Gabriel F. Y. Tsang
Dr Gabriel F. Y. Tsang 曾繁裕, currently Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, completed his PhD and MA degrees in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and the University of Hong Kong respectively. He formerly served the British Postgraduate Network for Chinese Studies as President, stayed as a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore, and worked as Associate Researcher at Sun Yat-sen University. His research outcomes were presented at the academic conferences held by the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Peking University, National Taiwan University, the University of Copenhagen, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, etc., and had been widely published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Journal of Narrative Theory, Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Studies, International Journal of China Studies, and The Language and Semiotic Studies.
As a writer, he won some literary awards in Hong Kong and published four novels, namely Stand (2010), Low-Level Love (2012), Silent Desire and Nothingness (2014), and Love in the Era of Post-human (2018). Other works, including short stories, prose and poems, appear in the literary magazines of Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, and England. Besides, he was invited to speak for International Workers’ Workshop, Singapore Writers’ Festival, Taipei International Book Exhibition, and Kowloon City Book Fair.
As a writer, he won some literary awards in Hong Kong and published four novels, namely Stand (2010), Low-Level Love (2012), Silent Desire and Nothingness (2014), and Love in the Era of Post-human (2018). Other works, including short stories, prose and poems, appear in the literary magazines of Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, and England. Besides, he was invited to speak for International Workers’ Workshop, Singapore Writers’ Festival, Taipei International Book Exhibition, and Kowloon City Book Fair.
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Papers by Gabriel F. Y. Tsang
《跋涉者蕭紅》(2019)和《蕭軍六記》(2021)更見成熟，與她的生命軌跡暗相呼 應，亦隱藏以“女性史學”進一步解讀的可能。
Corresponding to the Chinese leaders’ ambitious goal of actualizing “China Dream” and “national rejuvenation” by the mid-twenty first century and after a series of, what they consistently term, “riots” happening in Hong Kong since mid-2019, regional control towards national unity was not disrupted but even intensified during the pandemic. This article is concerned with how local contexts, as a methodological core, help to raise multiple enquiries into the currently accelerated mainlandization of Hong Kong. It proposes that various stakeholders (the Chinese government, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, and the pro-establishment Hong Kong public) are, no matter consciously or unconsciously, taking advantage of the public health crisis to move forward a progressive implementation of overall jurisdiction in response to the year-long social unrests caused by the controversial extradition law amendment, and that Regional Studies scholars who care about China might reflect on local contextual complicities to generate prospective perspectives.
transformation of consumerism from the paid and the hierarchic. The development
of the Internet intensifies the global flow of free eroticism. Since the free services
of Google, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, and many other apps have
corresponding services in mainland China, such as Baidu, Weibo, Youku, WeChat,
and Baidu Baike, the transplantation of networking techniques potentially exports
the erotic ideology on the media of the United States to another superpower with
opposite ideological claims. This research paper attempts to start a theoretical
discussion concerning the online spread of free consumerism and criticizes and
warns about the potential damage of corporeal ideology thus caused.
This paper will focus on the TV-series version of Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996), a well-received anime broadcast after the Great Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack perpetrated by terrorists of Aum Shinrikyo, both happening in 1995. I will base my discussion on some important concepts of Jean-Paul Sartre, such as le pour-soi (the for-itself) and bad faith, to illustrate how Hideaki Anno represents his protagonists as figures emancipated by existentialist morality. His frequent use of monologue in latter episodes individually enquiring the meaning of personal existence, following the dystopian fall of Tokyo-3, echoes the nihilistic context of both post-traumatic Europe and over-capitalized Japan. I argue that the subjective bonding between given existence of self-consciousness and innate search for fixing the purpose of being has pre-universalized relevant reflection. It sustains the celebrity of Neon Genesis Evangelion until now, especially when Japan has not yet recovered from the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, which carried unresolved economic challenges.
Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.
Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2014
pp. 467-484
In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt of the paper:
Reading dominant political narratives in China can allow us to understand the Chinese government’s ideological positions surrounding the economic-centered policy that has been advocated since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China from 1978 to 1992. A full understanding of the competing discourses and rhetorical techniques adopted by various stakeholders, and the dynamic process of communication between the government/dissidents and the public, is essential to address the structure of current political phenomena. Such a critical perspective prevents oversimplified conclusions about the modernizing process of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which make China appear to be either imitating the West or undermining the purity of “Chineseness.” Taking the documentary series He Shang [River Elegy] as an example, the first section of this paper will explain how such reductive conclusions can be reached and how they may appear as reasonable to the Chinese public. The second and third sections will focus on the narrative strategies adopted by Chinese democrats and political leaders, respectively. By investigating the political intentions of both sides, we can reassess the Eurocentric paradigm, in which the values categorized as belonging to the West, such as democracy, are regarded as universally superior, beneficial, and pragmatic. Instead of illustrating how democrats and political leaders comply with the international discipline that Western countries impose, this paper argues that the self-interest of individuals on both sides (exemplified by Chai Ling and Hu Jintao) motivates compliance with that discipline regardless of their intentions. While democrats employ Western political concepts to increase their discursive power, political leaders express agreement with the West to increase their economic bargaining power. In China, the process of building popular consensus around Western values is not straightforward, but instead full of internal contradictions, inconsistency, and incoherence.
