Training

The project out of which this website grew also had a training dimension.   With the expiration of the grant in 2019, we no longer have the funds necessary to finance this part of the project, which means that this "training" has for the moment been largely suspended--although Timothy Cheek continues to run "history labs" (see below) informally at the University of British Columbia.  Nonetheless, our experiment was rewarding and successful, and I will leave the description of what we did here to perhaps inspire others.     

Building on a long-standing institutional affiliation between the University of British Columbia and East China Normal University, the project paired Canadian graduate students (and eventually Australians and others, as well, as our network expanded) with Chinese graduate students and young scholars, to work on translation and other projects.  Our objectives were multiple. 

First, translation itself is hardly a “mechanical” exercise.  Translating well requires considerable historical and cultural knowledge, as well as sensitivity to linguistic nuance and style in both languages.  Working in tandem helps both the Westerner and the Chinese, who would often like to be able to publish in English, a daunting task. 

Second, collaborative translation builds relationships, which are at the heart of networking and scholarship, and provides access for both Western and Chinese scholars to institutional and personal resources which can otherwise take years to obtain.  Given the state of technology in our globalized world, scholarship requires these resources, and we were proud to be able to help our students get a leg up.

Participants included:

• Deng Jun, Associate Professor, School of Marxism, Shanghai Jiaotong University
• Matthew Galway, Ph.D., History, University of British Columbia, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley. Hansen Trust Lecturer, University of Melbourne (2019)
• ​Jonathan Henshaw, Ph.D. candidate, History, University of British Columbia
• François Lachapelle, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia
• Dayton Lekner, Ph.D., Chinese Studies, University of Melbourne
• Li Zhiyu, Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
• Lu Hua, Doctoral Candidate, Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University
• Ma Nan, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, East China Normal University
• Mark McConaghy, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at Chung-Shan University, Kao-hsiung, Taiwan.
• Selena Orly, Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow, Louis Frieberg Center for East-Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Shi Anshu, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Visiting Scholar, Duke University
• Will Sima,  Ph.D. candidate, Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University
• Craig A. Smith, Lecturer, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne 
• Song Hong, Associate professor, School of Marxism, East China Normal University
• Zhang Hongbin,  Assistant Professor, College of Humanities and Communications, Shanghai Normal University

(N.B.  Several of these institutional affiliations are surely out of date.  Appearances to the contrary, graduate students do finish their degrees and move on).

Concretely, we carried out collaborative translation through the mechanism of what we called “History Labs,” which were conversations, via Skype or similar communication technologies, about texts.  Each team of translators, under the supervision of one of the professors involved in the project, worked through an assigned text.  History Labs stimulated exchanges about the translation and about the text, and once again served also to build relationships.  Many of the texts translated through the History Labs appeared in the volume Voices from the Chinese Century (Columbia, 2019).

History Labs also produced a series of essays that map of state of the field in studies of Chinese establishment intellectuals, published in China Information:

Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua Fogel, "Mapping the intellectual public sphere in China today," China Information 32.1 (2018):  107-20.

Tang Xiaobing and Mark McConaghy, "Liberalism in contemporary China:  Questions, strategies, directions," China Information 32.1 (2018):  121-138.

Shi Anshu, François Lachapelle, and Matthew Galway, "The recasting of China's socialism," China Information 32.1 (2018):  139-159.

Jun Deng, Craig A. Smith, "The rise of New Confucianism and the return of spirtuality to politics in mainland China," China Information 32.2 (2018):  294-314.

Lu Hua, Matthew Galway, "Freedom and its limitations:  The contemporary mainland Chinese debate over liberalism," China Information 32.2 (2018):  315-335.

Li Zhiyu, Morgan Rocks, "The Sinosphere left looks at rising China: Missed dialogues and the search for an ‘Asian perspective,’" China Information 32.2 (2018):  336-357.