I005: Creating Emergent Futures in Chinese Communities

Organizer(s)

• XY

  Xiaobo Yuan

  Whitman College, United States
• 

  Shiqi Lin

  University of California, Irvine, United States

Chair(s)

• XY

  Xiaobo Yuan

  Whitman College, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• XY

  Xiaobo Yuan

  Whitman College, United States
• 

  Shiqi Lin

  University of California, Irvine, United States
• LP

  Laikwan Pang

  The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• TO

  Tzu-Chi Ou

  International College of Innovation, National Chengchi University, Taiwan (Republic of China)

Discussant(s)

• 

  Joshua Neves

  Concordia University, Canada
• 

  Jenny Chio

  University of Southern California, United States

Session Abstract: Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, political unrest in Hong Kong, and rumblings of a “new Cold War,” speculations about “the future of China” have become ever-more ubiquitous, dominated by discourses about the Chinese state’s role in a shifting global order. Challenging these state-centric perspectives, this panel investigates future-making within Chinese communities — spanning the Mainland, Hong Kong, and Chinese diaspora — as a constellation of collective, personal, and grassroots activities. Drawing upon literature, arts, new media, and ethnographic studies, the four papers explore the ways in which diverse social agents craft futures that disaggregate, pathologize, or contest dominant images of China’s future. Our panel suggests that the analysis of futurity might be a critical vantage point from which to study the affective entanglements between state and grassroots, future and history, reality and fiction. Xiaobo Yuan examines Chinese Christians’ aspirations toward global missionization, and suggests thinking about conversion as a speculative act. Engaging with Pak Sheung Chuen’s artwork about Hong Kong, Pang Laikwan explores the role of art in thinking and acting upon yet-undetermined futures of a city under threat. Turning to the urban fringes of Beijing, Tzu-Chi Ou examines how grassroots service-centers develop utopian imaginations among migrant workers. In a discussion of the “Dongbei Renaissance,” a transmedial boom in cultural productions about socio-economic tumult in Northeast China, Shiqi Lin explores a “ruinated futurity” in which restorative potentials emerge from trauma and disaster. Together, these papers attend to the layers of politics, aesthetics, affect, and desire embedded in multiple horizons of futurity.

Presentations:

• "When the Police Come Knocking": Chinese Christianity and the Futurity of Conversion
  

  Paper Presenter: Xiaobo Yuan – Whitman College
• "The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You": The Dongbei Renaissance and Ruinated Futurity
  

  Paper Presenter: Shiqi Lin – University of California, Irvine
• Polarity, Plurality, and Abjection: The Monsters in Hong Kong and Pak Sheung Chuen's "Nightmare Wallpaper"
  

  Paper Presenter: Laikwan Pang – The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• In Search of Community on Beijing's Urban Fringes
  

  Paper Presenter: Tzu-Chi Ou – International College of Innovation, National Chengchi University