The Logic of Westernization and Self-Orientalization
The charismatic discursive power of Western ideas in post-socialist countries after the end of the Cultural Revolution—fifteen years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—is similar to that of Marxism in capitalist countries during the late nineteenth century. This power consists more in the possible outcome of these ideas, their interpretability for political use, and their idealized contrast to the current situation, and less in their adaptability.
In the case of China after the death of Mao Zedong—the leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, who diplomatically enclosed China and practiced socialism—Deng Xiaoping’s policy favored the “translation and dissemination of foreign literature” (McDougall and Louie 334), and created the desire in the general populace for Westernization, that is, imitation of Western policies, culture, and philosophy. Simultaneously, because of Deng’s neglect of the economic and legal system, a prerequisite of reconstructing, Chinese intellectuals, who were adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, attempted to construct an image of China as inferior to the West in order to speed up the Westernizing progress. Their attempts to evaluate China through a Western gaze, which can be described as self-Orientalization, came about for two reasons. First, their past experience under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship gave them a sense that the still-dominant Marxist/socialist ideology was retrogressive. Second, the term “modernization” that Deng Xiaoping used to sum up his capitalistic reform gave them an impression that the successfully modernized Western countries were superior to China. According to Chinese Contemporary Literature Studies, between 1978 and 1982, over four hundred essays analyzing Western modernism were published in China (Yang and Jiang 182). While establishing the West as an object to study, scholars began to compare and contrast China and the West. During this time, the indefinite difference between self and other that Chinese intellectuals gleaned from personal experience and official statements became expressed through fixed binary oppositions: East-West, socialist-capitalist, developing-developed, modernizing-modernized, uncivilized-civilized, peripheral-central, dictatorial-democratic, suppressed-free, poor-rich, violent-peaceful, foolish-intellectual, dirty-clean, etc. In each binary pair, the first terms were used to describe the inferiority of China, and the second ones to evoke the qualities of the West regarded as aspirational for China.
Strengthening these divisions was the 1989 June Fourth Incident in Tiananmen Square, in which the central government suppressed the reform-seeking...
As a matter of fact, the current official written language of Taiwan and Hong Kong has determined their marginal literary positions. Due to the language origin, the population size of language users and the location of literary development throughout the history, the geographical absolute advantage enables mainland China to sustain a central position of Chinese literature through writing grand literary history and subordinating local literatures.
To pragmatically discuss this issue, this paper will juxtapose the context of Taiwan literature and Hong Kong literature with that of Japanese literature which successfully got rid of the Han cultural influence. It aims at figuring out whether the marginalisation of Taiwan and Hong Kong literature is irreversible due to their less-changeable language setting, whether international awards (like Nobel Prize) and cultural propaganda are necessary to de-subordinate their position, and to what extent the success of Japanese literature can be modelised for Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers to tactically imitate.
Keywords: Japanese literature, Hong Kong and Taiwan Literature, marginalization
https://medium.com/stanford-global-perspectives/the-rise-of-chinas-powerful-educated-youth-50952225fceb
https://cpianalysis.org/2016/07/12/up-to-the-mountains-down-to-the-countryside/
《跋涉者蕭紅》(2019)和《蕭軍六記》(2021)更見成熟，與她的生命軌跡暗相呼 應，亦隱藏以“女性史學”進一步解讀的可能。
Corresponding to the Chinese leaders’ ambitious goal of actualizing “China Dream” and “national rejuvenation” by the mid-twenty first century and after a series of, what they consistently term, “riots” happening in Hong Kong since mid-2019, regional control towards national unity was not disrupted but even intensified during the pandemic. This article is concerned with how local contexts, as a methodological core, help to raise multiple enquiries into the currently accelerated mainlandization of Hong Kong. It proposes that various stakeholders (the Chinese government, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, and the pro-establishment Hong Kong public) are, no matter consciously or unconsciously, taking advantage of the public health crisis to move forward a progressive implementation of overall jurisdiction in response to the year-long social unrests caused by the controversial extradition law amendment, and that Regional Studies scholars who care about China might reflect on local contextual complicities to generate prospective perspectives.
transformation of consumerism from the paid and the hierarchic. The development
of the Internet intensifies the global flow of free eroticism. Since the free services
of Google, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, and many other apps have
corresponding services in mainland China, such as Baidu, Weibo, Youku, WeChat,
and Baidu Baike, the transplantation of networking techniques potentially exports
the erotic ideology on the media of the United States to another superpower with
opposite ideological claims. This research paper attempts to start a theoretical
discussion concerning the online spread of free consumerism and criticizes and
warns about the potential damage of corporeal ideology thus caused.
