Cultural Heritage and Identity:Comparing Mainland China and Hongkong

The Center for East Asian Studies presents a lecture by Jung-a Chang on the recent movement to protect cultural heritage and traditional culture in China.

Jung-a Chang, Associate Professor Department of Chinese Language and Cultural Studies University of Incheon (South Korea)

Recently there has been a movement to protect cultural heritage and traditional culture in China. Chang examine this process through archival and interview-based research. Chang will show how diverse purposes and voices have been absorbed by a national project to protect the ‘great cultural heritage of China.’ The movement was initiated not only by the government whose main interest was to find a new resource for the national unity and propagation of the Chinese culture, but also by the academic and public who came to be interested in the intangible cultural heritage mainly due to the “Duanwujie” controversy with Korea in 2004. The fever and movement seemed to constitute a part of diverse projects related with a revival of ‘nationalism of the Great Chinese Nation.’ Chang tries to focus on the relation of the cultural nationalism and this movement as well as the chasm and controversies inside the movement. Chang will compare this process in mainland China with the popular interest in the 'collective memory and cultural heritage' in Hongkong. The two cases have very different implications especially regarding national identity, albeit the seemingly similarity in discourse and the movement of two governments.

Issues in Contemporary East Asia Lecture Series