Report | “Keywords of Contemporary China” Collaborative Writing Workshop II – 9. Post-Mainland Student

2026-10-28

“Keywords of Contemporary China” Collaborative Writing Workshop II – 9. Post-Mainland Student

Date: August 28–29, 2026
Venue: Room L522, Literature Hall, Tamkang University
Format: In person
Organizers: Contemporary China Research Project, International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University; Department of Chinese, Tamkang University

Abstract

The “Keywords of Contemporary China” Collaborative Writing Workshop seeks to use “keywords” as a research method for understanding contemporary China. Rather than simply collecting popular expressions or cultural phenomena, the workshop focuses on the two mutually constitutive concepts of “China” and “the contemporary.” Through a series of keywords, it seeks to map the historical experiences, institutional characteristics, affective structures, and cultural imaginaries of contemporary China.

In terms of historical periodization, we regard 1949 and the period from 1978 to 2000 as two important historical starting points for understanding “contemporary China.” We also treat “China” itself as a concept that requires reconsideration. Our aim extends beyond examining the meanings of words; instead, we approach each keyword as an entry point into the historical, literary, social, and intellectual contexts through which contemporary China can be understood.

Through collaborative writing and collective discussion, we hope to gradually develop a shared conceptual vocabulary for understanding contemporary China, map its complex landscape, and establish a body of literature and research resources for future reference.

Moderators

Sung Yu-wen, Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Central University
Tsai Meng-che, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Gender Studies, National Kaohsiung Normal University
Huang Wen-chien, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Tamkang University
Wang Chih-ming, Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica; Convener of the Contemporary China Research Subproject

Keynote Speaker

Luo Xiao-ming, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Cultural Studies, Shanghai University

🔗 Event Page

📸 Event Photos

Speaker Reflection – Keyword: Post-Mainland Student

Author: Zhu Chuncong, PhD Student, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

I happened to participate in the first meeting for the “Keywords of Contemporary China” writing project just two days before graduating and returning to mainland China. It was a rather extraordinary feeling. Until then, I had been constructing, through fieldwork and imagination, the kinds of subjects I understood to emerge from the political construction of cross-strait relations, as well as subjects who actively develop their own practices and creativity. I was also moving from a state of never having graduated into the next stage of life. I had moved into the space between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, lived within that space, and was now preparing to leave it. Yet all of this had taken place in my imagination rather than in reality.

After reflecting on this for a long time, I began to realize that although I am from mainland China, I seem to have become deeply entangled in cross-strait relations and in Taiwan itself.

To consider cross-strait relations and contemporary China from the perspective of a mainland Chinese student is to examine events and perspectives that unfolded in Taiwan. But what does it mean to think from the perspective of a “post-mainland student”? It was not until September that I finally resumed living on this side of the Taiwan Strait after an extended absence. Throughout the month, I traveled back and forth between Shanghai and Jiangsu. In the evenings, I often walked along the Huangpu River, following the riverside promenade between Lupu Bridge and Nanpu Bridge. I frequently visited the nearby Power Station of Art or went to the China Academy of Art to see paintings by Lin Fengmian. At other times, I took the high-speed train back to the small city of Suqian in Jiangsu to enjoy a more rural way of life and eat plenty of food from my hometown.

Gradually, these experiences helped me understand what my interviewees had told me about their memories of living in Taiwan: returning to those days felt like waking from a dream, as though they had lived in a parallel universe, or experienced the possibility of another way of being Chinese.

This transition in my everyday life made the shift tangible. Through the physical movement between places and the transformation of my identity, I began to reconsider cross-strait relations and contemporary China from the other side of the Taiwan Strait. I had finally moved out of the space between the two sides and returned to life within mainland China. Yet this physical return could not erase everything I had experienced intellectually or the life I had lived in Taiwan, within the space between the two sides of the Strait. This, precisely, became the starting point for my reflections on this keyword.