CROSS-FACULTY RESEARCH HUB (with Arts Faculty/humanities base)
Title: CHINA, HUMANITIES, AND GLOBAL STUDIES
Welcome to the webpage for the research hub and virtual center, China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS). It exists to foster the inter-disciplinary, theoretically-informed study of the global conjuncture, one that so powerfully and self-evidently features the impacts and potentials of a rising China since the 1970s, as well as the “second handover” of Hong Kong as it enters a new era of integration with the mainland. It is based in the Arts Faculty, but welcomes humanities scholars working in the social sciences. By ‘global conjuncture,’ we refer to the specific ensemble of cultural, economic, and social forces that make up our given period or ‘moment’ of the global situation, as well as its political outcomes and new realities. What is China’s and Hong Kong’s place in this, and in what ways?
This hub supplements and complements the valuable empirical, area-based, quantitative, policy, and other work on China, Hong Kong, Asia, and globalization being done at HKU. It seeks to produce and support humanistic, interpretive, and reflective work that builds on concrete and contextualized studies yet aspires to a more global reach.
This hub was also created – it is important to note -- to develop and enhance our professional and intellectual ties with mainland-based scholars and programs that, likewise, are working on the complex, urgent, and fascinating questions subtending China in/and globalization and the new conjuncture.
This hub takes the new times we live in seriously, beginning with the rise of China and the era of de-colonization, as well as the aftermath of the Soviet interregnum and thence the relative decline of the traditional Western powers, including their command of the media and knowledge-production. But the question remains as to how best to describe and understand the new global conjuncture or theatre. And how should we interpret and evaluate or theorize this new global and geo-political reality? This period is in flux even as it is also crisis-ridden. It behooves us to support and foster work, in the SAR and the mainland, that attempts to describe and know the distinctive shape of this new conjuncture in any of its concrete aspects. This is precisely the purpose of the hub and its future activities. And it is, as well, the traditional role and function of the humanities, criticism, and the interpretive social sciences.
Organization:
The CHAGS Hub is directed by Prof. Daniel F. Vukovich (School of Humanities and Chair of Comparative Literature), in consultation with an advisory board of Hong Kong University professors in the humanities broadly defined. All faculty members with shared interests are welcome to join the activities of the hub as well as share ideas and suggestions for events, activities, and initiatives.
Research Themes:
The hub will be gently organized around several research themes and projects within the rubric of China, the humanities, and global studies. These projects will be led by renowned scholars alongside dedicated researchers and earlier career faculty.
- On the Conjuncture: The World in/and China
- Tradition and Contemporary China
- Borders, Identities, Citizens
- Global Culture and Global China
Advisory Board, HKU: (May 2024):
Prof. Daniel Vukovich, Director
Prof. Song Geng, School of Chinese
Prof. Daniel Bell, Faculty of Law
Prof. Loretta Kim, School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Prof. Enze Han, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Faculty of Social Sciences
Prof. David Palmer, Department of Sociology and Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS)
Prof. Wang Pei, School of Chinese
Advisory Board (China):
Professor Yan Hairong 严海蓉, Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor at the Department of Sociology
Professor Lyu Xinyu 吕新雨, East China Normal University, School of Communication, Dean of the International Communication Research Institute
Professor Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元, Tsinghua University, School of Public Policy and Management and Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor Yin Zhiguang, 殷之光, Fudan University, School of International Relations and Public Affairs,
Professor Liu Shih-Ding 劉世鼎, University of Macau, Department of Communication, and Sr. Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies
Professor Wang Hui 汪晖, Tsinghua University, Departments of Chinese and History, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences
Advisory Board (Abroad)
Prof. Meng Bingchun (孟冰純), LSE, Media and Communications
Prof. Jamie Peck, Univ. British Columbia, Dept. of Geography
Prof. Catherine Liu (劉慧心), UC Irvine, School of Humanities, Film and Media
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, UCSB , Dept. of Global Studies
Prof. Jon Solomon (蘇哲安), Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, Language and Literature
Prof. Ban Wang (王斑), Stanford University, East Asian Languages & Literature
Prof. Fang Yan (杨帆), Univ. Maryland, Media and Communication Studies
Prof. Zhong Xueping (钟雪萍), Tufts Univ., International Lit. and Cultural Studies
Upcoming Event
25 Sep 2026 – The Politics of Knowledge Production about China
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
Past Events
