Welcome to the Humanities Initiative

NYU China House & EAS Event
A Seminar presented by

Wolfgang Kubin

Time: 11:30-2pm, Monday, March 30 2009
Location: 20 Cooper Square, Humanities Initiative, 5th Floor, Conference Room 503

In order to be successful, any kind of revolution has to simultaneously fulfill two preconditions: first of all, it has materials such as land and property to be redistributed; secondly, it promises the mass a utopian society. This is so because the revolutionary, who very often is of melancholic, even depressive nature, needs to mobilize the mass by persuading them that they should be either unhappy about or dissatisfied with their current living conditions. In short, he has to produce the wrath of the masses. All revolutions, however, are doomed to fail as soon as all previous property is used up and once the mass discover that the new master is more demanding than the old. This is true not only for East Europe before 1989, but also for China before 1979. After 1979, a rescue for Chinese socialism is even to have more exploitation of natural resources and man power, i.e., to ask help from capitalism. Thus, this talk tries to show how the idea of Utopia is manipulated as a tool by and for China's new ruling power.

Kubin, Wolfgang (in Chinese: Gu Bin) is Professor of Chinese Studies at Bonn University and works as a translator and a writer, too. In 1985 he was appointed professor of Chinese at Bonn University. At first he worked at the Department of Oriental Languages where he was in charge of the Chinese section. Since 1995 he has been the head of the Department of Chinese Studies. Since 1989 he has been editing the journals Orientierungen. Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens and minima sinica. Zeitschrift zum chinesischen Geist. Since 2002 he has been writing and editing the history of Chinese literature Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur, which is intended to comprise ten volumes. Wolfgang Kubin focuses on Chinese literature and the intellectual history of imperial and modern China. For his scholarly and literary work as well as in the field of translation he was awarded several prizes and honorary professorships.