The Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power, Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies, and Stanford's Department of History invite you to Memory as Resistance: From Tiananmen to Hong Kong on Monday, April 17, 2023 from 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT at Stauffer Auditorium.
This talk is grounded in two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. Drawing on contextualized personal accounts, Rowena He will illuminate the unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship on China’s forbidden past, and their implications for nationalism, democratization, and the field of China studies. Highlighting her extensive interactions with local and mainland Chinese students during Hong Kong’s unprecedented social movement, she illustrates how memory becomes a form of resistance that embodies citizen autonomy and agency. The power of the powerless.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Rowena He is an associate professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China was named a Top Five Book of 2014 by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. Her op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and The Wall Street Journal.
Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs the Hoover project on China’s Global Sharp Power and works closely with government and civil society partners to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. Most recently, he co-authored and edited Global Engagement: Rethinking Risk in the Research Enterprise (2020).