This paper will focus on the TV-series version of Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996), a well-received anime broadcast after the Great Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack perpetrated by terrorists of Aum Shinrikyo, both happening in 1995. I will base my discussion on some important concepts of Jean-Paul Sartre, such as le pour-soi (the for-itself) and bad faith, to illustrate how Hideaki Anno represents his protagonists as figures emancipated by existentialist morality. His frequent use of monologue in latter episodes individually enquiring the meaning of personal existence, following the dystopian fall of Tokyo-3, echoes the nihilistic context of both post-traumatic Europe and over-capitalized Japan. I argue that the subjective bonding between given existence of self-consciousness and innate search for fixing the purpose of being has pre-universalized relevant reflection. It sustains the celebrity of Neon Genesis Evangelion until now, especially when Japan has not yet recovered from the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, which carried unresolved economic challenges.
Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.
Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2014
pp. 467-484
In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt of the paper:
Reading dominant political narratives in China can allow us to understand the Chinese government’s ideological positions surrounding the economic-centered policy that has been advocated since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China from 1978 to 1992. A full understanding of the competing discourses and rhetorical techniques adopted by various stakeholders, and the dynamic process of communication between the government/dissidents and the public, is essential to address the structure of current political phenomena. Such a critical perspective prevents oversimplified conclusions about the modernizing process of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which make China appear to be either imitating the West or undermining the purity of “Chineseness.” Taking the documentary series He Shang [River Elegy] as an example, the first section of this paper will explain how such reductive conclusions can be reached and how they may appear as reasonable to the Chinese public. The second and third sections will focus on the narrative strategies adopted by Chinese democrats and political leaders, respectively. By investigating the political intentions of both sides, we can reassess the Eurocentric paradigm, in which the values categorized as belonging to the West, such as democracy, are regarded as universally superior, beneficial, and pragmatic. Instead of illustrating how democrats and political leaders comply with the international discipline that Western countries impose, this paper argues that the self-interest of individuals on both sides (exemplified by Chai Ling and Hu Jintao) motivates compliance with that discipline regardless of their intentions. While democrats employ Western political concepts to increase their discursive power, political leaders express agreement with the West to increase their economic bargaining power. In China, the process of building popular consensus around Western values is not straightforward, but instead full of internal contradictions, inconsistency, and incoherence.
The Logic of Westernization and Self-Orientalization
The charismatic discursive power of Western ideas in post-socialist countries after the end of the Cultural Revolution—fifteen years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—is similar to that of Marxism in capitalist countries during the late nineteenth century. This power consists more in the possible outcome of these ideas, their interpretability for political use, and their idealized contrast to the current situation, and less in their adaptability.
In the case of China after the death of Mao Zedong—the leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, who diplomatically enclosed China and practiced socialism—Deng Xiaoping’s policy favored the “translation and dissemination of foreign literature” (McDougall and Louie 334), and created the desire in the general populace for Westernization, that is, imitation of Western policies, culture, and philosophy. Simultaneously, because of Deng’s neglect of the economic and legal system, a prerequisite of reconstructing, Chinese intellectuals, who were adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, attempted to construct an image of China as inferior to the West in order to speed up the Westernizing progress. Their attempts to evaluate China through a Western gaze, which can be described as self-Orientalization, came about for two reasons. First, their past experience under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship gave them a sense that the still-dominant Marxist/socialist ideology was retrogressive. Second, the term “modernization” that Deng Xiaoping used to sum up his capitalistic reform gave them an impression that the successfully modernized Western countries were superior to China. According to Chinese Contemporary Literature Studies, between 1978 and 1982, over four hundred essays analyzing Western modernism were published in China (Yang and Jiang 182). While establishing the West as an object to study, scholars began to compare and contrast China and the West. During this time, the indefinite difference between self and other that Chinese intellectuals gleaned from personal experience and official statements became expressed through fixed binary oppositions: East-West, socialist-capitalist, developing-developed, modernizing-modernized, uncivilized-civilized, peripheral-central, dictatorial-democratic, suppressed-free, poor-rich, violent-peaceful, foolish-intellectual, dirty-clean, etc. In each binary pair, the first terms were used to describe the inferiority of China, and the second ones to evoke the qualities of the West regarded as aspirational for China.
Strengthening these divisions was the 1989 June Fourth Incident in Tiananmen Square, in which the central government suppressed the reform-seeking...
As a matter of fact, the current official written language of Taiwan and Hong Kong has determined their marginal literary positions. Due to the language origin, the population size of language users and the location of literary development throughout the history, the geographical absolute advantage enables mainland China to sustain a central position of Chinese literature through writing grand literary history and subordinating local literatures.
To pragmatically discuss this issue, this paper will juxtapose the context of Taiwan literature and Hong Kong literature with that of Japanese literature which successfully got rid of the Han cultural influence. It aims at figuring out whether the marginalisation of Taiwan and Hong Kong literature is irreversible due to their less-changeable language setting, whether international awards (like Nobel Prize) and cultural propaganda are necessary to de-subordinate their position, and to what extent the success of Japanese literature can be modelised for Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers to tactically imitate.
Keywords: Japanese literature, Hong Kong and Taiwan Literature, marginalization
https://medium.com/stanford-global-perspectives/the-rise-of-chinas-powerful-educated-youth-50952225fceb
https://cpianalysis.org/2016/07/12/up-to-the-mountains-down-to-the-countryside/