on current cross strait relations.”
Wicks grew up grew up in Taiwan and teaches world cinema and postcolonial literature at Point Loma Nazarene. He has published two books, “Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s (HKUP, 2014)” and “An Annotated Bibliography of Taiwan Film Studies (Columbia UP, 2016)” with Columbia University librarians Jim Cheng and Sachie Noguchi as co-authors.
The Modern China Lecture Series was initiated to promote awareness of important issues related to China for those on the CSUSB campus and in the community. In the series of more than 30 lectures, workshops, film screenings, and roundtable forums since January 2014, China scholars from UC San Diego, UC Riverside, the Claremont Colleges, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine and other institutions have visited the CSUSB campus to share their expertise and opinions.
Speakers in the series have included specialists in history, economics, political science, philosophy, finance, security studies, literature, anthropology and other fields.
The Modern China Lecture Series is sponsored by the CSUSB Department of History, the History Club/Phi Alpha Theta, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the College of Extended Learning, the Center for Global Management/Jack H. Brown College of Business and Public Administration, the John M. Pfau Library and the Intellectual Life Fund. Special thanks to History Department coordinator, Pam Crosson, as well as Iwona-Maria Luczkiewicz Contreras (Pfau Library) and Alan Llavore (Strategic Communications).
For more information on the April 18 and 20 events or the Modern China Lecture Series, contact Jeremy Murray, assistant professor of history, at (909) 537-5540 or jmurray@csusb.edu.