East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks ft. Hang Tu

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

RSVP HERE

This event will take place at the Franke Institute for the Humanities

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Hang Tu’s book!

The first (4) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Registrant MUST register using their full name AND UChicago email address and check in on the day of the event. Registrant will receive a confirmation email from CEAS and will have 48 hours to pick up their copy from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Books not claimed 48 hours after notification will be offered to the next student registered to attend the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.

Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hang Tu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. As a scholar of literature and thought, Professor Tu's primary research interests center on public intellectual debate in contemporary China. His English monograph, Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard University Asia Center, 2025), analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in reform China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacy in light of its postsocialist transition. His Chinese monograph, An Emotional State: Public Intellectual Debate and the Politics of Affect in Contemporary China (Taipei: Linking Press, 2023), devotes attention to several key writers and scholars from contemporary Chinese and Sinophone world, ranging across Li Zehou, Liu Zaifu, Yu Ying-shih, Chen Yingzhen, Wang Anyi, and others.

ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT

Johanna S. Ransmeier 任思梅 is a social and legal historian of modern China. Her current research investigates the expansion of legal literacy and the development of a Chinese legal imagination during times of revolutionary change. In this project, she asks what happens when citizens’ legitimate expectations of the law get ahead of the ability of legal institutions to deliver on the promise of new legislation or legal innovations? What makes the law a site of both soaring aspiration and crushing disappointment? She also studies the surprising ways crime and the law intersect with family life in China. Her first book Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China (Harvard University Press, 2017) exposed the transactional foundations of traditional family structures and the role of human trafficking in late Qing and Republican China. She is a fellow with the National Committee on US China Relations Public Intellectuals Program (Cohort V) and was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Before joining the University of Chicago, she was a member of the department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. She currently serves as co-chair of the faculty board of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

EAST ASIA BY THE BOOK! CEAS AUTHOR TALKS SERIES

The East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series showcases CEAS faculty, alumni, and special guests who provide author talks and book launches as a way to engage the broader community in conversations regarding key scholarship on East Asia. This series features a presentation by the author(s) that is often facilitated through conversation with a discussant, following by a question and answer session with the audience. For more information on the series, follow the link here: https://ceas.uchicago.edu/events/east-asia-the-book-ceas-author-talks

SPONSORSHIP

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

PHOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

Please note that there may be photography taken during this educational event by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for archival and publicity purposes. By attending this event, participants are confirming their permission to be photographed and the University of Chicago’s right to use, distribute, copy, and edit the recordings in any form of media for non-commercial, educational purposes, and to grant rights to third parties to do any of the foregoing.