"River Elegy and China's Tradition of Scathing Cultural Self-Criticism,": fourth webinar in the China Keywords series

Click here to register for the seminar! 

The fourth webinar of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute's "China Keywords" series, entitled "River Elegy and China's Tradition of Scathing Cultural Self-Criticism," will take place on Thursday, July 18, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (16:00 to 17:00 Central European Time). Our guest will be Prof. David Moser, who will discuss China's tradition of unsparing, sometimes hyperbolic, cultural self-criticism. This is the tradition of the democratizers of the May Fourth Movement, who rejected Confucian hierarchy; of the Red Guards, who, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, sought to obliterate China's traditional cultures and authority structures by force; and of the documentary series River Elegy (1988), which in the run-up to the 1989 protests claimed that conservatism and isolationism had dried up China's cultural vitality.

The speakers: 
David Moser is Associate Professor in the Foreign Languages Department at Beijing Capital Normal University. He watched the six-part CCTV miniseries River Elegy in his dorm room at Peking University in June 1988 and witnessed it "hit academic circles like an atomic bomb." What was River Elegy about? What were its ideals? What is left of River Elegy's legacy and the broader tradition of cultural self-criticism in contemporary China?

During the webinar, Prof. Moser will be interviewed by Eric Hendriks, the director of TPPI's China Initiative, streaming live from the Danube Institute in Budapest, where he is a fellow. We encourage active participation with an extensive Q&A, providing the webinar audience with ample opportunities to exchange ideas with our guest. Our formal conversation will last one hour, but the entire webinar has been scheduled for two hours to allow for flexibility and for our traditional informal gathering among attendees after the conclusion of the formal event. 

Click here to register for the seminar!