12:00 pm – 1:30 pm | Moore Hall 258 & Zoom | flyer PDF

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Drawing on big data analytics of over 50,000 newspaper articles published in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this international collaborative project delves into the CCP’s narrative portrayal of the USSR from the late 1940s to the collapse of the world’s first proletarian revolutionary state. The analysis reveals significant shifts in both the thematic focus of discussions surrounding socialist ideology and sentiments towards Soviet Union within Chinese official discourse over the socialist era. Notably, the distribution of discussion topics concerning the USSR appears to have been primarily influenced by China’s domestic political dynamics. Conversely, the sentiments expressed towards the USSR reflect a broader diplomatic spectrum, encompassing expressions of friendship, debates, conflicts, and instances of reconciliation between the two nations.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Qiang Fu is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a co-director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. His recent publications have appeared in journals such as American Journal of Epidemiology, American Journal of Sociology, Annuals of the American Association of Geographers, Annals of Epidemiology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, and Sociological Methods & Research.

Organizer/Online Moderator: Le LIN, Associate Professor, Sociology Dept.,UHM.

Onsite Moderator/Discussants: Kate Zhou, Professor, Political Science Department, UHM, and Wensheng Wang, History Department, UHM.

Co-sponsor: UHM Depts of Sociology, Political Sciences and History.