Post-colonialism Backfires: Be Proud of My Chinese Name Please?
February 6, 2015
By Flair Shi, Currently Studying Comparative Literature (MA) at University College London, Graduate of the School of English University of Nottingham Ningbo, BA in English Language and Literature. As Walter Benjamin poignantly points out in his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, the philosophy of language surely starts from the …
Fieldwork reflections: Elusive subjects and the value of trust
January 29, 2015
By Gareth Shaw, PhD Candidate in Contemporary Chinese Studies, The University of Nottingham, UK. I’ve often heard from fellow scholars that conducting fieldwork in a foreign country represents one of the most challenging aspects of a research project. It can often seem like a battle fought between endless bureaucracy and one’s own faltering reserves of …
Are there lessons from Business for the CCP?
January 22, 2015
By Joseph Healy, MA student in Contemporary Chinese Studies, UNNC One of the intriguing leadership and management challenges anywhere in the world in 2015 is how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages the socioeconomic transition within China. It’s hard to think of a precedent in politics or business to equate to the scale of the …
African community in Guangzhou – Trade development and migrant integration
January 15, 2015
By Dr. Youqing Fan, Assistant Professor at the SCCS, At the University of Nottingham Ningbo. When first witnessing quite a few African people gathering at the gate of one large Catholic church in Guangzhou for services in 2009, I was amazed that the Africans have to some extent formed their community in China’s southern economic …
More ‘Tigers’ in President’s Sights.
January 9, 2015
By David O’Brien, Assistant Professor, School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo. The Communist Party of China faces threats from dangerous internal cliques who are ‘parasites’ harming both the country and the people, official state media reported this week. Such strong condemnation is certainly striking and would seem to indicate that President Xi …
Singapore: China’s Ambivalent Heterotopia
December 29, 2014
By Flair Shi, Currently Studying Comparative Literature (MA) at University College London, Graduate of the School of English University of Nottingham Ningbo, BA in English Language and Literature. Any Chinese who is efficiently bilingual in both Mandarin and English should be interested in Singapore, and with the population of such Chinese, especially that of the …
When Chinese Eyes are Smiling
December 12, 2014
By David O’Brien Assistant Professor, School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo For a small country we Irish box well above our weight diplomatically. And we take great pride in being masters of soft power. There is no other country in the world which has its national day celebrated with such exuberance and …
Dream On
December 4, 2014
By Kim Willcocks Senior Tutor for Reading and Writing, Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham Ningbo Xi Jinping’s contribution to the arsenal of warm and fuzzy CCP catchphrases is “the Chinese dream” and recently I’ve read about it more and seen it plastered on the billboards around Ningbo more. Seems that someone’s trying …
CCTV and the race for soft power
November 24, 2014
By Dr. Xiaoling Zhang, Head of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham. The Chinese official media outlets, especially the “Big Four” as Yang Jiechi the State Councillor calls them — Xinhua News Agency, Central China Television (CCTV), China Radio International (CRI), …
Nü Zhi Qing: the Wilted Flowers of the Country
November 14, 2014
By Flair Shi, Currently Studying Comparative Literature (MA) at University College London, Graduate of the School of English University of Nottingham Ningbo, BA in English Language and Literature. For the young college students enjoying China’s unprecedented expansion of urban wealth and education in the 21th century, it is very hard to imagine with what kind …