Lecture: Global Information Flows and Chinese Responses to Tragic News Events

University of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies presents Vanessa Fong.

In this presentation, Professor Fong will examine how Chinese citizens in China and abroad used discourses of Chinese backwardness to make sense of tragic news events while simultaneously trying to avoid becoming identified with that backwardness. She focuses on various interpretations of NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the 2003 global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and explore how Chinese citizens negotiated between their own ambivalent national loyalties and the contradictory local, unofficial, national, and international narratives in which these events were embedded. These negotiations suggest that global information flows are creating a transnational panopticon that increasingly enables neoliberal governmentality to operate on transnational levels.

Vanessa Fong is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from the Harvard University Anthropology Department in 2002. She is the author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (which won the Francis Hsu Prize in Asian Studies), coeditor of Chinese Citizenship: Views from the Margins and Women in Republican China, and articles in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Ethos, and City and Society.