The Localisation for Overseas Chineseness: Reflections on Education of Sinology at SJTU

CHANG, Chihyun (chihyun@sjtu.edu.cn) 

Chihyun Chang, Professor of International Trade History, Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the Assistant Dean of School of Humanities, also Senior Research Fellow of Bristol University and Project Professor of Tokyo University, is now working on the Sino-Foreign trade history from 1895-1927 and focusing on Republican China’s financial and monetary consolidation whilst performing China's financial obligations to foreign powers. He is also applying spatio-temporal GIS platform to historical personnel studies, such as the B & C class war criminals and the Chinese Customs’ foreign employees. He is the author of Government, Imperialism and Nationalism in China (2013) and The Chinese Journals of Lester Knox Little: The Eyewitness of China’s Revolutions and Wars (2017). 

Research Overview 

This talk aims to provide discussions towards how the education of Chinese studies and sinology shed lights on new teaching methodology. As the director of the international master programme in modern Chinese studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the speaker has been working on the adaptation of educational methods and methodology for international students with a wide range of background. The variety of these backgrounds, somehow, would construct an obstacle for advancing students’ understandings of sinology. However, the speaker likes to argue that the nature of the variety would actually help lecturers to look into different cultures’ perception to Chineseness and this would, ultimately, lead to a new way of teaching sinology - the educational adaptation. Thus, the speaker would like to argue that before lecturers like to teach students what Chineseness is, they would need to learn how these students’ cultures understand Chineseness.