Since imperial times, and even more since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese authorities have endeavored to control the historical narrative. This conference will present the essential role played by minjian (unofficial) history in our understanding of the history of contemporary China.

This talk showcases the constructive role of mothers in the formation of male bonding during medieval China, with an emphasis on the Tang dynasty (618-907). The practice of making obeisance to mothers extended beyond a mere family ritual, serving as a crucial mechanism for creating quasi-kinship bonds. Tang intellectuals not only recognized this practice but also conceptualized it within broader frameworks of rituals, emotional attachment, and gender norms. The practice of making obeisance to mothers evolved to gain strategic importance among regional military leaders, emerging as a thoughtful act of goodwill aimed at easing political discord. By redefining the image of women at elite men’s social functions, this research demonstrates that the politicization of domestic space, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and the display of friendship and fraternity together characterized male bonding in medieval China.

This paper begins with a brief discussion of four ways of imagining social change: replacement, transformation, transition,   and reconfiguration. Focusing on transformation and transition, the paper then asks: if examining or experiencing a particular social transformation, how can we understand the presence of things past? How do practices, logics, ideals, and things from the past inform, influence, or simply exist in the “new” social context? Understanding forms of continuity is simply the flip side of the coin of understanding change. Conceptualizing continuity intimately relates to imagining social transformation. The paper proposes two modes of understanding continuity: haunting and recombinant transformation. The paper ends by working through an example of the place of the past in the present: location based social control in the Great Leap Famine, the birth planning policy, and the recent Covid related lockdowns in Shanghai. How do the ideas of haunting and recombinant transformation differentially illuminate this continuity?

五个学科包括：

• 现代语言学（第28位）
• 语言学（第33位）
• 人类学（第36位）
• 人文学科（第47位）*
• 神学及宗教研究（第47位）

这次排名充分证明了文学院全体成员，在教学和研究方面所做出的杰出贡献。我们衷心感谢所有教师、行政人员以及学生为实现卓越的学术成就和研究成果所付出的努力和贡献。

在庆祝这些成就的同时，我们也被提醒著未来的种种挑战与机遇。我们将致力持续追求学术和研究的卓越，培育一个活跃、敢于创新的人文社群，为大学及社会作出贡献。让我们继续携手努力，将中大文学院成为国际上更负盛名的人文研究与教学学院。

我们邀请您探索我们丰富多元的课程，并加入我们，一同迈向未来更高的成就。

*人文学科为科目类别

Expressivists about ethical discourse maintain (near enough) that an assertion of 'x is good' displays the speaker's positive evaluation of x, opposing those descriptivists who maintain that the assertion instead describes x as having the evaluative property of 'being good'. A familiar promise of this expressivism is the dissolution of metaphysical vexation over how evaluative properties fit into the natural order: talk of 'evaluative properties' is confused, and the vexatious question along with it. An expressivism about mental discourse (including discourse about 'consciousness') would have a comparable promise of dissolving metaphysical vexation over how mental properties fit into the natural order -- namely, the mind–body problem: talk of 'mental properties' is confused, and the mind–body problem along with it. Unfortunately, ethical-discourse expressivism has a familiar tendency to collapse into a subjectivist descriptivism, on which 'x is good' describes the speaker as positively evaluating x: for mental-discourse expressivism, such a collapse would disastrously restore mental properties, while drastically attenuating our ability to speak about them. Fortunately, the collapse can be prevented -- albeit by means of an extremely deep adjustment to the foundations of analytic philosophy, by reassigning the fundamental theoretical role in systematic theory of meaning from truth, the actual world, and metaphysically possible worlds to (what I call) 'endorsement', 'my present stance', and 'phenomenologically possible stances': by exchanging 'logical realism' for 'logical mentalism'.

Online
No registration is required.
Meeting ID: 945 0500 2061
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/94505002061

Face-to-face
Register by 12 April 2024
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13686629
Delivered in English. All are welcome.

萧校友出生三个月因眼癌摘除眼球，5岁的时候，她问爸爸：“看不见是不是就没有用？”如今20多年过去了，她已经找到了答案：“天生我材必有用！”
多年来，即使身体残疾，萧校友依旧经常参加义演筹集善款，甚至不怕艰苦去贫困山区当义工。而她的梦想，是开一些可以包容不同学生的音乐学校，为祖国不同的孩子作贡献。

文学院衷心恭贺萧凯恩获得此殊荣!

是次讲座主要探讨亚太地区女性主义神学发展的背景，并指出现今关注议题，包括性小众歧视、和平与复和、生态公义。

郭佩兰教授从亚洲和亚裔的视角建构女性主义神学和后殖民神学，著作等身，在学术界享负盛名。 她曾获选为美国宗教学会2011年度的会长，并获多项国际殊荣。 学者向她致敬的论文集于2021年出版。 郭教授为本院学士和硕士课程校友，并曾任教本院。 她把近着Postcolonial Politics and Theology献予本院众师生，以志其神学之旅之起点。

为庆祝本院60周年院庆，是次讲座费用全免。
主办 ｜ 崇基学院神学院
合办 ｜ 崇基学院神学院校友会

金教授的教育和翻译事业生涯跨越数十载，于1965年加入中大，其后出任翻译系系主任期间，带领该系由副修系发展成独当一面的主修系。她曾任中大校董及文学院副院长，现为新亚书院及善衡书院荣誉院务委员。

The term “Western Civilization” has the power to split people into bitterly opposed camps. Some claim it is the source of all that is good in the world; others that it is the origin of the worst evils faced by contemporary society. But both sides are wrong. Moving beyond good and evil, I will tell two unexpected stories: first, I will explain how today’s conventional view of Western Civilization arose in very particular cultural contexts and was driven by very particular motivations. Second, and more importantly, I will argue that the historical reality is more complicated and much more interesting: the classical tradition understood to underlie Western Civilization is global, more diverse and commingled than people have imagined. It’s not just that subaltern peoples have engaged with the classical tradition; in fact, it’s that subaltern peoples have always been an essential part of shaping that tradition. In a series of brief case studies, I will illustrate the rich diversity of the classical tradition over the past two millennia.

ZOOM Meeting Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183