China Seminar | 11 February 1993

Nationalism and Contemporary China: A Symposium Report

Daniel W. Y. Kwok

Please join us for a report on a major international symposium on the theme of “Nationalism and Contemporary China" which convened on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Scholars agree that nationalism forms the major theme of twentieth-century Chinese social, political, economic and ideological change. Yet, among Chinese scholars, it has been a subject more often felt than articulated in scholarly interpretation. For China herself, this nationalism has been revolutionary at the same time that it has been generally unsympathetic to modernization and modernism. Then, in the China after 1949 it has been an unmentionable subject itself. Thus, the convening of a conference on this volatile and protean phenomenon was in itself a significant event. That the conference was held in Hong Kong, at the Chinese University and conducted in Chinese, makes it unprecedented as well as timely a major event in the field of Chinese studies.

Professor D. W. Y. Kwok, the founding convener of the China Seminar, was an invited member of the planning committee of this symposium. He will give a profile of this historic meeting, at which he also delivered a paper. Professor Kwok is professor of history at the University of Hawaii, where he has served as Director of Asian Studies, Chairman of the Department of History and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. His major field is Chinese intellectual history.