Free Admission (Registration Required). Please RSVP by emailing chk.library@utoronto.ca.
Seminar will be presented in English.
Abstract
In 1979, the CCP Propaganda Department Division Chief Li Honglin published a manifesto piece titled Reading without Restrictions (讀書無禁區) in the inaugural edition of the Chinese intellectual magazine Reading (讀書), stating that the destruction of culture and the restrictions on knowledge should come to an end with the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. Just ten years later in 1989, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, crushing the idealism of a generation of college students who had just started to learn to think without fear. Drawing on contextualized accounts, Rowena He will illustrate the challenges and hopes in her journey of teaching the taboo from Harvard to Hong Kong. She argues that the price one has to pay for preserving the historical memory of China’s forbidden past is beyond personal. The unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship has profound implications for citizenship education, democratization, and the field of China studies.
Speaker Bio
Rowena He 何曉清 is a China specialist and historian of modern China. She is interested in the nexus of history, memory, and power, and their implications for the relationship between academic freedom and public opinion, human rights and democratization, and youth values and nationalism. Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, was named Top Five Books 2014 by the Asia Society’s China File. The book has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, China Journal, Human Rights Quarterly, and other international periodicals. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin.
Dr. He is passionate about teaching. Her teaching has been featured by both international and campus news outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Gazette, Harvard Magazine, and Wellesley News. She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years for the Tiananmen courses that she created. She joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 and received the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, she was denied a work visa to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History. She has also taught at Wellesley College and Saint Michael’s College.
Dr. He publishes and speaks widely beyond the academy. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and the Nation. She has been a keynote speaker for the Canada Human Rights National Symposium, testified before a US Congressional hearing, and delivered lectures for the US State Department and the Canada International Council. Her scholarly opinions are regularly sought and she has been interviewed by the ABC (Australia), ABC (U.S), Al Jazeera, Associate Press, BBC, CBC, CNN, CTV, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Le Monde, NPR, NBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Time, Times Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016. Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
Moderator
Dr. Eric Yan-ho Lai, Research Fellow, Center for Asian Law, Georgetown University Law Center