Evolution of China’s Economic Development and the West’s/Global Response

“History and Theory in the Evolution of China’s Economic Development and the West’s/Global Response.”

How do “we” – and who gets to define “we”? – frame China’s rise or socio-economic trajectory since 1949, and especially since, say, the last decade? This type of inquiry often begins — and stays — at an empirical level: the economic facts, policies analysed objectively, the ‘truths’ on the ground, and so on. This is unsurprising and even important. But there is also a place for a certain philosophical, searching or essayistic approach to the meaning and interpretation of China’s development. This is a huge topic –in fact a whole field of discourse and history– in itself. This talk will focus on the meaning or significance of two things: the global or Western or “anti’” response to China’s economic development and emergence, understood as part of a very long tradition of orientalism and modern, colonial or liberal discourse; and also the meaning of what this development over the three phases (1949-78; 1979-2017; 2018–) might be in terms of important and contested terms (and real phenomena) like “socialism” and “people’s livelihood” and “progress” or “freedom.”

Speaker: Daniel Vukovich (胡德)

Advisory Research Fellow (2020–), Southeast University (东南大学) , Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, School of Marxism.
Adjunct Professor, Department of Politics, East China Normal University ( 华东师范大学]), 2021-2023.

Daniel Vukovich (胡德) has worked at Hong Kong University in the School of Humanities since Fall 2006, after earlier years as faculty in communications at Hocking Technical College and as a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of two critically acclaimed, polemical monographs, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012) and Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) as well as two dozen journal articles and book chapters. His work has been translated into Chinese, German, and Portuguese, and he serves on the editorial board of two international, inter-disciplinary journals: Humanities and Social Sciences (Springer), and the venerable Neohelicon: Acta comparationis litterarum universarum, the first international comp lit/comparative studies journal of Europe (AK Press and Springer).

Recent essays include “A City and a SAR on Fire” for Critical Asian Studies and “A Sound and Fury Signifying Mediatisation” for Javnost: The Public. His forthcoming monograph, After Autonomy (Palgrave), offers a theoretically-driven analysis of Hong Kong and global politics after the rise of China and the resurgence of xenophobia, Sinological orientalism, and fascistic social movements that subtend the decline of American/Hong Kong/liberal intellectual and moral hegemony.
Last but certainly not least, he teaches frequently and with enthusiasm for the Comp Lit program, offering classes in a range of canonical and heterodox subjects from world literature and culture to political theory, Chinese rebellions and revolutions, and the globalization of ideas and discourses.