The China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Research Hub, Faculty of Arts, presents:
The Politics of Knowledge Production about China
Speakers:
Meng Bingchun (孟冰純), Professor, Dept. of Media and Communications, LSE
Daniel Vukovich (胡德), Professor, Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, September 25, 2026
Time: 5:00-6:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room CPD-3.29, 3/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109332
Professor Meng Bingchun from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author of The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (2018), among other works, joins us to lead a discussion about the politics of knowledge in the China field and in the world. She will offer reflections based on her experience as a co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of The China Quarterly on knowledge production about China.
Professor Vukovich will add his current reflections on the topic as the author of China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (2012). To what extent is the production of knowledge (or discourse) still a useful inquiry into not just area studies itself but into the worlds of China, the US-UK, and the current global situation? How does this problematic differ, add to, or fail to improve our understanding of some of the realities of these places, of politics, and of our vocation as scholars and teachers? How do credibility, access, and gate-keeping figure into knowledge-production today?
Meng Bingchun is a Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE and the Director of LSE PhD Academy and LSE-ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership. She is also the Co-Director of LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely in these topic areas on leading academic journals. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a Senior Fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. In December 2025, Professor Meng was appointed Senior Lingnan Fellow of Lingnan University Institute of Advanced Studies (LUIAS). Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. Her co-edited volume (with Guobin Yang and Elaine Yuan) Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience and Governance in the Covid-19 Crisis is coming out with Michigan University Press in January 2024. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.
Daniel Vukovich is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on modern colonialism/imperialism/globalization and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political aspects of the “China-West” dyad. He is the founding director of the China, Humanities, and Global Studies research hub, and the author of China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019), and After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave, 2022). The latter appears in a revised and expanded Chinese edition with HKUP as 香港回歸第一階段的歷史反思 1997–2019 (August 2026). He is currently at work on After the Rise of China: Theorizing In the Interregnum, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. It will be part of the new book series he is editing with Professors Gao Mobo and Yan Hairong https://link.springer.com/series/60687
